Noel Saldanha

Noel Saldanha is a contributor at Fathom, covering AI agents, open-source models and the tooling around them. His beat is the part of the industry that ships without a press release: open-weight releases, agent frameworks, protocol work such as MCP, and the developer infrastructure that decides what independent builders can actually make. He also covers where AI meets fintech and blockchain, including agent-to-agent payments and the stablecoin rails being built for machine transactions, a subject he approaches with more scepticism than most of its advocates. He is interested in the distance between a demo and a deployment, and in what open weights mean in practice once licence terms and compute requirements are taken into account.