Evan Smith

We help entrepreneurs form new teams and build AI-first startups. We bring together world-class engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs to create new companies together from scratch. We help them come up with ideas, find co-founders, engage pilot customers, define their product, incorporate the latest A.I. techniques into their technology, and raise millions of dollars in venture funding. Over the last six years, we have created 20+ companies that are collectively worth $750M+ in valuation, have collectively raised $150M+ in venture funding, and have collectively created 500+ jobs. Even more impressively, more than half of that growth occurred in the last year. But beneath those numbers, the missions of those companies are even more important. These startups are helping immigrants to improve their communication skills (Yoodli), helping scientists to significantly accelerate cancer research (Ozette and Modulus), helping A.I. practitioners monitor critical algorithms in the wild (WhyLabs), helping business ops and legal teams to be much more efficient (Lexion), helping millions of creators to more easily produce voice content (WellSaid), turning your smartphone into a powerful medical device (MeasureLabs), and so much more. Our unique advantages come from our core team's expertise and our exclusive partnership with the Paul Allen Institute for A.I. (aka "AI2"). Created in 2014 by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, AI2 has 200+ PhDs, researchers, engineers, professors, and support staff—and is well known for its contributions to the A.I. research community including 600+ papers, 20+ best paper awards, and numerous products/open source offerings including SemanticScholar, AllenNLP, and more.