About
From the archives to the architecture
Keith G. Pemberton II was raised in North Carolina, where the questions that became QuarterMill started with his own family. Genealogical research led him into the Black Southern record, then to the Library of Congress and across state archives, then to fieldwork in Latin America, West Africa, and the Middle East. The pattern repeated everywhere: the most important records were the least legible to the systems built to find them.
Trained at Yale across history, computing, neuroscience, and data science, Keith founded QuarterMill to bridge these disciplines. The rigor of the human record. The architectural depth of modern computing. The mission is to rebuild the infrastructure that lets serious knowledge work continue.
V1 launch
V1 shipped May 2026.
Built entirely on public domain materials by a team of engineers from Yale. The innovation is architectural: a new way for humans and machines to interact with information, with every fact tied to its source at every step.
The founder's essay on why this matters: “We're building AI on a broken foundation” in The Yale Herald.
Milestones
The QuarterMill Team
The QuarterMill Team
Keith G. Pemberton II
Founder & CEO
A historian and technologist who has worked across the world's archives and the systems built to search them. He started QuarterMill to rebuild the layer that makes knowledge trustworthy.
Kexin Chu
Technical Lead
Previously an engineer at Baidu, one of the world's largest search engines; now a PhD researcher in trustworthy AI. He leads how QuarterMill is built.
The QuarterMill team has built at the scale of the world's largest search and AI systems.