About Bureau

What Bureau does

Bureau is one workspace for the conversation, the agents and the tools the work actually touches. Every capability below exists in the app today.

Shared channels for people and agents

Open and private channels, DMs and threads hold both teammates and shared agents. Anyone in a channel can mention an agent, and its replies stream into the same thread with reactions, saved messages and reminders. The outcome is one record of a decision instead of three private chat histories nobody else can read.

Agents with instructions, memory and knowledge

Each agent has a name, a persona, standing instructions and knowledge pulled from sites, documents or repositories. You can assign tasks to an agent or a person, and trigger automations from events or incoming webhooks. The outcome is an agent a whole team can rely on, instead of a prompt one person keeps in a personal note.

Tool connections an admin sets up once

An admin connects GitHub, Linear, Notion, Figma, Granola and Vercel on the server, and shared agents use those connections without every teammate repeating the setup. Personal keys stay isolated from workspace admins. The outcome is that a new teammate is useful on their first day rather than after an afternoon of authorising integrations.

Runs you can watch, stop and approve

Each run shows its steps and elapsed time, can be cancelled, and can be restarted after a readable error. Any tool call outside an agent’s standing permissions waits for a person to approve it, and a usage ledger records model spend. The outcome is delegation you can supervise, with a record of who approved what.

Mac, iPhone and web on one workspace

A signed Mac app with automatic updates, an iPhone TestFlight build and a web app all connect to the same workspace, and the server keeps agent runs going when a laptop closes. The outcome is that work continues while you travel, sleep or switch machines.

Your choice of model provider

Agents can run on Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, Groq or OpenRouter, chosen per agent. The outcome is that a model change is a setting, not a migration, and your provider relationship stays yours.

What makes Bureau different

Agents belong to the channel, not to one person

In seat-based assistants such as ChatGPT Team or Claude, an agent’s work happens in a private thread and reaches colleagues as a copy-paste. In Bureau an agent is a member of the channel that anyone can mention, correct and continue. Dust is the closest comparison here, and the reason multiplayer chat alone is not the whole difference.

Work continues when your laptop is shut

Agent runs execute on Bureau’s server, so a run a teammate started at 17:00 is still going after they close their Mac, and its output lands in the thread for whoever is next. Desktop-bound agents and terminal tools stop with the machine that launched them. This is what makes handing work between timezones or teammates practical.

A real Mac app, not a browser tab

Bureau ships a signed, automatically updating native Mac app with a menu-bar item and quick entry, plus an iPhone TestFlight build and a web app on the same workspace. Dust and Relevance AI are browser-first products. For teams that keep chat open all day, the difference shows up in launch speed, keyboard control and notifications.

You keep your model billing

Bring your own keys and pay Anthropic, OpenAI or xAI directly: the proposed price is €12 per seat per month with no Bureau charge on those calls. Managed seats are €29 per seat per month with an €8 model allowance pooled across the workspace and overage at provider cost + 30%, shown in Settings before anything is charged. Agent platforms that bundle inference into their own plans make that cost harder to see and harder to move.

Month to month, with the exit built in

Bureau is sold per seat, monthly or annually, with no minimum term and no seat minimum; the annual rate is the same product at a discounted monthly equivalent. Services vendors such as Accenture and 10Pearls sell scoped engagements, and agency suites such as Productive and Workamajig are typically bought on annual commitments. An owner can export or delete a Bureau workspace at any time, and the alpha itself is free.

Who uses Bureau

• Small, Mac-heavy product and design teams of roughly 2 to 20 people who already use chat plus two or more AI tools.
• Independent design, brand and marketing agencies of roughly 5 to 50 staff in the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom.
• Services firms that run one chain from proposal to client review, delivery and invoicing, and want the agent work attached to it.
• Founder-led startups where one or two people carry product, design and code and need agents to cover the rest.
• Teams that already hold Anthropic, OpenAI or xAI API keys and want shared, supervised use of them instead of individual subscriptions.
• Teams whose day runs through GitHub, Linear, Notion, Figma, Granola and Vercel.

The team behind Bureau

Renato Valdés Olmos, founder

Renn has spent two decades building products, brands and the teams behind them, including design leadership at Lyft, Grammarly, Honor and GrowthX, and organisations of up to roughly 60 people. He co-founded Human, acquired by Mapbox, and has worked full time on Noord since May 2026, defining the products, designing them and writing the code that ships.

LinkedIn ↗ · X ↗ · Threads ↗ · GitHub ↗ · renatovaldes.com ↗

How Bureau started

Noord is an applied design lab in Alkmaar that delivers client work and publishes its methods. Bureau came out of that delivery practice: the studio was running client projects with several AI tools at once, and the shared context kept ending up in one person’s private chat history. Bureau is the workspace built to keep it with the team instead.

The team today

Noord is founder-led: Renn handles product direction, design and development, and all product intellectual property is owned by Noord. The next hire is a founding engineering lead, or a cofounder and CTO with the right fit. Bureau has two siblings from the same lab — Vlak, the design system it is built with, and Polder, the open method library.

How Bureau works

Getting in

Request an invitation from the Bureau page, or sign in with Google or GitHub to ask for access. Creating a workspace requires an invitation key; joining one you were invited to does not.

Onboarding, in five steps

1. Request access and receive an invitation key.
2. Sign in with Google or GitHub on Mac, iPhone or the web.
3. Add a model provider key — Anthropic, OpenAI or xAI — as workspace owner or admin.
4. Create your first agent: persona, instructions and any knowledge it should read.
5. Connect GitHub, Linear, Notion, Figma, Granola or Vercel, and invite your teammates.

Who you work with

Bureau is founder-led, so alpha teams work directly with Renn: the person answering your email is the person who writes the code. Feedback from a thread regularly becomes a change in the next automatic Mac update.

Communication and response times

Day to day, the work happens in Bureau’s own channels, threads and DMs. Outside the product, write to hello@getbureau.app. The alpha carries no service-level agreement, no uptime commitment and no guaranteed response time — the honest description is a small team replying as fast as it can, usually within a working day.

Turnaround and what runs where

Agent runs start immediately and continue on the server whether or not you stay online; you can watch, stop or restart them and approve individual tool calls. Every workspace runs on one hosted server and database in a single region with nightly backups, and there is no data-residency choice during the alpha.

Key facts

Prices are proposed commercial rates in EUR excluding VAT; the alpha is free and checkout is closed.

Frequently asked questions