Our origin story
What is a Cothon?
Cothon takes its name from Carthage's ancient harbor—a protected space that enabled Mediterranean trade when safe passage was critical to nations. We're building the same for AI: infrastructure that lets organizations navigate safely.
Our team
We saw AI's potential to transform aid delivery - faster response, better localization, more impact per dollar - and organizations unable to capture it because they had no safe way to adopt.
Max McGrath-Horn, Co-Founder & CEO
Max spent 15 years building partnerships across the development sector - bringing together donors, implementers, and technical partners to get complex projects funded and delivered. At the United Nations, he managed a $350M climate finance portfolio across Asia and the Pacific Islands. At Chemonics, he built a nature-based carbon facility from the ground up, orchestrating investors, NGOs, and local communities. At ARPA-E, he learned how to move emerging technology from concept to market.
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Max holds a Master's degree from the Fletcher School at Tufts University in development finance and international business.
Will Culhane, Co-Founder & CPO
Will spent 15 years in humanitarian operations across the Middle East, Africa, and Central America - watching data systems fail the people who needed them. At the United Nations, he managed the Displacement Tracking Matrix, a large-scale program producing mission-critical intelligence and AI tools for decision-making in complex emergencies. He's conducted emergency assessments during the Somalia drought and Libyan civil war.​
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Will holds a Master's degree from Sciences Po Paris in International Development and a professional training from MIT in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
Yann Say-Liang-Fat, Founding Engineer
Yann has spent 13 years building the data infrastructure humanitarian organizations rely on to make decisions in the field. Across 20+ international missions, he's designed data governance frameworks and analytical pipelines—from survey design through ETL development to dashboards. At IMPACT Initiatives in Geneva, he standardized data workflows across diverse projects.
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His technical stack spans machine learning, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Yann holds a Master's degree from Maastricht University in Global Health and Epidemiology.
