Cothon
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Built by people whose work had to hold up

Between them, thirty years of producing written work where being wrong had consequences: for displaced people, for donors, for governments making real decisions. They knew the verification problem long before AI made it universal. When AI arrived and the gap between fast and careful opened under everyone at once, they built Cothon.

Max spent 15 years in climate finance: at the UN, where he managed a $350M portfolio across Asia and the Pacific, and with USAID, where he implemented a $250M climate finance accelerator. Will spent 15 years in humanitarian crisis response across Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Tunisia, and Guatemala, most recently running the International Organization for Migration's Iraq Data Hub.

Why we called it Cothon

Cothon takes its name from Carthage's ancient harbor: a protected space that enabled Mediterranean trade when safe passage was critical to nations. We are building the same for AI, infrastructure that lets organizations navigate safely.

No one was building for that.

We saw the gap between how fast professionals can now produce and how confident they feel putting their name on it. Then we built the team to close it.

Max McGrath-Horn
Co-founder · CEO

Max McGrath-Horn

Knows how to fund it, partner it, and scale it.

Max spent 15 years building partnerships across the development sector, bringing together donors, implementers, and technical partners to get complex projects funded and delivered. At the United Nations, he managed a $350M climate finance portfolio across Asia and the Pacific Islands. At Chemonics, he built a nature-based carbon facility from the ground up, orchestrating investors, NGOs, and local communities. At ARPA-E, he learned how to move emerging technology from concept to market.

Max holds a Master's degree from the Fletcher School at Tufts University in development finance and international business.

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Will Culhane
Co-founder · CPO

Will Culhane

Knows what to build and why it matters.

Will spent 15 years in humanitarian operations across the Middle East, Africa, and Central America, watching data systems fail the people who needed them. At the United Nations, he managed the Displacement Tracking Matrix, a large-scale program producing mission-critical intelligence and AI tools for decision-making in complex emergencies. He has conducted emergency assessments during the Somalia drought and Libyan civil war.

Will holds a Master's degree from Sciences Po Paris in International Development and professional training from MIT in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

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Yann Say-Liang-Fat
Founding engineer

Yann Say-Liang-Fat

Knows how to build it and make it work.

Yann has spent 13 years building the data infrastructure humanitarian organizations rely on to make decisions in the field. Across 20+ international missions, he's designed data governance frameworks and analytical pipelines, from survey design through ETL development to dashboards. At IMPACT Initiatives in Geneva, he standardized data workflows across diverse projects.

His technical background spans data science, software engineering, and AI engineering, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic harnesses, and AI evaluation. Yann holds a Master's degree from Maastricht University in Global Health and Epidemiology.

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