fathom vision
My name is Clinton. I'm one of three co-founders of Fathom.
I will spare you a cringe manifesto. The facts:
We're building Fathom - voice-first AI for engineers whose first language isn't English. Engineers converse naturally with their codebase, infrastructure, and workflows in their working language and hear an answer back, grounded in their actual code, in under 3 seconds.
It is a wonderful form factor and starting point. The product has been in closed beta for a few months and in that time has become extremely powerful. 128 active engineers are using Fathom in closed beta, 500+ person on the waitlist. 2nd place at OpenAI's GPT-5 Startup Hackathon in NYC.
These numbers aren't massive, but they are not small either.
It's still early. But I think the current version is a glimpse of where engineering is heading - where most of the world's engineers will interact with code by voice, in their own language, with grounded retrieval. Not by typing English prompts into a chat box.
That's the vision I want to build this company around, with a focus on engineering teams whose working language isn't English.
When I was 15, I moved across the country alone from Lagos to Belgium to study, then to the U.S to study computer science at Morgan State. Every codebase I touched was English. Every variable, every comment, every Stack Overflow answer, every Cursor autocomplete. My English is good. But my closest friends back home, back in belgium - engineers as sharp as anyone I know in SF - they think in Dutch, French, Yoruba, in Igbo, in Hausa, then translate to English to type. That's a tax. Multiply it by every engineer in Korea, Japan, China, Brazil, France, Germany. That's hundreds of millions of people paying a cognitive tax every day to use tools that weren't built for them.
Tech Twitter does not reflect the real world.
In reality, the 24-year-old fintech engineer in Seoul maintaining a US-built monorepo doesn't have a tool that meets her where she works. The fresh grad in Sao Paulo onboarding into a Python service her senior in Berlin wrote 3 years ago doesn't have a tool that speaks her language. The engineering manager in Tokyo trying to understand a legacy API doesn't have a tool that respects how her brain works.
We all have access to the same models. Very few of us have tools built for how we actually think.
And, I just believe it's an interface problem.
The English-first typing interface took the same chips and the same models and made them 100x harder to use for the half of the world's engineers who don't think in English. We want to take the same frontier models everyone else is using and make it so the power of this technology can break out of English-typing chat boxes and into the hands of every engineer who reads code their senior wrote in a language not their own.
Much of this is early. We're 3 founders. We came out of Apple Camera ML, Apple Siri ML, Meta Threads, and Snap Spotlight. The three of us hold full-time return offers from for fall 2026. We're prepared to rescind them. And go all in on this.
If you're an investor interested in seeing how this plays out, I'd love to talk.
If you're an engineer who works in a non-English-first team and you want early access, join the waitlist at heyfathom.com.
If you're a non-English-first engineer who wants to work on this with us, reach out.
This is the bet I'm making. I think it's the right one.
- Clinton