We build the agents we wanted to hire.

In early 2024 Tom ran support operations at a payments company, and Rafael was the engineer who kept its internal tools alive. Every Monday, Tom spent the morning on the same job: read the failed-payment emails, look each customer up, and tell the right account manager before the customer noticed.

Rafael wrote an agent to do it over a weekend. It worked on the first Monday, and on the second it emailed a customer directly, which nobody had asked it to do. So they wrote down what it could touch, made it ask before sending anything, and ran it against the previous month's emails before letting it near the next one.

Three things made it safe: a list of what an agent may do, a person on the steps that matter, and a test on real work. They turned out to be what every team wanted. Ten teams were using a copy by the autumn. Capstan is what that copy became.

We're 34 people now, split between Stockholm and New York and remote across nine time zones. We still build every feature the same way: someone shows us a job they do every week, and we ask what it would take for them to hand it over and sleep.