Memory Is the Missing Primitive: Why AI Agents Need a New Infra with Vasilije Markovic of Cognee скачать в хорошем качестве

Memory Is the Missing Primitive: Why AI Agents Need a New Infra with Vasilije Markovic of Cognee

This week Ashley Smith sits down with Vasilije Markovic, CEO and co-founder of Cognee, just after closing a $7.5M seed round led by Pebblebed with participation from Vermilion Cliffs Ventures and 42Cap. Vasilije's background spans data engineering and cognitive science, and that combination is not incidental. It shapes how Cognee thinks about memory as infrastructure for the agentic era, not a feature bolted onto a model or workflow. The conversation covers why production AI deployments keep breaking at the data model layer, why RAG and embeddings are building blocks and not a memory solution, how the industry is moving from GraphRAG toward predictive memory, and what practical advice actually looks like for teams deploying customer-facing agents right now. CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction and Cognee overview 1:14 Vasilije's background: from data engineering to cognitive science 2:28 What breaks when AI agents move from demo to production 5:10 Why embeddings and RAG are not memory 7:11 How agents need to reason over time and relationships 11:00 Memory as infrastructure, not an application layer concern 11:47 How persistent memory changes how teams debug and trust AI systems 13:27 Advice for deploying customer-facing agents right now 15:13 Speed round begins 15:22 What shipped in the last 7 days 15:48 Hardest technical tradeoff: latency vs quality 16:05 What almost made him quit 16:47 The metric that tells him he's winning 17:04 Default mode under stress 17:29 Hardest part of being CEO 18:39 City or nature 19:10 Where Vasilije is from 19:48 Favorite place to work from 19:51 Ship fast or ship perfect 20:09 Small team or big team 20:24 Design first or architecture first 21:13 Closing