If you knew SimpleDirect at the beginning of 2026, you knew a fintech company.
Today we're something different — and we want to tell you what changed, and why.
SimpleDirect is now an AI lab.
We build open-weight language models you can download and run yourself, trained against a public Constitution, on Canadian infrastructure.
Our first model, Vinci Piccolo, launches June 30, 2026.
That's a long way from where we started.
Here's the honest version of how we got here.
Where we came from
SimpleDirect began in 2019, in a basement near the University of Waterloo, after George Pu met a home improvement contractor, Benson.
The problem was real: home-improvement contractors needed a way to offer financing to their customers.
So we built it — a buy-now-pay-later platform that integrated 13 lenders and processed over $95 million in loans for 254 active contractors.
It worked. And then, slowly, the math stopped working.
By 2025 we were earning roughly $1,500 a year per contractor and spending $1,300 to $1,900 to serve each one.
We were charging a self-service price to a market that wanted white-glove, phone-based support.
That's not a gap you optimize away — it's a structural mismatch.
In October 2025 we published a post sunsetting SimpleDirect Financing.
We were close to shutting the company down for good.
Why we pivoted instead of forcing it
A few things made the pivot possible — and they happen to be our values, so they're worth naming.
We never took venture capital.
That meant when the model broke, we had the freedom to change direction instead of forcing a broken business onto someone else's growth curve.
Independence isn't a slogan for us — it's the reason we're still here to write this.
And when we looked honestly at where we should go, the case was clear:
- A better market — tech-savvy people who genuinely want self-service, instead of a market that demanded high-touch support at low-touch prices.
- Better economics — self-service that actually works.
- A better fit — we're builders and developers, not a call center.
- Better timing — early in the shift to AI, instead of late in embedded finance.
We almost didn't get the chance to make that call.
We were hours from shutting down when a single customer message made us stop and rethink. We took the rethink.
What we are now
SimpleDirect is an AI lab. Concretely, that means:
We fine-tune open foundation models against a public Constitution — we call it Constitutional Fine-Tuning — and release our own models, branded Vinci.
The weights are open and downloadable, shipped under Apache 2.0.
Weights you can download, not an API we resell.
You can run Vinci on your own hardware, read exactly what it is, and keep it.
It runs on Canadian sovereign infrastructure, governed by Canadian law.
And we build for one thing above raw capability: character.
A model that's honest when it doesn't know, that has a point of view, and that you actually enjoy using.
We think capability is becoming the easy part. Character is the part almost nobody is building — and it's where we've chosen to compete.
What we value
- Honesty — in the company and in the model. We'd rather tell you what's broken than sell you a story. This post is an example.
- Openness — open weights, a public Constitution, public test results. If we claim it, you can check it.
- Ownership — the model should be yours, not rented.
- Independence — no VC, and no pressure to force a model that doesn't work.
- Building in the open — we ship early, share the process, and let your feedback shape what comes next.
What's next
Our first model, Vinci Piccolo, launches June 30, 2026 — a small, free, open-weight model you can run on your own laptop.
It's the smallest version of the idea, and the first proof that character holds even at small scale.
Larger models, sharing the same Constitution and character, are on the way.
If you knew us as a fintech: thank you for being part of that chapter.
This is the next one — come build it with us.
