Define the frontier
Setting the research direction: which capabilities to distill, which architectures to bet on, where efficiency buys the most leverage.
Foundational AI Lab · Marketing & SEO
We build the structure
that ambitious AI grows on.
Pergola Studio is a foundational AI lab. We design vertically specialized, distilled models for marketing and SEO that are an order of magnitude more efficient than the state of the art - and ship them as the core technology inside the products we build.
- 10×
- cheaper inference vs. frontier models, at the quality that matters
- 100M+
- users reached by our founder's last company
- $100M+
- ARR built before - a unicorn outcome
- 3
- products already climbing the platform
01 - The tension we're resolving
State-of-the-art models are impressive.
At scale, they're margin-dilutive.
Today's frontier models produce remarkable results - but at a unit cost that quietly erodes the margins of every SaaS business built on top of them. Worse, that cost ceiling makes it impractical to run the AI-driven performance feedback loops that would make those products compound.
Pergola Studio exists to break that trade-off. We research and train small, fast, vertically specialized models that hold their quality where it matters and drop the cost everywhere else - so AI stops being a line-item to ration and becomes an engine you run everywhere, continuously.
02 - The lab
A world-class Foundational AI Lab, from research to production.
The lab owns a family of vertically specialized distilled models for marketing - from the research question all the way to the production endpoint. It is the company's core technology.
Fine-tune & distill
Designing and fine-tuning cost-efficient, scalable models - the full lifecycle: training, scaling, and monitoring.
Prove it holds
The evaluation and observability that let us trust a small model in production the way we'd trust a frontier one.
Deploy at scale
Infrastructure, deployment, and optimization - turning research artifacts into fast, reliable endpoints called millions of times.
03 - The portfolio
One lab. Three products growing on it.
Pergola Studio builds the platform-level AI. Our operating companies are where it ships first - each a real product with real users, climbing the same structure.
AlpacaRelay
Flagship
AI marketing platform
The next-generation marketing platform where the studio's efficient models run copy, creative, and the performance feedback loops that used to demand a frontier model on every call.
alpacarelay.com ↗
PageKiss
Live
Landing pages that convert
Turns a brief into a high-converting landing page in minutes - generating, A/B-testing, and iterating on copy, layout, and SEO with distilled models in the loop.
pagekiss.com ↗
ApronPrep
Live
AI for the kitchen
Personalized meal planning, recipes, and prep schedules generated by lightweight models built for everyday scale - vertically specialized AI that feels instant.
apronprep.com ↗Product descriptions are drafts - tell us what to sharpen.
04 - About the studio
Efficient AI is a growth channel, not a cost center.
Marketing and SEO are where AI economics bite hardest: the winning play is to generate, test, and rewrite constantly - every headline, every landing page, every meta description, every keyword cluster. On frontier pricing that loop is a luxury. On Pergola Studio's distilled models it's the default.
We build vertically specialized models for the marketing stack: SEO content generation, on-page optimization, ad and email copy, creative variation, and the ranking-and-evaluation systems that decide what actually performs. That specialization is the whole point - a model that only has to be excellent at marketing can be small, and small is what makes continuous optimization economically free.
- SEO content & on-page optimization
- Model distillation
- RAG & retrieval
- Agent orchestration
- Evaluation & observability
- Cost-efficient inference
05 - Voices (draft)
What the models unlock.
PageKiss rewrites our landing pages nightly now. Per-page inference cost dropped by an order of magnitude - and conversion followed.
The distilled models hold frontier-level quality on our marketing tasks at a fraction of the cost. That changes what you can afford to run.
Continuous optimization used to be a budget conversation. Now it's just how the product works.
Placeholder testimonials - swap in real quotes when ready.
06 - Leadership
A team that has done this before.
The studio is led by people who have built and operated products at global scale - and are now setting out to build something ambitious with a small, elite team.
Borya Shakhnovich
CEO
Previously co-founded and scaled a global SaaS company to 100M+ users, $100M+ in annual revenue, and unicorn status. Sets the vision and research direction of the lab.
LinkedIn ↗
Rob Sobecki
COO
Operating leader who turns the lab's technology into a business - owning go-to-market, commercial strategy, and day-to-day execution across the portfolio.
LinkedIn ↗Careers
We're hiring across the studio.
Engineers and researchers who want to own core technology from day one - building AlpacaRelay and the efficient models underneath it.
View open roles →