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

Описание: 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