Robert Chandler is co-founder and chief technology officer of Wordware, the company behind Sauna, an AI coworker that learns how individuals and teams work. He builds systems that retain organizational context, coordinate across workplace software, and complete complex tasks without requiring people to manage every intermediate action.
From autonomous vehicles to AI coworkers
Chandler studied information and computer engineering at Cambridge, where he met his future co-founder, Filip Kozera. At autonomous-driving company Five AI, he led the offline perception team, developing automated ground-truthing systems for testing self-driving technology. He also co-founded HeyDaily, a creator-subscription platform, and served as its CTO.
Chandler and Kozera founded Wordware in 2023 to help domain experts and engineers build AI applications together through natural-language programming. Its initial platform combined document-style workflow development with prompt versioning, deployment, tracing, and integrations. Wordware joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch and raised a $30 million seed round led by Spark Capital.
Building agents that can actually finish tasks
Agentic tools should own the complexity. Chandler argues that thin Model Context Protocol wrappers expose models to interfaces built for conventional software: verbose JSON, pagination, authentication, and excessive narrowly scoped functions. These consume context and create long chains of unreliable decisions. His alternative is agentic MCP tools that accept natural-language instructions, manage integrations internally, and deliver completed work.
Specialists make orchestration reliable. His Wordware Toolbox demonstration contrasts a Slack agent struggling to send a message with a competitor-analysis tool that gathers Twitter material, applies specific evaluation criteria, writes its findings to Notion, and returns the finished document. Claude coordinates the workflow; the specialized tool handles execution.
Useful assistants accumulate context. Chandler and Kozera ultimately moved beyond software for constructing automations toward assistants that remember organizational knowledge, working habits, and recurring tasks. Their account of Wordware’s evolution describes this transition to Sauna, which connects workplace applications, performs background tasks, and shares relevant knowledge between teammates’ assistants while preserving human oversight.
