About

I'm CIO at Pactum AI, after serving as CTO. Over the past decade, I've built technology products and teams at Veriff, NFTPort, and Pactum.

At Pactum, I've seen AI agents from both ends: building them for Fortune 500 teams and adopting them across a 150-person company. Pactum's agents have autonomously negotiated tens of billions of dollars in supplier deals; we've been building agents since before GPT-3 existed. Internally, I lead how we use general-purpose AI agents across the company, not only in engineering.

This site is working notes on building with AI, work, and judgment. I write before I've figured everything out; thinking in progress is more useful than polished conclusions.

Background

Before Pactum, I co-founded NFTPort ($26M Series A from Atomico). Before that, I built Veriff's first AI product and team; Veriff is now a unicorn. I am based in Tallinn, Estonia. From 2015 to 2021, I wrote in Estonian at pungas.ee.

Working together

I take on a small number of projects alongside my work at Pactum. Three kinds make sense:

Talks and workshops. On building AI products beyond the prototype, how to tell whether they work, and what changes when the technology meets a real organization. The talks page has formats, examples, and the complete history.

Technical due diligence on AI companies. For investors deciding whether an AI product is real: what the team has actually built, what a competitor could reproduce, and where the pitch runs ahead of the system. I've answered diligence through NFTPort's Series A and Pactum's Series C, led it on the buy side of an acquisition, and given investors independent reads on companies they were considering.

Thinking partner on AI. Recurring conversations with a CEO, CTO, or CIO about what to build or buy, where agents pay off, and how to evaluate what ships. I work with operators changing an existing company and founders building AI products. I've advised Rendin and DriveX on AI, product, technology, and key hires. My longest-running setup has lasted three years.

Contact

Reach me at taivo@pungas.ee. Include what you want to do, why me specifically, and rough scope and timeline.