Intelligible — the team behind elbi — is part of TechCrunch Disrupt's 2026 Startup Battlefield 200
elbi

How it works

From bound data to a certified tool in five steps.

No fine-tuning. No re-platforming. Just a structured layer between your data and whatever agent is asking it questions.

  1. step

    01

    Bind your data

    Local files or a SQL database — declared once, in config.

    Point elbi at a CSV, JSON, or Parquet file, or bind a SQL table. The binding lives in elbi.dev.yaml, versioned alongside your derivations — explicit and reviewable.

  2. step

    02

    Author a derivation

    A plain Python function with declared inputs and an output format.

    A derivation is any computation over your bound data: a metric, a transform, a trained model. Write it as a decorated function, or promote a SQL query or notebook cell once you've found the right shape.

  3. step

    03

    Verify & certify

    Gate on a data contract. Sign off before anything serves.

    Gate it on a machine-checkable data contract — types, ranges, keys, referential integrity — verified before it serves. An agent can propose one; elbi verifies it under isolation and serves it once a named person certifies it.

  4. step

    04

    Serve over MCP

    A versioned, cached tool for any client.

    elbi serves it as an MCP tool and resource — reachable from Claude Desktop, Cursor, the MCP Inspector, or your own agent. Try it first in elbi serve's chat UI.

  5. step

    05

    Reuse, monitor, orchestrate

    Cached until it's stale. Watched once it's live.

    Cached and reused until the code or data changes. Monitor it for anomalies against a learned baseline, materialize it on a schedule, and trace its lineage across every artifact it touches.

What an agent sees

A tool call in, a cited answer out.

An agent calls run_churn_risk and gets back the cached, certified result — not the raw rows behind it.

# Churn risk

| customer_id | risk |
| --- | --- |
| C-1021 | 0.5 |
| C-0820 | 0.2 |
| C-0640 | 0.1 |

Cached and reused until churn_risk's code or the sales data changes.

Verification certificate

Verified

churn_risk@v3

Bound inputs

  • sales.customer_id
  • sales.amount
  • sales.recency_days

Certified by

you@company.com

Signature

3f9a1c…e02d

Built on the Open Derivation Spec

Any implementation can validate against the same format.

Derivations validate against a public conformance suite, so an elbi tool call isn't tied to elbi's own implementation. Read the spec, or dig into the pieces below.

Try it

Bring a dataset. Leave with a certified tool.

uv tool install elbi, then elbi init and elbi serve. No API key needed to start.

Get startedHow it works