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
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
Team
Yatharth Agarwal
AI safety research · self-alignment
- Cofounded Stanford AI Group and taught AI safety: high-school curriculum, Stanford's first for-credit course, programs for professionals
- Led AI research at Axle Health; researched screentime addiction; writes on self-alignment in humans
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
AK
Axel Kerbec
UCL math · Michigan instructor
- Mathematician: wrote for Chalkdust on number theory, competed for UCL in the International Mathematics Competition, and taught at Michigan
- At Softmax, works on theory for ML and reinforcement-learning experiments
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
Additional Team
Want to join us?
We're hiring researchers and engineers to build the science of organic alignment.
See open roles →