Filip Kozera is the co-founder and chief executive of Wordware, the company behind Sauna, an AI coworker designed to retain professional context and gradually assume responsibility for useful work. His central challenge is making autonomous systems reliable when the knowledge they need is scattered across meetings, messages, documents, and human preferences.
Kozera studied deep learning at the University of Cambridge, where he met future co-founder Robert Chandler. After moving to San Francisco in 2018, he co-founded KRISTALIC, a memory-augmentation company that experimented with GPT-2 and BERT, and later exited the business. He subsequently founded HeyDaily, a creator-subscription venture, where Chandler joined him as co-founder and chief technology officer.
The pair built Wordware around natural-language programming, giving engineers and domain specialists a shared environment for developing AI agents through written instructions. Wordware joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch and raised a $30 million seed round led by Spark Capital. Kozera and Chandler then rebuilt the product around Sauna, shifting from tools for agent developers to an assistant intended to maintain context across connected applications, learn individual working preferences, and earn trust over time.
- Documents as executable intent. Kozera considers chat a poor foundation for repeatable work: long conversations pollute the context window, bury instructions, and complicate revision. Structured documents make expectations easier to organize, edit, reuse, and translate into persistent workflows.
- Background agents with human oversight. He envisions agents running concurrently and responding to meetings, emails, Slack messages, or scheduled triggers. They might update a CRM or draft engineering tickets while escalating uncertain decisions for approval. Responsibility should expand only as systems demonstrate reliability.
- Persistent context across fragmented work. Most knowledge workers lack the shared, version-controlled source of truth that software teams have in a code repository. Sauna aims to preserve relevant information across inboxes, meetings, documents, and workplace tools while adapting to changing preferences and conflicting information.
- Vibe doing beyond software. Kozera applies vibe doing to research, project coordination, relationship management, presentations, and chief-of-staff work. Effective organizational agents, he argues, need explicit permissions, defined authority, approval requirements, and communication protocols more expressive than basic tool connectivity.
