About
Why Manta Labs exists
We're an AI enablement firm built around a single bet: that working software in the right small place beats a strategy deck nine times out of ten. Two co-founders, a tight team, and a proprietary platform — Reef — that does most of the heavy lifting before an engagement even starts.
We started Manta Labs because we kept watching the same thing happen.
The companies we ran or worked with had real ROI on the table — hours of repeated work, copy-paste workflows, the same email written forty times a month. The kind of slow that costs money in a way you can actually name.
The people pitching them on AI either had nothing to ship (the strategy firms) or shipped the wrong thing (chatbot vendors who'd never seen the inside of a real operation). Nobody was sitting down with the team, mapping the work, and quietly building the right small piece.
We made that our job. Reef — our proprietary platform — gets most of what would otherwise take a year to build out of the way. What's left is your specific work. And it ships in weeks, not quarters.
How we think
No big philosophy//just a few rules
Working software beats slides
A deck describing what AI could do is worth approximately nothing compared to a single automation actually running in the business.
Most operations don't need an overhaul
They need the right small change, made in the right place, by someone who understood the work first.
Reef in the back, your tools in the front
We bring proprietary infrastructure for the heavy lifting — connectors, queues, audit, observability. Your team keeps using what they already use. Nothing new to log into, nothing to migrate to.
Pilots should be small enough to be honest
If a project is too big to walk away from cleanly, the conversation about whether it's working stops being honest.
Our founders
Nat Trienens
Nat Trienens is an entrepreneur and software engineer with deep experience in enterprise technology leadership, business operations and finance.
Nat graduated from Northwestern University in 1998 with a degree in Computer Science and began his career as a Financial Analyst for boutique investment firm Big Flower Holdings. While there he managed the acquisition of several companies and oversaw investments in an array of early dot-com startups.
In 2001, he co-founded the digital agency Fuzz, serving as its CEO for 18 years. Fuzz executed digital transformation projects for clients including Google, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Shake Shack and many others. Fuzz was acquired by Japanese agency Monstarlab in 2019. While running Fuzz, Nat founded Koala, a premium digital ordering platform purpose-built for the restaurant industry. As its CEO he guided Koala from its initial concept through scaling and acquisition in 2024.
Today, Nat is applying his experience in technology, business and finance to AI enablement, focusing on bringing scalable automations to complex enterprise workflows.
Anthony Chao
Anthony Chao is a seasoned expert in the financial industry having worked across Banking, Trading, Investment Advisory and Fund Management. Anthony was named on two US patents for innovation in trading systems, and has helped to deliver technology platforms on a global scale.
He began his career at JPMorgan after graduating from Duke University with a degree in Markets and Management. During his decade-long tenure, he developed risk and trading systems for Emerging Markets and served as Vice President. Later, as Managing Director and CIO for Emerging Markets and Latin America at Barclays, he led global engineering teams in delivering institutional-scale applications.
After twenty years in global banking, Anthony co-founded Wave Advisors, where he designed quantitative algorithmic investment strategies for clients across Europe and the US.
He currently sits on the board of a European venture capital fund manager, speaks three languages, and has lived on four continents. At Manta Labs, Anthony oversees the development of scalable, reliable AI automations designed for high-pressure enterprise environments.
Companies we've worked with
Think we'd get along?
The first conversation is short and concrete. You tell us what's slow, where the pain points are; we tell you whether we can add value.