If you’ve been around the Portland startup community long enough, you know there’s a particular kind of company that just keeps showing up. Heads down. Building. Not chasing rounds. Not chasing headlines. Just figuring it out. And embracing that concept of aggressive humility. Tellagence is one of those startups.
Founded in 2011 by Matt Hixson and Nitin Mayande. Self-sustaining since around 2016. And now, after years of mostly working in the background, they’ve put their AI framework through an academic gauntlet — and the results just landed on arXiv with co-authors from Portland State University and Villanova.
Tellagence has built something called SSAS — Syntactic and Semantic Context Assessment Summarization — and put it up against the consistency problem that nobody in the LLM world really likes to talk about.
You know the one. You’ve experienced it. You ask the same question twice and get two meaningfully different answers. Not good.
But Tellagence is working to fix that gap. And they’ve got the research to prove it. The study ran across 433,000 real-world data points from Amazon, Google, and Goodreads reviews. Standard LLM variability across repeated runs landed somewhere between 22% and 28%.
With Tellagence SSAS sitting in front of the model, though…? That variability dropped to 1–2.5%. Plus 96% alignment with human analysis. It’s the kind of result that has implications for anyone trying to use these tools for anything that needs to be the same answer twice — or a hundred times — in a row.
“The most dangerous AI output is not one that is obviously wrong — it’s the one that is confidently inaccurate,” said Matt. “When AI produces different results each time the same analysis is run, organizations can’t tell whether a shift in their data reflects a real change in customer opinion or just model variability. A major strategic decision could be made based on a trend that isn’t real. We built this framework to reduce that uncertainty to levels organizations can build strategy on — and the research proves it does.”
Also worth noting: Dylan Boyd joined the team as VP Sales & Marketing in early 2025 after 13 years as an advisor.
For more, visit Tellagence.
