Alexios Bluff Mara × Illinois State University
Research Collaboration · Cardinal & Code
Alexios Bluff Mara LLC dba Red Team Kitchen Bloomington–Normal, IL

Brain-response analysis.
Personal AI.
Built where Cardinal meets Code.

Alexios Bluff Mara LLC is a research-and-software lab operating in collaboration with Illinois State University. Two flagship projects today: Cortex, a multimodal brain-response analysis system built on Meta's TRIBE v2 and Google's Gemma 4, and Mercury, a personal AI agent that runs locally across six surfaces — terminal, Discord, web, iMessage, email, and mobile.

See Cortex live demo View source on GitHub

What we ship

Three doors into the lab. Two are open-source research projects; the third is the storefront where ABM LLC ships handmade artifacts of that research.

Project · Cortex
Watch your brain respond to any video.
Upload a clip. In about six minutes, 20,484 cortical vertices light up in real-time 3D and Gemma 4 narrates the response at three levels — general, college, clinical.
Read more →
Project · Mercury
Your AI on your hardware, through every door you own.
A personal agent that lives on a single computer you own. One brain, one memory, six surfaces. Nothing leaves the building.
Read more →
Products — Red Team Kitchen
SaaS scan access. Educational content. Research data licensing.
Three revenue paths: public API access for Cortex brain scans, educational neuroscience video series, and anonymized fMRI prediction dataset licensing for research. Coming Q3 2026.
Coming soon →

What ABM does

Alexios Bluff Mara LLC partners with Illinois State University on applied AI and computational neuroscience research. The work is hardware-flexible by design: the same code path runs on a single RTX 5090 sitting under a desk, on a Google Cloud Run L4 instance for burst capacity, and — through ACCESS-CI partnerships at UIUC and similar institutions — on national HPC nodes when the experiment demands them. Open-source where possible. Local-first by default.

"From a single Blackwell card to an HPC partition — same code, different horsepower. The research question dictates the hardware, not the other way around."

Below are the ISU departments and facilities the lab interacts with. None of these endorse the lab's work; they are listed because they are the academic homes the research draws from and contributes to.

Department
School of Information Technology
illinoisstate.edu/departments/sit
Department
Department of Psychology
psychology.illinoisstate.edu
Department
School of Biological Sciences
bio.illinoisstate.edu
Facility
Milner Library
library.illinoisstate.edu
Facility
College of Applied Science & Technology
cast.illinoisstate.edu
Compute
ACCESS-CI (national HPC)
access-ci.org

Active hackathon submissions

Both projects are competing in May 2026 hackathons. Submissions are live and publicly reproducible.

Kaggle · Gemma 4 Good — Health & Sciences track
Cortex: accessible brain imaging with a $2,600 GPU.
Clinical fMRI costs $5,000/scan and requires a radiologist. Cortex runs the same predictive model for <$0.01 and narrates the result in plain language. Built on Meta TRIBE v2 + Google Gemma 4, Apache-2.0.
View submission →
Nous Research × Kimi — Creative track
Mercury: a personal AI agent built from a Hermes-fork brain.
One model instance, six surfaces (terminal, Discord, web, iMessage, email, mobile), local-first architecture. Powered by Nous Hermes + Kimi K2.6 for long-context reasoning. MIT license.
View submission →

Receipts — the real numbers

Pulled from the live project READMEs. No extrapolation, no cloud bills rounded up.

$22.04
Kimi K2.6 sprint cost
75 min
Sprint duration · 14 commits
20,484
Cortical vertices
6
Mercury surfaces
194
Tok/sec on RTX 5090
~6 min
Per-scan turnaround

Work with us

Alexios Bluff Mara LLC is actively seeking research partners, compute sponsors, and early investors aligned with local-first AI infrastructure and computational neuroscience.

Research partnership
ISU faculty co-investigators & NAIRR GPU allocations.
We hold active research association with Illinois State University. Faculty co-PIs in neuroscience or CS can unlock NAIRR Start-Up GPU allocations (A100/H100 at NCSA/UIUC) within ~3 weeks of submission. If you are an ISU faculty member interested in fMRI prediction or personal AI, reach out.
Google Cloud / VC credits
Applying via 1871 Chicago accelerator network.
The Google for Startups AI Tier offers up to $350K in GCP credits for startups using Gemini/Vertex as core infrastructure, accessed through partner accelerators. ABM LLC is a Chicago-based AI research startup. If your accelerator or VC fund has a Google partnership, let's talk.
Investor inquiry
Seed & pre-seed · Chicago and remote.
Consumer AI, computational neuroscience, and educational media converge in one lab. We're talking to Chicago-area angels and pre-seed funds. Revenue path: SaaS scan access, HPC-time marketplace, educational video licensing, and ISU research grants. Get in touch.
Contact →

Funding & capital

Current capitalization

  • $3,000 cash — seed capital
  • ~$25,000 in hardware and infrastructure at cost
    • RTX 5090 — $2,600
    • AMD 9800X3D workstation — $1,400
    • 64 GB DDR5 — $350
    • 8 TB NVMe — $450
    • MSI X870E-P — $350
    • Networking / UPS — $400
    • Software licenses — $1,200/yr
    • Google Workspace + GCP — $300/yr
    • Cloud Run + Firebase engineering — ~$5,000 value
Chicago angel & pre-seed investors
AI research startup seeking $250K–$500K pre-seed.
AI research startup seeking $250K–$500K pre-seed for SaaS scan access, HPC marketplace, and ISU research partnerships. Email soumit@redteamkitchen.com subject INVEST.
Google for Startups AI Tier via 1871 Chicago
Up to $350K in GCP credits through 1871 Chicago.
Up to $350K in GCP credits for Google-integrated AI startups through the 1871 Chicago accelerator network. Apply via cloud.google.com/startup/ai.
NAIRR compute grant (ISU faculty co-PI)
A100/H100 GPU time at NCSA/UIUC via NAIRR.
National AI Research Resource: A100/H100 GPU time at NCSA/UIUC, ~3-week turnaround. Requires ISU faculty co-PI. Contact soumit@redteamkitchen.com.
Research conducted in association with Illinois State University, Bloomington–Normal, IL.
Alexios Bluff Mara LLC · 2026