Ivan Nikitin, CEO and Co-Founder of Fortytwo – Interview Series

Ivan Nikitin is CEO and co-founder of Fortytwo, where he is developing swarm inference technology that brings multiple AI models together to reason and evaluate one another’s work. His background spans games, conversational AI, generative AI, and interactive systems at Temporal and Sensorium. He co-founded Temporal in 2011 with Vlad Larin, now Fortytwo’s co-founder and CTO, building experience with evolving populations of agents and systems that combine specialized models.

Fortytwo builds AI infrastructure that enables models to collaborate during inference. Its Fortytwo Engine uses a Swarm Decoder to steer a shared reasoning process as it unfolds, aiming to improve accuracy and reduce unnecessary token generation on long tasks. The company offers an API for developers through Fortytwo Engine and on-premises deployment through Fortytwo Harbor.

Before co-founding Fortytwo, you spent years building products around conversational AI, generative AI, and interactive systems at Sensorium and Temporal. How did those experiences shape your view of where individual large language models fall short, and ultimately lead you to the swarm-based approach behind Fortytwo? A big part of our team, myself included, came into AI…