Our origin story
Built by people whose work had to hold up​
Max spent 15 years in climate finance — at the UN, where he managed a $350M portfolio across Asia and the Pacific, and with USAID, where he implemented a $250M climate finance accelerator. Will spent 15 years in humanitarian crisis response across Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Tunisia, and Guatemala — most recently running the International Organization for Migration’s Iraq Data Hub, where his team's evidence shaped the Government of Iraq's National Plan to End Displacement.
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Between them, thirty years of producing written work where being wrong had consequences: for displaced people, for donors, for governments making real decisions. They knew the verification problem long before AI made it universal. When AI arrived and the gap between fast and careful opened under everyone at once, they built 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.
What is a Cothon?
Our team
We saw the gap between how fast professionals can now produce and how confident they feel putting their name on it. No one was building for that.
Max McGrath-Horn, Co-Founder & CEO
Knows how to fund it, partner it, and scale it
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
Knows what to build and why it matters
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
Knows how to build it and make it work
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.
