Softmax

We're a small team building the science of organic alignment: the claim that the kinds of agents that stay aligned with us are the kinds that stay aligned with each other. We come from backgrounds in AI safety, developmental biology, infrastructure, and collective intelligence research, brought together by our mission.

Founders

Emmett Shear

CEO & Founder

Partner at YC, founder and CEO of Twitch, and extremely interim CEO at OpenAI
Independent researcher in alignment and agency before cofounding Softmax

David Bloomin

Founder

Built large-scale infrastructure at Google, Facebook, and Asana for two decades
Cofounded Plurality Institute and led research on multi-agent AI frameworks and governance methods

Board

Adam Goldstein

Board Member and Founder Emeritus

Cofounded Hipmunk before joining Michael Levin's lab at Tufts to research cell signaling, bioelectricity, and basal cognition
Cofounded Softmax and brought the organic alignment thesis into the company's multi-agent research

David Langer

Board Member

Founder and Managing Partner at Lionheart Ventures, backing AI, mental health, and climate companies
Previously founded Zesty (YC-backed, acquired by Square in 2018) and GroupSpaces

Team

James Boggs

PhD Michigan · Cognitive Architectures

PhD in AI at Michigan on deliberative reasoning in cognitive architectures
Worked in John Laird's Soar lineage on integrating perception, symbolic representations, and learning; at Softmax, builds agent evaluation and learning loops

Malcolm Handley

Ex-Asana #1 · Founder, Nuclear Fusion VC

First employee at Asana; early engineer at Google
Founded nuclear fusion VC Strong Atomics; advisor to ARPA-E

Richard Higgins

PhD Michigan · CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS

PhD at Michigan, with research spanning diffusion models (ICCV 2025), object segmentation (CVPR 2023, NeurIPS 2021), and solar magnetic field estimation
Previously visiting academic at NYU Courant and CV research intern at Meta

Jordan Horwich

Applied ML · Apple/Google

Applied ML at Apple for AirPods accessibility; engineer at Google on Knowledge Graph; founding engineer at Nebulous/Sia
Earlier built Microsoft Kinect natural interfaces, market-data tools at Bloomberg, and LinkedIn homepage features

Aaron Landy

4x Founder · Uber Infra · Edge AI

4x founder; scaled engineering at Uber on infrastructure for 100M+ rides, helped build assistant-UI, shipped developer tools to $1M+ ARR, and founded imply+infer to make edge-AI hardware easier to build with
At Softmax, works on research infrastructure and researcher tooling

Malcolm Ocean

Writer · Creator of Intend.do

Writer, software designer, and researcher focused on collective intelligence, rationality, and the mechanics of trust between agents
Created Intend.do, a goal-pursuit app rooted in his writing on meta-cognition, and has spent over a decade publishing influential essays on mutualism, cultural evolution, and how groups think together

Subhojeet Pramanik

Alberta RLAI · Ex-IBM Research

MSc at Alberta's RLAI lab; introduced the Recurrent Linear Transformer (AGaLiTe, TMLR 2024)
Previously at IBM Research, building OmniNet, a unified architecture for multi-modal multi-task learning; at Softmax, builds continual-learning architectures

S. Alex Smith

PhD UCLA · Led Infra at Asana

Math at Cornell, then math PhD at UCLA
Led the infrastructure organization at Asana with deep experience in large-scale backend and storage systems

Michael Smith

CFAR Cofounder · Psychotech Writer

Cofounded CFAR and wrote influential LessWrong essays on rationality, social reality, attention, and self-modeling; now writes as Morphenius
PhD in mathematical education; at Softmax, builds collaborative memory and learning infrastructure

André von Houck

Creator of pixie, boxy, chroma

Prolific contributor to the Nim programming language community, where he has authored many widely used open-source libraries — pixie (2D graphics), boxy (GPU rendering), jsony, chroma, and 40+ others
At Softmax, works on the game engine and game UX