About Us

We are obsessed with what differentiates experts from everyone else.

We've spent years studying expertise. Not credentials. Not tenure. The actual reasoning that separates someone great from someone adequate.

A senior underwriter spots fraud in 30 seconds. A veteran case manager knows which clients need a call versus an email. Ask them how? They shrug. "Experience." That's tacit knowledge—and it's invisible to most systems.

When we started building AI, we noticed the gap: AI jumps to answers. Experts take time to understand the problem first.

We built a framework to measure that difference. Not what experts conclude—how they think.

The Team

From Aotearoa, New Zealand

A team who've spent their careers measuring what makes experts different—and building systems to capture it.

  • Joe Cole

    Founder & CEO

    Christchurch, New Zealand

    15 years building measurement systems for elite organizations. Now capturing expert reasoning at scale.

  • Roanne Hurley, PhD

    Co-Founder & Research Lead

    Christchurch, New Zealand

    Researches how experts think, adapt, and develop. The science behind what we measure.

  • Kale Panoho

    Co-Founder & Growth

    Wellington, New Zealand

    Brings expertise frameworks to organizations that need them. Scales what works.

  • Alex Dong

    Head of AI

    Dunedin, New Zealand

    Serial entrepreneur. Sold social search company to YouTube founders. Now building AI that thinks like experts.

Our Background

From Elite Performance Systems to Expert Reasoning

At Smartabase, we built software for organizations where expertise is life or death—special operations, emergency services, elite sports. We learned to measure things that seemed unmeasurable.

When we started building AI, we hit a wall. The AI would rush to recommendations. Expert practitioners spent the first five minutes just asking questions—understanding the person, not pattern-matching symptoms.

That gap —between jumping to answers and truly understanding—is what we set out to close.

We built a framework to capture expert reasoning. Not the conclusions they reach. The questions they ask. The factors they weigh. The uncertainty they navigate.

Now we help organizations measure and deploy that reasoning at scale.

Our Values

What We Believe

Think right, not look right.
Everyone training AI on labeled outcomes is training it to look right. A novice and an expert can reach the same conclusion for completely different reasons. We train AI to think like experts, not just match their answers.
Your best people are bottlenecks.
The better they get, the more everyone depends on them. The more everyone depends on them, the less they can do. We break that loop.
Knowledge dies in documents.
Expertise isn't what experts write down. It's the question they ask in the first 10 seconds. The pattern they notice that nobody taught them. The gut call they can't explain. That's what we capture.
Active over passive.
Don't just read—read out loud. Don't just listen—speak. Don't just watch—teach. Full engagement changes cognition. Passive consumption is a trap.
Trust is earned in outcomes.
Not credentials. Not promises. Not pitch decks. We measure ourselves by what happens after, not what we said before.
Execution elucidates reasoning.
You can't know what you know until you're doing it. Experts reveal their expertise in the decision, not describing it afterward. We capture the doing.

See The Platform In Action

30 minutes. We'll show you how we capture expert reasoning and deploy it at scale.