rl-list.com · Vendors · General Reasoning

General Reasoning

Open source

medium confidence

www.gr.inc ↗ · Status: active confirmed · Founded 2025

General Reasoning is a London AI research lab (legal entity General Reasoning, Inc., US) working on models that operate over much longer time horizons. It builds OpenReward, a platform for serving RL environments (the vendor states 380+), and the open Open Reward Standard. It also ships open tooling (Firehorse, inspect-openreward, Harbor support), the KellyBench long-horizon benchmark and BackSearch, a paid point-in-time search API. It says its own language models launch in Q4 2026.

Key facts

Headquarters

London, United Kingdom (Shoreditch), operating research hub; legal entity General Reasoning, Inc. registered in San Francisco/US per SEC Form Dconfirmed cite

Headcount band

11-50reported cite

Total raised

$10.9Mreported cite

Last round

Equity offering, $10,904,992 sold, filed 2025-07-11 (SEC Form D; stage not labeled, reported as ~2025 seed-stage by Crunchbase)reported cite

SOC 2

unknown

What they sell

environmentsconfirmed cite

Open source

yesconfirmed cite

Deployment

managed-hosted / self-hosted / APIconfirmed cite

What's new

9 sourced updates · last 6 months

Oct 2026product Homepage announces a new generation of GR language models for Q4 2026
The homepage (as seen on 2026-10-05) promises 'a new generation of language models' in Q4 2026 that will 'showcase new innovations in pre-training and post-training to make models think and work at much longer time horizons.' The date the announcement first appeared is unknown.
Why it matters: GR is moving from environment and infra vendor to training its own models. Buyers using OpenReward to compare models should take that into account.
31 Jul 2026other Ross and Chengxi Taylor's 'Scaling to Long Horizons' talk (AI Engineer World's Fair 2026) published
The talk video went up on the AI Engineer YouTube channel on 2026-07-31; the talk date itself is not stated. It covers RL-trained context-compaction policies, value critics to reduce gradient variance and sparse-reward problems on long trajectories, and the infrastructure limits of rollouts that last days or weeks (per the startuphub.ai write-up).
Why it matters: The clearest public statement of where GR's research is heading.
24 Jul 2026product BackSearch launched: point-in-time web search and fetch over a frozen archive
Search and fetch endpoints that return results as of a given date. It launched in July as a narrow preview over news and SEC filings. The 2026-09-13 update covers news, SEC filings, arXiv, Wikipedia and the general web. The docs show it working as tools through the OpenAI Responses API. Published price: $10 per 1,000 searches and $2 per 1,000 fetches; only successful requests are billed.
Why it matters: Forecasting and backtesting evals get a search tool that cannot leak future information. It is the company's first product with published usage pricing.
30 Apr 2026research KellyBench paper posted to arXiv (2604.27865)
'KellyBench: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Sequential Decision Making' by Thomas Grady, Kip Parker, Iliyan Zarov, Henry Course, Chengxi Taylor and Ross Taylor. The abstract reports the best model averaging about -8% return over the season, and Claude Opus 4.6 scoring 26.5% on the strategy-sophistication rubric. The newer release-page leaderboard shows Claude Opus 4.7 at -3.7%.
Why it matters: A citable preprint that also names the core research team.
27 Apr 2026open-source inspect-openreward: OpenReward environments inside the UK AISI Inspect eval framework
An open-source package that provides an Inspect Dataset (built from an environment split), a Solver and a Scorer for OpenReward environments. It detects the provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or OpenRouter) from the Inspect model config. Repo: github.com/OpenRewardAI/inspect-openreward. License not stated.
Why it matters: Connects OpenReward to the eval framework that safety institutes and many lab eval teams use.
21 Apr 2026open-source Firehorse released: open library for sampling agent trajectories on OpenReward environments
A Python library (pip install firehorse-cli; Apache-2.0 per its GitHub repo). It runs Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and ReSum harnesses against OpenReward environments and writes JSONL trajectories with rewards, token usage and cost estimates. Supported providers: OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
Why it matters: Teams can produce eval runs and training trajectories across agent harnesses without writing per-environment glue code.
21 Apr 2026product Native Harbor task support in OpenReward
Connect a GitHub repo of Harbor tasks. OpenReward detects each task, builds Docker sandbox images, redeploys only changed tasks and shows build status per task. Harbor environments can run with Claude Code's default toolset or with other harness toolsets through Firehorse.
Why it matters: Teams with tasks already in Harbor format can host them on OpenReward without rewriting them.
10 Apr 2026other Financial Times and The Times cover KellyBench; TechSpot and Decrypt follow
The gr.inc news page lists FT coverage dated 2026-04-10 ('AI punters lose their shirts on Premier League bets') and The Times ('Superhuman AI models fail to predict football scores'). The FT article is paywalled and was not read directly. TechSpot (2026-04-13) and Decrypt (2026-04-15, https://decrypt.co/364406/ai-beat-sports-betting-market-top-8-models) also covered the results.
Why it matters: Tier-1 press coverage gives a small lab visibility.
9 Apr 2026benchmark KellyBench released: every frontier model evaluated loses money over a simulated Premier League season
A long-horizon, non-stationary benchmark. Agents build betting strategies across the 2023-24 EPL season. On the current release-page leaderboard every model has a negative mean ROI: Claude Opus 4.7 -3.7%, GPT-5.4 -7.9%, GPT-5.5 -9.6%, Claude Opus 4.6 -11.2%. The page says many models hit ruin, defined as total loss of bankroll in at least one seed.
Why it matters: An open benchmark for long-horizon, real-world sequential decisions. It shows a clear gap between the strategies models can describe and what they actually do.

Founding team

Ross Taylor

Co-founder & CEO

Former head of the reasoning team at Meta AI (Llama 2, Llama 3) and research lead on Galactica. Co-founded the startup behind Papers with Code, which Meta acquired in 2019. Earlier worked at HM Treasury and on quantitative football modelling. Studied at Warwick and Cambridge.

Profile ↗

Chengxi Taylor

Co-founder & President

Leads investment and strategic partnerships at GR; her site says she has managed partnerships with Meta and Google DeepMind. Founded four tech companies (3D printing, AR, AI) and SEEN, angel investor via SixND, Oxford MBA, CFA. KellyBench co-author. Likely the 'Chengxi Wang' listed as director/executive on the 2025 Form D (inference from the name match).

Profile ↗

Kip Parker

Co-founder

Named as co-founder by Entrepreneur First and listed as co-founder on the AI Engineer org page. Appears as director 'Kip Gabriel Parker' on the 2025 SEC Form D. KellyBench co-author. No other public background found.

What practitioners should know

For researchers

KellyBench (arXiv 2604.27865) tests long-horizon, non-stationary decision-making; the environment and leaderboard are open on OpenReward. The paper abstract and the release-page leaderboard give different best-model numbers (about -8% vs -3.7%) because the leaderboard was updated later with newer models.
In ORS, agents act on environments only through tool calls; the protocol adds rewards, episode termination and task splits.
Research direction stated in the 2026 World's Fair talk: RL-trained context compaction, value critics against gradient variance and sparse rewards, and rollout infrastructure for trajectories lasting days or weeks.
GR says it will release its own long-horizon language models in Q4 2026. It has no public models or datasets on Hugging Face yet.
Public GitHub repos include env-swe-gym, env-r2e-gym, LAB-Bench, env-zebra and citecast, plus sonic-moe-fork (Apache-2.0).

For program managers

No new funding disclosed. The only filing is the 2025-07-11 SEC Form D: $10,904,992 sold, 8 investors, no stage label. Entrepreneur First lists GR as a portfolio company.
Small London team led by Meta's former Llama 2/3 reasoning lead. Three open roles: Head of Rollouts, Infrastructure, Research Scientist.
Organizations shown as environment providers or partners on OpenReward and in the launch post (Meta, Google DeepMind, Qwen, Nebius, Sarvam, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Eigent, EpochAI, Tencent AI Lab) are vendor-shown contributors, not confirmed paying customers.
BackSearch has published pay-as-you-go pricing. OpenReward pricing is not published on its homepage.
A Q4 2026 model launch is planned. If you use OpenReward to evaluate competing models, check vendor neutrality.

For data ops

Native Harbor task support: connect a GitHub repo and OpenReward builds and redeploys Docker images per task, rebuilding only what changed.
Integrations: Inspect (inspect-openreward), Firehorse (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, ReSum harnesses; JSONL logs), Tinker, Miles and Slime trainers (named in the launch post), and the OpenAI Responses API (BackSearch).
Deployment: managed hosting, self-hosted, or API.
Docs at docs.openreward.ai; public status page at status.openreward.ai.
No SOC 2, ISO certification or security/trust page found.

Benchmarks & research

4 published

KellyBenchbenchmark · 9 Apr 2026

Long-horizon, non-stationary sequential decision-making benchmark. Agents build betting strategies over a simulated 2023-24 English Premier League season.

Every frontier model evaluated lost money over the season and many hit ruin. Current release-page leaderboard: Claude Opus 4.7 -3.7% mean ROI, then GPT-5.4 -7.9%. The paper abstract (2026-04-30) reports about -8% for the best model at that time.

Open ↗Paper ↗

KellyBench environment and leaderboard (OpenReward)leaderboard · Apr 2026

Live KellyBench environment hosted on OpenReward.

Open ↗

Open Reward Standard (ORS)paper · 24 Mar 2026

Open-source HTTP protocol connecting agents to RL environments through tool calls, with rewards, episode termination and task splits. License not stated.

Open ↗

OpenReward environment catalogenvironment · 24 Mar 2026

Hosted catalog of first-party and community RL environments. The vendor states 380+ (330+ at launch).

Open ↗

Products

OpenReward ↗

Platform for hosting and serving RL environments as API endpoints for agent training and evaluation. Launched as a public beta, with training support as an early research preview. The vendor states 380+ environments. Docs at docs.openreward.ai; status page at status.openreward.ai.launched 24 Mar 2026

Open Reward Standard (ORS) ↗

Open-source HTTP protocol for agent-environment interaction. License not stated.launched 24 Mar 2026

KellyBench ↗

Long-horizon decision-making benchmark environment and leaderboard.launched 9 Apr 2026

Firehorse ↗

Apache-2.0 library that samples trajectories from Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and ReSum harnesses on OpenReward environments and writes JSONL logs.launched 21 Apr 2026

inspect-openreward ↗

Open-source package that runs OpenReward environments inside the UK AISI Inspect eval framework.launched 27 Apr 2026

BackSearch ↗

Point-in-time web search and fetch API over a frozen archive (news, SEC filings, arXiv, Wikipedia, web) for leak-free forecasting and backtesting evals. Pay-as-you-go: $10 per 1,000 searches, $2 per 1,000 fetches.launched 24 Jul 2026

Scale & velocity

Current headcount

~10 (LinkedIn public snippet; '11-50' band)reported cite

Headcount growth

unknown

Open roles

3confirmed cite

Other locations

unknown cite

Distributed / remote

noestimated cite

Research depth

Has researchers

yesconfirmed cite

Researcher count

~6 named individuals on site (founders + research/eng staff); counted from research/team pageestimated cite

Backgrounds

Ross Taylor (co-founder/CEO) - former head of reasoning at Meta AI (Llama 2/Llama 3), research lead on Galactica; co-founded Papers with Code (acquired by Meta 2019), Chengxi Taylor (co-founder/President) - serial founder (4 tech companies), Oxford MBA, CFA; leads investment and strategic partnerships; KellyBench co-author, Kip Parker (co-founder) - KellyBench co-author; Form D director, Research staff named as KellyBench authors: Thomas Grady (also a Form D director), Iliyan Zarov, Henry Courseconfirmed cite

Capital

Total raised

~$10.9M (amount sold per SEC Form D 2025-07-11; corroborated by Crunchbase)reported cite

Last round

Equity offering, $10,904,992 sold, filed 2025-07-11 (SEC Form D; stage not labeled, reported as ~2025 seed-stage by Crunchbase)reported cite

Investors

Entrepreneur Firstreported cite

Valuation

unknown

Revenue signals

Published usage pricing for BackSearch ($10 per 1,000 searches, $2 per 1,000 fetches; only successful requests billed); no revenue figures disclosedconfirmed cite

Security & compliance

SOC 2

unknown

Other certifications

unknown

Security page

unknown

Product

What they sell

environmentsconfirmed cite

Open source

yesconfirmed cite

License

Apache-2.0 (firehorse and sonic-moe-fork repos); Open Reward Standard and inspect-openreward described as open-source, specific license not statedreported cite

Deployment model

managed-hosted / self-hosted / APIconfirmed cite

Maturity

Early commercial / beta (OpenReward launched as public beta with training as an early research preview; BackSearch sold pay-as-you-go)estimated cite

Notable customers

⚑Meta self-claimed ⚑Google DeepMind self-claimed ⚑OpenAI self-claimed ⚑NVIDIA self-claimed ⚑Qwen (Alibaba) self-claimed Nebius self-claimed Sarvam self-claimed Eigent self-claimed EpochAI self-claimed Tencent AI Lab self-claimed cite

Buyer analysis

Best fit: Teams wanting open, portable RL environments (including Harbor tasks) and long-horizon agent benchmarks they can self-host or call via API, plus leak-free point-in-time search for forecasting and backtesting evals.

How we verified this

2026-10-05 refresh: I opened every draft source except the paywalled FT article, which returned 403 (its date and headline were confirmed on the gr.inc news page). The identity is correct: gr.inc, Ross Taylor's London lab. Release dates check out against the gr.inc news index: Firehorse and Harbor 2026-04-21, Inspect 2026-04-27, BackSearch 2026-07-24 (updated 2026-09-13), KellyBench 2026-04-09, arXiv paper 2026-04-30. I dropped the 2026-03-24 OpenReward launch from news because it falls before the window. I made four news corrections: (1) removed an unverifiable FT quote; (2) re-dated the World's Fair talk to the video's 2026-07-31 publish date, since 2026-08-22 was only the write-up's update date; (3) added that the paper's abstract reports about -8% for the best model, compared with the later -3.7% leaderboard figure; (4) noted that BackSearch launched as a narrow news/SEC preview and replaced an unverified 'prepaid' billing detail. On founders, the AI Engineer org page and the founders' own sites confirm the roles (Ross Taylor CEO, Chengxi Taylor Co-founder & President, Kip Parker Co-founder). Both photo URLs return single-person JPEG headshots, and Kip Parker has no photo. I fixed the self-contradictory 'GA' maturity to beta/early commercial and added EpochAI and Tencent AI Lab as self-claimed environment providers. No new funding, acquisition or shutdown turned up: the Form D shows only the 2025 filing, and Google News RSS found nothing new. My web search budget ran out, so the check for missed paywalled coverage is limited.

Related vendors

Sources

www.gr.inc/ · 2026-10-05, Homepage: Q4 2026 model plans, products with dates, ex-Meta team
www.gr.inc/news · 2026-10-05, Release dates; press links (FT and The Times, 2026-04-10)
www.gr.inc/careers · 2026-10-05, 3 open roles, London Chapter I, founded 2025
www.gr.inc/research · 2026-10-05, Research index (KellyBench)
www.gr.inc/releases/introducing-openreward · 2026-10-05, OpenReward launch: public beta, 330+ envs, Tinker/Miles/Slime, environment contributors
www.gr.inc/releases/introducing-kellybench · 2026-10-05, KellyBench release 2026-04-09 and leaderboard ROI
arxiv.org/abs/2604.27865 · 2026-10-05, KellyBench paper, authors, submitted 2026-04-30
openreward.ai/GeneralReasoning/KellyBench · 2026-10-05, KellyBench environment page (HTTP 200)
www.gr.inc/releases/introducing-firehorse · 2026-10-05, Firehorse release 2026-04-21
github.com/GeneralReasoning/firehorse · 2026-10-05, Apache-2.0 license
www.gr.inc/releases/deploy-harbor-environments · 2026-10-05, Harbor support 2026-04-21
www.gr.inc/releases/inspect-openreward · 2026-10-05, Inspect integration 2026-04-27
github.com/OpenRewardAI/inspect-openreward · 2026-10-05, inspect-openreward repo (HTTP 200)
www.gr.inc/releases/introducing-backsearch · 2026-10-05, BackSearch release 2026-07-24, updated 2026-09-13; pricing and coverage
openreward.ai/ · 2026-10-05, 380+ environments; logos Meta, Google DeepMind, Qwen, Nebius, Sarvam; docs and status links
openrewardstandard.io/ · 2026-10-05, ORS overview; no license stated
github.com/GeneralReasoning · 2026-10-05, Repos; latest update 2026-10-02 (citecast); sonic-moe-fork Apache-2.0
huggingface.co/GeneralReasoning · 2026-10-05, No public models or datasets
ai.engineer/orgs/general-reasoning · 2026-10-05, Roles (CEO; Co-founder & President; Co-founder), talk, speaker headshots
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bvtay8wGYI · 2026-10-05, 'Scaling to Long Horizons' talk video, AI Engineer channel, published 2026-07-31
www.startuphub.ai/ai-news/ai-research/2026/general-reasoning-founders-on · 2026-10-05, Talk write-up (published 2026-07-31, updated 2026-08-22); research directions
rossjtaylor.com/ · 2026-10-05, Ross Taylor bio
chengxitaylor.com/ · 2026-10-05, Chengxi Taylor bio: co-founder & President, partnerships with Meta and Google DeepMind
joinef.substack.com/p/portfolio-news-march-2026 · 2026-10-05, Entrepreneur First portfolio newsletter naming GR (co-founders Ross Taylor, Kip Parker)
www.formds.com/issuers/general-reasoning-inc · 2026-10-05, Only Form D filing 2025-07-11: $10,904,992 sold, 8 investors; directors Grady, Parker, Taylor, Wang; no 2026 filings
decrypt.co/364406/ai-beat-sports-betting-market-top-8-models · 2026-10-05, Decrypt coverage of KellyBench, 2026-04-15
www.ft.com/content/544cbd80-492e-4ee8-a8b4-66e447361651 · 2026-10-05, FT coverage 2026-04-10 (paywalled, returned 403; date and headline from the gr.inc news page)
uk.linkedin.com/company/general-reasoning · 2026-06-07, Public snippet - ~10-11 headcount, 11-50 band, founded 2025, London, long-horizon RL focus
www.linkedin.com/in/rosstaylor90/ · 2026-06-07, Ross Taylor co-founder/CEO, ex-Meta AI
www.interconnects.ai/p/interviewing-ross-taylor-on-llm-reasoning · 2026-06-07, Background: Ross Taylor led Galactica, Llama reasoning, Papers with Code

Last updated 2026-10-05 · Every quantitative field carries a source and a confidence tag. Fields we could not source publicly are marked unknown, never estimated. See the methodology.