sf-labs.co
safety factor labs
sf-labs is a firm that focuses on building great solutions to real-world problems and investing our time into the community.
operating companies
trustdog.co ai-powered escrow for creator ad deals on the solana blockchain. the influencer marketing industry runs on broken rails, with platforms charging 10-15% fees for simple matchmaking. trustdog provides the infrastructure for trustless, verified deals at a 2% platform fee. by combining ai-verified content delivery with blockchain escrow, we enable brands to pay only when creators deliver, and creators to get instant payouts.
ai
solana
social media
infrastructure
ideated and launched oct 2025. currently processing an increasing number of deals where trustdog is neither creator nor advertiser.
botornot.bot an aggregator of ai detection services that provides robust, multi-source results. the project was initially capital-intensive, relying on multiple third-party apis. using smart tooling, we created a system that replicates the process without having to fine tune anything or rely on expensive detection apis, cutting our operating costs to near-zero. this demonstrates our core philosophy: solve problems with pragmatic engineering, not by burning capital.
ai
education
research & development
finetoo.co automated database creation and operational tooling for engineering firms. the ai industry has a financial incentive to push costly fine-tuning as the solution to all problems. we believe this is often incorrect, a belief supported by rich sutton's essay, "the bitter lesson." generalist models with sufficient scale and compute consistently outperform specialized, data-limited approaches. finetoo will provide engineering firms with a full-scope operational solution, including cad file integration, for a flat fee of $30 a month.
project repository.
ai
engineering
infrastructure
4sb.io a platform for creating simple, mobile-first e-commerce sites on solana. latency is high and desktop computer access is low in many developing countries. 4sb (for small business) allows anyone to create a lightweight, functional online shop (myshop.4sb.io) for free, entirely through a simple chat interface on their mobile device. it is built for poor connections and is part of our greater solana vision.
ai
solana
developing nations
infrastructure
davinshak tractors a repairable, made-in-canada tractor built around the
cummins qsb33 engine. manufacturing is automated via retrofitted bridgeport milling machines in a sea can in an undisclosed location in ontario.
engineering
infrastructure
qnav exploring nitrogen-vacancy diamonds for offline gps technology.
engineering
name pending a portable device for the programmers of tomorrow.
education
f2chat.com an end-to-end encrypted chat app that uses fully homomorphic encryption.
infrastructure
accelerator
we select ideas, build them, and launch them at no cost to the founder.
founders run the company for one year. if profitable, they choose their equity split (n% founder, m% sf-labs, where n + m = 100). if not profitable after one year, sf-labs takes (100 - n)% of the company and assumes operations.
to apply: email n, m ∈ ℕ such that n + m = 100 to sj@sf-labs.co
stewardship
sf-labs is led by shakil jiwa, a research engineer with a background in mechanical and electrical engineering, and building and deploying ai/ml systems. shakil got his start working on touchless checkout with some friends at mcgill. in california is where he learned coding with the ceo of axys and his uci roommate ken, who taught him a lot, before dropping out of his phd. after working in non-software fields for a while, he's excited to bridge a lot of gaps. projects are built with a focus on rapid iteration and pragmatic engineering. when possible, we open-source our work to contribute to the ecosystem. sf-labs also holds various other investments (berkshire hathaway, options on construction materials...) although it is not the main priority of the company. always open to learning more about fhe.
sj@sf-labs.co
open source projects: github.com/bon-cdp
research: google scholar