Company
Building AI the world can rely on
Merkium is an AI research laboratory founded on a single principle: the most capable systems must also be the most trustworthy.
Merkium was founded in 2025 by Afonso Faro with a clear mandate: develop language models that are not only state-of-the-art in capability, but rigorously engineered for safety, transparency, and real-world reliability.
As a lean, research-first organization, we maintain end-to-end ownership of the Adamas model family — from pre-training data curation through alignment tuning to deployment evaluation.
Leadership
Afonso Faro
Founder · Lead Researcher & Engineer
Afonso founded Merkium in 2025 to pursue a research-first approach to frontier AI development. He leads both the research agenda and the engineering effort behind the Adamas model family, overseeing everything from architecture design and pre-training to alignment and deployment.
Values
Research-driven
Every model is designed, trained, and evaluated in-house — giving us full accountability for how our systems perform in production.
Long-term thinking
We optimize for the safety and benefit of future users, not short-term benchmarks. Our decisions reflect where AI is headed, not where it is today.
Intellectual honesty
Frontier AI carries real uncertainty. We hold our conclusions loosely, publish our methods openly, and update our approach as we learn.
Interested in working with us?
Merkium is a small, focused team. We're always interested in connecting with exceptional researchers and engineers.