Jonas Bauer is a co-founder and engineering lead at Upside, where he applies search infrastructure, language models, and forensic revenue attribution to a persistent business problem: companies collect enormous amounts of customer information but struggle to understand which relationships and interactions actually produce sales.
Bauer began his engineering career after traveling from Colorado to California for a mobile-development program and joining Branch instead of returning to high school. Over more than seven years, he advanced from customer support to engineering roles spanning linking infrastructure, analytics, and search. He became a principal engineer, worked on analytics pipelines processing billions of daily events, and led development of a search product reaching more than 100 million people daily.
He subsequently co-founded Upside with Branch co-founder Mada Seghete, Alex Bauer, and Dan Ahmadi. As Bauer explained in his account of founding the company, the team confronted a fundamental obstacle to understanding business-to-business revenue: customer-journey records were fragmented, incomplete, and unreliable. Upside moved beyond conventional attribution modeling toward reconstructing the underlying commercial relationships and interactions themselves.
His approach centers on three connected ideas:
- Enterprise data as a searchable map: Apply principles from web crawling and search to connect scattered information about companies, people, and commercial activity.
- Structured signals from unstructured records: Use language models to extract actionable details from neglected sources such as email, feeding enterprise knowledge graphs and customer-journey analysis.
- Production reliability for lean engineering teams: Protect customer workflows through automated end-to-end testing, safer refactoring, and careful attention to the maintenance burden of quality-assurance infrastructure.
During the HF0 Residency, Bauer helped advance Upside’s product and public introduction. At AI Engineer World’s Fair 2025, he articulated its technical ambition: turn raw enterprise records into a structured, usable picture of how companies reach customers and generate revenue.
