AI-Fueled Startups

We pair the best AI minds in the world with successful entrepreneurs to build AI startups together.

We're looking for entrepreneurs with big ideas and technologists who can help deliver them to millions of people.

Three Ways to Join the Incubator

CTO Residency Program

Our full-time CTO Residency Program trains talented engineers on the latest in Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence and helps them launch the next billion-dollar AI startup.

Over a 12-month period, residents get exclusive mentorship from many of the best AI minds in the world, pair with successful entrepreneurs or early startups to bring a new company to market, and exit the incubator with significant co-founder equity.

Ideal candidates are talented, hands-on engineers, typically at a senior level. Or, someone who was a past startup CTO.

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Entrepreneur in Residence

We help entrepreneurs build their AI team and accelerate AI capabilities.

We offer collaboration with 75+ AI PhDs and researchers, CTOs who can go-to-market, MBA interns, office space, up to $100K in funding, and fast-track access to VCs. We also offer help with recruiting, immigration, PR, sales, marketing, and patent filing.

We mostly work with entrepreneurs in Seattle, or those willing to relocate.

Ideal entrepreneurs have successfully led efforts to build a new tech product, take it to market, and drive real revenues.

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Early-Stage Companies

We help startups build their AI team and accelerate their AI capabilities.

We offer collaboration with 75+ AI PhDs and researchers, CTOs who can go-to-market, MBA interns, office space, up to $100K in funding, and fast-track access to VCs. We also offer help with recruiting, immigration, PR, sales, marketing, and patent filing.

We mostly work with early startups in Seattle, or those willing to relocate.

Ideal startups have done a meaningful amount of work to validate demand and are mostly looking for technical AI help.

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Our Technical Capabilities

Google has DeepMind. Facebook has FAIR. Microsoft has MSR-AI.
And now, you have AI2.

Our Incubator is the only place on the planet where early-stage startups or entrepreneurs can access the same caliber of AI talent employed by giant tech companies. Moreover, our team of 75+ AI PhDs, researchers, and engineers are leading experts in several fields of artificial intelligence, including:

Deep Learning
Machine Learning
Computer Vision
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Speech (ASR) and Waveform Analysis
Conversational Artificial Intelligence

Who We Are

Jacob Colker
Managing Director
Jacob Colker is an early-stage startup leader with 10+ years of experience as CEO, GM, CMO, and 2x founder. He teaches entrepreneurship at the University of Washington Foster Business School and is an active angel investor, mentor, and advisor in the Pacific Northwest. Jacob was formerly a political campaign operative with the Democratic Party.
Vu Ha
Technical Director
Vu Ha is a technologist with 20+ years of experience building products at some of the largest companies in the world. Most notably, Vu led applied research and engineering teams at Microsoft's AdCenter Labs and Bing. He co-founded SemanticScholar.org and led its development through its first public launch. Vu holds a Ph.D. in AI from the University of Wisconsin.
Oren Etzioni
CEO of Allen Institute for AI
Dr. Oren Etzioni is Chief Executive Officer at AI2. He has been a Professor at the University of Washington's Computer Science department since 1991. His awards include Seattle's Geek of the Year (2013), and he has founded or co-founded several companies, including Farecast and Decide. He has written over 100 technical papers, as well as commentary on AI for The New York Times and Nature. He helped to pioneer meta-search, online comparison shopping, machine reading, and Open Information Extraction.
James Allard
COO of Allen Institute for AI
James Allard is the COO at AI2. James specializes in Operations and Finance and has had founder or leadership roles in organizations ranging from a large multi-national software company to start-ups in various industries. James continues to focus on operational excellence and financial efficiency at AI2, and works to build a culture that will allow AI2 to achieve all of its goals relating to AI for the common good. James has an MBA and a JD and was a corporate and international trade attorney in his early career.
Gaurav Oberoi
Entrepreneur in Residence
Gaurav Oberoi is widely-respected amongst many Seattle entrepreneurs. He was the founder of BillMonk (acquired by Obopay), the founder of Precision Polling (acquired by Survey Monkey), and is also an active angel investor in Estately, Glowforge, Paperflip, and more.
Kirby Winfield
Investor in Residence
Kirby Winfield is one of the most seasoned startup operators and angel investors in Seattle. He was a founding team member and operating executive at back-to-back tech IPOs, with Go2Net (GNET) and Marchex (MCHX). He also has two more exits as operating CEO, with AdXpose (acquired by comScore) and Dwellable (acquired by HomeAway). Additionally, Kirby is an angel investor in over 20 companies.
Alessya Labzhinova
CTO in Residence
Alessya Labzhinova studied Applied Math and Russian Literature at the University of Washington as an undergrad. For the past nine years she worked as a Software Engineer and Program Manager at Amazon building forecasting platforms, data science tools and solving latency problems on a massive scale. Her interests lie in data science platforms, reproducible research, forecasting methods, and education technology entrepreneurship.
James Baird
CTO in Residence
James Baird studied Computer Science and English Literature at Western Washington University. He has eleven years of experience as a software engineer, and has built frontend systems, backend systems, and mobile apps for a variety of companies in the Seattle area.
Michael Petrochuk
CTO in Residence
Michael Petrochuk graduated from the University of Washington with a bachelor from the Computer Science department. He founded a Nonprofit organization, Husky Nation, that received the world record title of Largest Exercise Ball Class with 450 people. He received several awards including TigerLaunch Semi-Finalist, Dubhacks 1st Place, and Sears Independent Track Grand Prize. Michael interned at Google, Uber, Lattice (acquired by Apple), Stylyze, and vCita as machine learning engineer and full-stack developer.
Matt Hocking
Entrepreneur in Residence
Matt is an experienced product designer excited by building businesses and products that solve real problems for everyday people. He co-founded moving startup Ghostruck, was an early member of product teams at MeetMoi (acquired by Match.com) and Chime, and has consulted on design and experience for Uber, WeWork, Microsoft, T-Mobile, DocuSign, OfferUp, Regalii and Appuri (Acquired by Docusign). Matt has also lectured on design internationally at General Assembly and the Shillington School of Design.
Kohen Chia
CTO in Residence
Kohen Chia has over ten years of experience building consumer products at Expedia and Zillow, where he led several engineering, big data, and machine learning teams. He founded the team behind Zillow's video walkthrough and 3D virtual tour products, and is passionate about building experiences that inspire people. Kohen holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Washington.
Emad Elwany
CTO in Residence
Emad is a CTO-in-Residence at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Incubator. He received his Master’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University and his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Alexandria University in Egypt. He has more than a decade of industry experience in building software and leading engineering teams. Emad’s area of interests are machine learning, artificial intelligence and distributed systems. Besides engineering, Emad enjoys being outdoors with his family and friends, playing bass guitar, traveling and reading.
Vlad Magdin
CTO in Residence
Vladimir is a CTO-in-residence at the AI2 incubator. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science from UBC, a thesis-based master's degree from York University, and a couple of years towards a PhD (before being lured away by the industry). His graduate school training and research in speech recognition lead to holding positions at top speech technology labs like the STAR Lab at SRI International and ASR Research in the Amazon Alexa organization. More recently, he has been consulting for startups that work on unique speech and language processing problems. Outside of work Vlad enjoys long-distance bicycle touring, rock climbing, and spending time with his new baby.