Dustin Allen and Hearsch Jariwala, the founders behind Triangle-based Caffeine, have officially shifted their focus to Trinitite.
According to Allen, who is CEO, the new startup represents “an evolution of the technology, but a pivot on the mission” of Caffeine.
Caffeine was founded in 2024 (at that time under the name Fiscus AI) and built to be an AI productivity agent that learned workflows and boosted productivity. Last year, the company participated in both the 1616 Ventures online accelerator and the second-ever cohort of the Launch Powered by KPMG accelerator.
While building Caffeine, however, the team sensed they were operating in a saturated space, particularly as compared to other areas of enterprise AI adoption.
“We realized that the productivity space is a ‘red ocean,’” Allen said. “Everyone from Microsoft to hundreds of startups is fighting for that market. However, the governance layer underneath it was fundamentally broken. We realized we couldn’t deploy Caffeine safely to enterprises using existing tools, so we built our own safety architecture.”
That architecture, they recognized, was “actually the high-value product.”
Trinitite’s “Glass Box” solution
In the evolving new age of agentic AI, the Trinitite team argues that the old Silicon Valley adage, move fast and break things, works better for social media than for autonomous agents. That’s in part because those agents can have access to, for example, “bank accounts, medical records, or sensitive codebases.”
“In the agentic era, if you break things, you do not just lose users,” Allen said. “You face regulatory fines and lawsuits.”
Allen described current AI safety provisions against those kinds of issues as probabilistic in nature: They work most of the time but can fail unpredictably.
“For an enterprise, that unpredictability is a liability nightmare,” Allen said. “Trinitite replaces ‘probabilistic guardrails’ with ‘deterministic governance.’ We provide mathematical certainty that an AI agent cannot execute a dangerous action, transforming AI risk from a gamble into a manageable, insurable asset.”
Allen noted that beyond being unpredictable, AI mistakes also happen inside a “Black Box,” which is to say that companies can’t always prove why a mistake happened. This in turn makes it harder to address the root cause (or defend the mistake in court, come to that).
By contrast, Trinitite operates like a “Glass Box” providing total visibility.
“It is not just a log of what happened [if an AI made a mistake],” Allen explained. “It is a flight recorder that allows for ‘forensic replayability.’
This not only enables a Trinitite user to “rewind the tape” and see what the AI did, but also makes clear how the system may have followed or violated specific policies. The system is built such that different agents adhere to different guidelines (looser laws for a “Marketing Bot,” strict SEC policies for a “Finance Bot,” etc.).
All of this amounts to a functioning twist on the move fast and break things approach: “Move fast and prove it.” This motto, the team said, is powered by their doctrine of Test-Driven Governance (TDG).
“Instead of deploying a model and crossing your fingers, TDG allows you to define your safety boundaries upfront…. We then prove, mathematically, that the system adheres to those boundaries before it ever touches a customer,” Allen said.
Caffeine roots, Trinitite growth
Trinitite represents a clear shift in focus for Allen and Jariwala; it is the “Governor” to Caffeine’s “Actor,” as Allen put it. But the team is still building on the foundation they established with Caffeine.
When the team participated in the fall 2025 Launch Powered by KPMG accelerator, it was as Caffeine. It was during that program, however, that the pivot to Trinitite started to take shape.
“It was out of that experience [in the Launch/KPMG accelerator], and largely due to the incredible work they introduced us to, that this new vision came together,” Allen said, specifically shouting out Launch Chapel Hill’s Emil Runge and KPMG’s Jordan McAlister for “championing” the pivot. “We realized we were building the first reliable braking system while everyone else was building faster engines.”
The team’s experience with 1616 Ventures’ 1616 Ignite online accelerator is still paying dividends as well. Allen noted that Caffeine raised $100K “nearly a year ago” from this connection, helping to power the tech that would evolve into Trinitite.
On top of that $100K boost, the team plans to kick off a pre-seed raise as soon as next week.
QUICK BITS
Startup: Trinitite
Co-Founders: Dustin Allen (CEO), Hearsch Jariwala (CTO)
Founded: 2024 (as Caffeine)
Team size: 3
Location: Raleigh
Website: trinitite.ai
Funding: $100K from 1616 Ignite Accelerator; imminent pre-seed raise
The Trinitite team aims to use the impending raise to capitalize on the pivot and scale the engineering team to meet the demand they’re already seeing from pilots.
The platform is already live, with a pilot for a “massive enterprise partner” set to roll out in the coming weeks.
The startup’s pricing model is “enterprise-focused” based on each individual client’s size, revenue, and usage of the Trinitite platform. That said, Allen indicated that in the future they aim to align with insurance and reinsurance markets—possibly in a way that would result in Trinitite being offered “gratis” as a means of lowering risk premiums.
Immediate next steps for the Trinitite team include working to secure those insurance partnerships, which they view as necessary to scale the platform.
Those interested can view that platform here.
(And if you’re curious about the team’s previous work, you can read our past feature on Caffeine)
