The interesting point here is that the two founders had previously co-founded a similar AI company, Adept, that raised a much larger amount of funding ($415m vs $57m here) to build foundation models:

https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/two-co-founders-of-...

Why did they leave only to create a rival company in the same space? One could argue that Adept is more focused on native multimodality and agentic models (https://www.adept.ai/blog/act-1) developed with longer-term research horizons in mind, but Essential also seems to be aiming at frontier-level capabilities in models trained from scratch.

My bet: as with OpenAI/Anthropic, there's both a philosophical divide and a power struggle to be found in this backstory.