Tony Goss is Co-Founder and CTO at Idler (YC S25), a San Francisco-based frontier AI research lab building evaluation datasets and reinforcement learning environments for the world's leading AI model labs.

Tony earned a BS in Computer Science from Tufts University (2017-2021) and went on to work at 0xPARC, the applied cryptography and zero-knowledge proof research group, as well as the U.S. Census Bureau and Young People For.

Tony is known for ethically exploiting a legal loophole in the blockchain strategy game Dark Forest to win a prize NFT that a collector valued at $400,000, a feat that directly connected him with Idler co-founder Ivan Chub and shaped the company's core philosophy of treating RL environments as games for AI agents.

Before zeroing in on AI infrastructure, Tony and his co-founders initially explored automating small-business workflows, building tools like powerdialer.ai and mailkarma.ai before pivoting to training environments for frontier model labs after joining Y Combinator's S25 batch.

Idler raised a $9M seed round led by Paradigm, with participation from Y Combinator and Long Journey, and is now building the infrastructure layer for evaluating and benchmarking the next generation of frontier AI models.