Braden Wong
| Braden Wong | |
| Occupation | Software developer, entrepreneur |
|---|---|
| Known for | Founder of Epicenter |
| Education | Yale University (B.A., Ethics, Politics & Economy) |
| Website | epicenter.md |
Braden Wong is an American software developer and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Epicenter, an ecosystem of open-source, local-first applications that share a unified memory layer, described as "ChatGPT's memory feature in an open, portable format."[1] Epicenter was part of Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.[2]
Early life and education
Wong attended Yale University, where he studied ethics, politics, and economy, beginning in August 2020.[3] During his time at Yale, he was involved in software development projects, including an app and website that displayed menus of Yale's residential college butteries.[4]
Career
Wong developed Whispering, an open-source transcription tool that supports both local and cloud-based speech recognition models. The project, hosted on GitHub under his account, accumulated 272 stars before being archived in February 2026 when its functionality was incorporated into the broader Epicenter ecosystem.[5]
Wong founded Epicenter to address what he saw as the fragmentation of personal data across siloed applications. The platform stores all user data — including notes, transcripts, and chat histories — in a single folder composed of plain text files and SQLite databases on the user's local machine. Each tool in the Epicenter ecosystem reads from and writes to this shared memory, enabling interoperability without cloud dependency or data export workflows.[6]
As of early 2026, Epicenter's product suite includes Whispering, a transcription application; and epicenter.sh, a tool that allows users to query their codebase remotely using their own hardware via secure tunneling. The platform is built using Rust, Svelte, and CRDTs for local-first synchronization. Users can connect their own API keys for AI models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, rather than relying on a centralized service. All tools are released as free and open-source software.[7]
Epicenter operates in the productivity and note-taking software space and is categorized under SaaS, open source, and AI assistant industries on Y Combinator's directory.
References
- ↑ "Epicenter – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Epicenter". 'Epicenter}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Braden Wong – Crunchbase". 'Crunchbase}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Yalies develop app to satisfy late-night buttery cravings". 'Yale Daily News}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "braden-w/whispering – GitHub". 'GitHub}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Epicenter". 'Epicenter}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Epicenter". 'Epicenter}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.