Augur

[laughs]

[laughs] So another company that shifted to the engineering center, of course, was Augur, our last editorial board meeting on the podcast, where they moved from Bellevue to Dallas as their headquarters.

Well, let's get to that.

Well, that skips into our whole LinkedIn discussion.

All right.

That's fun.

[laughs] Uh, so Augur, we've talked about this at length, but they are no longer eligible for the GeekWire 200, our list of the top 200 startups in the Pacific Northwest.

They shifted to the engineering centers list because technically they're no longer headquartered here.

That distinction matters when a vendor says a bigger model can still run quickly on a laptop.

Augur's recommendation is to test a narrow part of an existing agent's work locally, while keeping the current system as the comparison.

Don't book the savings before the local system has completed the job correctly.

This is the Augur Dispatch for Thursday, October 15th, 2026.

Liquid reports a score of about 48 on LiveClaw, a test of agent tool use, against about 38 for one competing open model from Quint.

These are benchmark scores, not percentages of your company's tasks that the model will finish.

Count retries and human review as well as computing costs.

A lower model bill isn't a saving if an engineer spends the difference correcting answers or maintaining the machine.

'Cause yeah, I mean, like, we're not sponsored by that.

Augur is.

But, um, the fact that it's available, you, like you mentioned, £35.

Yeah.

Keep human approval while you find out.

This is the Augur Dispatch for Tuesday, October 6th, 2026.

Greptile makes a tool that reviews proposed software changes.

Those proposals are called pull requests, and merging one means accepting it into the code base.

Picture an engineering manager reading those findings just before a budget meeting.

The obvious temptation is to say the quality problem has been solved and move the reviewers elsewhere.

Augur's read is that the evidence supports a local audit before a staffing or approval change, not a general permission to stop checking.

Gupta presented internal vendor data in a conference talk, not an independently audited study.

Yeah.

Another one of these companies is Augur.

So what is Augur and how did you guys get involved?

Augur.

So Augur is, we have an amazing talent function at Oak and it's really embedded in our investment strategy.

And they are identifying people every day that we should be talking to who are great entrepreneurs.

great talent, whether it's in, you know, existing large legacy companies, whether it's in, uh, you know, the new entrepreneurs, whether it's 20 year olds that are dropping out of college.