Alden DoRosario

Alden DoRosario is a Massachusetts-based founder and engineer who has bootstrapped companies for more than two decades. In 2003 Alden and Venkat Kolluri left their jobs at the search company Lycos to start Chitika, an online contextual advertising network where Alden served as co-founder and CTO. By Alden's own account, the company was started on $5 borrowed from Alden's wife and grew to become one of the largest contextual ad networks after Google; Chitika later shut down.

After Chitika they co-founded DreamPick and have been active as an angel investor with TiE Boston. In 2023 Alden launched CustomGPT.ai, a no-code platform that lets businesses build AI assistants and agents grounded in their own content, using retrieval-augmented generation for customer support, internal knowledge and research.

CustomGPT.ai has stayed bootstrapped and leans on public benchmarks to make its case. A Tonic.ai RAG benchmark reported it ahead of OpenAI on answer accuracy, and in 2026 DoRosario announced that the company's six-person research team had reached the top of the GAIA agent leaderboard. On X, Alden describes the work as stress-testing production AI and publishing the results.