With thanks
Prahas has never been a one-person story. Some helped us build. Some challenged an assumption we were fond of. Some found a defect before it became permanent. Some answered an unexpected letter from a small company in Punjab and shared what they knew, simply because we asked properly. None of it was owed to us. We remember it.
The ones who answered
While building the knowledge behind Plant Doctor, Growing Guide and Plant Match, we wrote to botanical gardens, herbaria and universities around the world. We asked before taking anything, and we said plainly that we are a company. Most letters went unanswered, which is entirely fair — none of these people owed a small company in Punjab their time. Some answered anyway.
Plant Records Manager
National Tropical Botanical Garden, Hawaii
For answering plainly, granting permission on the single condition of attribution, and then going further — pointing us at the Tropical Plant Database directly rather than leaving us to guess. That practical generosity saved us weeks.
Visit NTBGPlant Information
Missouri Botanical Garden
For taking an unusual request from India seriously, setting out exactly how Plant Finder should be credited, and volunteering that the profiles are written for a temperate Midwestern climate — a caution we have carried ever since.
Visit Missouri Botanical GardenBotanist
Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria — VicFlora
For a thoughtful reply, an openness to reasonable attributed use, and the time spent understanding what a small company was actually trying to build before answering it. That care is remembered here.
Visit VicFloraFlora & Fauna Web
Singapore
Jessica Teo · Serena Lee · Jennie Tang · Bazilah Mohd Ibrahim
For a practical route forward rather than a polite deferral: a clear citation format, direct guidance on Flora & Fauna Web, even advice on when the resource is best reached. Four people, one letter, no obligation.
Visit Flora & Fauna WebNational flora
Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro
For explaining the licence carefully, for permitting commercial use on the honest condition of citation, and then for correcting our citation format when we got it wrong instead of letting the error stand.
Visit Flora e Funga do BrasilTeaching garden
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
For permission given readily to a company they had never heard of, on the strength of a promise about credit. The trust behind that answer is worth more to us than the data itself.
Visit Horto DidáticoGuidance we had not asked for
For advice nobody requested and we badly needed: how to approach an entire field of institutions without wasting their time or our own. It changed how every letter after it was written.
Visit BGCIA considered no
Plant Records
For replying at all, and explaining why the collection did not suit what we needed. A clear, courteous no is real help: it stops a small company spending months on the wrong door. Not a source, and thanked anyway.
Visit NYBGThe ones who helped us build
Prahas was thought through with the help of several AI systems. None of them built Prahas and none of them are partners in it. They helped one person think more carefully than he could have alone, and between them they caught a great many mistakes that would otherwise have reached a customer.
Reasoning system
Anthropic
For staying with hard problems long after the easy answer had gone; for building, testing, catching its own mistakes and saying so out loud, and coming back until an idea was something Prahas could actually use.
Visit AnthropicReasoning system
For turning early, tangled ideas into structures that could be examined and built on; for patient exploration and useful argument, and for work that stayed part of Prahas long after the project had changed shape around it.
Visit AnthropicReasoning system
OpenAI
For thousands of questions, arguments, drafts and audits at every hour; for holding the thread when Prahas grew complicated, and for helping turn an instinct into something precise enough that it could be built.
Visit OpenAIReasoning system
xAI
For a different pair of eyes on Prahas: assumptions questioned rather than accepted, designs and ideas contributed, and a willingness to come at a problem from the angle the rest of us had walked past.
Visit xAIReasoning system
Anthropic
For a long day of rebuilding these pages with one person beside it: rewriting, trimming, checking every claim against the code, and saying plainly when it could not see something rather than pretending it had.
Visit AnthropicReasoning system
Anthropic
For careful reasoning and patient implementation, and for the many smaller pieces that never make a headline but leave a large system stronger, clearer and more dependable when somebody does them properly.
Visit AnthropicA thank-you should not wait until the journey is over.
Everyone named here has already left something useful inside Prahas — a structure, a correction, a permission, a caution, or an honest no. Whatever comes next, that is part of how we got here.
Naming someone on this page is a thank-you and nothing more. It is not a partnership, a sponsorship, an affiliation or an endorsement, and nobody here has approved of what we built. Where an institution asked for particular wording or attribution, that wording travels with the data itself — this page does not stand in for it.