Holding company · Est. 2026
The holding company for what I build.
Grazier Ventures is where I build lean, AI-native products — designed to be genuinely useful and sustainable, not to raise a round. The first is Aqen.ai.
Founded by Duncan Grazier — CTO and advisor. Founder of TideHelm (advisory for founders, CTOs, and investors), former Chief AI Officer at BuildOps ($1B unicorn), CTO at Weedmaps (NASDAQ IPO), and VP Engineering at ShopKeep ($550M acquisition by Lightspeed).
01 — Thesis
Small, independent products under one roof.
The thesis
The thesis is simple: AI has collapsed what it costs — in time, capital, and headcount — to take an idea to a real business. So I build small, independent products under one roof, rather than chasing a single venture-scale swing.
Aqen.ai — first
Aqen.ai comes first: an AI cofounder that coordinates the non-product work of starting a company — legal, finance, marketing, ops. More may follow — each built lean, each built to stand on its own.
The writing — the public notebook
Essays on engineering leadership, AI, and building in the AI era at itsmeduncan.com. Giving back the lessons that can only be earned by doing.
02 — Products
What I’m building and running.
Highball Platform
An AI-native data platform for real-time trains. Infrastructure, APIs, and tooling for the next generation of rail and transit applications — built and operated by one.
highballplatform.com →Highball.app
Real-time train tracking for families and rail enthusiasts. A consumer app built on top of the Highball Platform — AI turns raw feeds into a delightful, personal experience.
itsmeduncan.com/highball →Civic SLM
A domain-specialized small language model for U.S. local government — cities, counties, and townships across all 50 states. Eval-first LoRA fine-tune of Qwen2.5-7B with open weights, open dataset, and open evals.
github.com/itsmeduncan/civic-slm →itsmeduncan.com
Writing on engineering leadership, AI, and building technology teams. Essays, talks, and the long-running personal archive of Duncan Grazier.
itsmeduncan.com →03 — Get in touch