We build AI-first startups. Join us, and let’s build a company around you.

The AI2 Incubator helps launch AI-first startups. We are an initiative of the Allen Institute for AI—a world-leading A.I. research institute with over 150+ A.I. PhDs, researchers, engineers, and support staff.

Each year, we invite talented engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs to join our incubator on a rolling basis. 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.

We also invest up to $800,000 into the companies we work with. This investment capital comes from some of the best investors in the world, including four industry-leading VCs—Madrona Venture Group, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Two Sigma Ventures.

More than anything else, this is an extraordinary community, all working together to help each other succeed. And as your cofounder, we are with you every step of the way.

Join us — and let’s build a new (AI-first) startup, around you.

Latest News

$36.5Mfunding raised by our startups
$277.5Mcollective valuation of our startups

We help entrepreneurs and technical cofounders to form new teams and build AI-first startups.

Entrepreneur-in-Residence (CEO)

We help business-focused founders to pair with technical cofounders that specialize in AI. We then help teams to come up with ideas, integrate AI into their products, build traction, raise VC funding, and more.
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Future CTO / Technical Co-Founder

We help skilled engineers to strengthen their AI capabilities and find a CEO/business partner. We then help teams to come up with ideas, integrate AI into their products, build traction, raise VC funding, and more.
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Entrepreneurial Investigator

We help students and researchers to create new startups alongside their academic commitments. Participants pair with skilled CEOs and CTOs to turn AI technologies into exciting new products.
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For select entrepreneurs, the incubator provides a significant amount of support.

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$120,000 Salary

$10,000/month stipend for 12 months (in the form of an investment) to ease your transition from the big company life to the startup life.

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Help Finding a Co-Founder

We help you find your future cofounders, by matching you with people from our highly vetted community, that have complementary skills

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Recruiting

You will likely hire several of your first employees through our talent network

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A.I. Support

Coaching on integrating latest A.I. into product

, Mentorship from research paper authors

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Design

Support with v1 brand, product experience

, Support creating your v1 UX/UI design

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Introductions

Unique access to customer discovery contacts

, Help and support finding pilot customers

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Community

Private coworking space with fellow founders

, 50+ mentors, A.I. coaches, investors, advisors

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Business

Sounding board on business models, strategy

, Sounding board on sales, marketing, go-to-market

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Legal

Coaching on incorporation and patents

, Discounted access to leading law firms

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Fundraising

Support with fundraising strategy

, Introductions to venture investors in our network

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Office

12+ months of free office for your team

, A stunning roof deck and event space

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Infrastructure

Free cloud credits to train models

, Investment of laptops, hardware as needed

The journey takes anywhere from 6-18 months to go from an idea on the whiteboard to a multimillion dollar venture funding round

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PROGRAM START
Phase 1 : Idea vetting + cofounder matching
(90/180 day Checkpoints)
Phase 2 : Product definition + customer discovery
Phase 3 : Customer validation + early traction
Phase 4 : Fundraising + expanded hiring

Our incubator fund is backed by some of the best investors and executives in the world

Jeff Dean
Google Senior Fellow
Jeff Wilke
CEO Amazon Worldwide Consumer
Adam Selipsky
CEO, Tableau Software
Sujal Patel
Founder, Isilon
Carol Reiley
Serial entrepreneur, co-founder Drive.ai
Laura Butler
Fmr. Microsoft Technical Fellow
Leigh McMillan
CEO, Whitepages
Charlie Bell
Sr. VP, Amazon Web Services
Chris Ré
Stanford Professor & Founder of Lattice
Nadia Shouraboura
Entrepreneur, PhD, former Technology VP at Amazon
Shwetak Patel, PH.D.
UW Professor & Founder of Zensi
Jeff Hammerbacher & Halle Tecco
Techammer.co

Our entrepreneurs build their startups inside of a leading AI research institute and get access to world-class technical experts.

367+papers published by AI2 researchers
1,200+collective years of engineering and AI research experience
46+PhDs at our research institute

Computer Vision

Both ‘at-the-edge’ and in the cloud, we train computers to identify and process images in the same way that human vision does, and then provide appropriate output/insights.

Key papers:
- YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger Best Paper Honorable Mention, CVPR 2017
- You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection OpenCV People’s Choice Award, CVPR 2016
- Toward a Taxonomy and Computational Models of Abnormalities in Images Best Student Paper Award, AAAI 2016

Deep/Machine Learning

We train computer algorithms to handle new situations via analysis, self-learning, observation and experience—removing manual identification of features in data.

Key papers:
- CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge Best Resource Paper, NAACL 2019
- Deep contextualized word representations Best Paper Award, NAACL 2018
- LSTMs Exploit Linguistic Attributes of Data Best Paper Award, ACL 2018
- Automatic Construction of Inference-Supporting Knowledge Bases Best Paper Award, AKBC 2014

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

We train computers to understand and read human text—bridging the translation gap between human languages and computer code—and opening a world of possibilities.

Key papers:
- Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints Best Paper Award, EMNLP 2017
- Modeling Biological Processes for Reading Comprehension Best Paper Award, EMNLP 2014

Speech & Acoustic Processing

We train computers to artificially simulate human speech, to convert speech into text or text into speech, or to analyze an audio signal to extract insights and meaning.

Key projects:
- Blue Canoe Blue Canoe uses AI and speech recognition to increase business productivity by helping non-native English speaking employees communicate clearly with colleagues and customers.
- WellSaid WellSaid creates life-like synthetic voice for next generation experiences, products, and content.

We surround our entrepreneurs with 150+ AI PhDs, researchers, engineers, and fellow founders—a support community like no other.

The proof is in the AI companies we help to build.

Xnor

xnor.ai

“AI everywhere, on every device.”

XNOR bridges the growing divide between AI models dependent on the cloud and devices running at the edge, on devices as basic as a Raspberry Pi Zero. The company’s patented technology has upended traditional AI, resulting in billions of devices and products being AI-optimized—from battery operated cameras, to complex manufacturing machinery and cars.

FOUNDERS
Ali Farhadi, PhD & Mohammad Rastegari, PhD

MILESTONES
Acquired by Apple in 2020

WellSaid

wellsaidlabs.com

“A voice for everyone.”

WellSaid creates truly life-like synthetic voices for next generation voice experiences, products, and content. The company’s text-to-speech editor offers video producers an inexpensive, subscription-based alternative to costly voice actors, without the robotic-sounding voices of traditional software.

FOUNDERS
Michael Petrochuk & Matt Hocking

MILESTONES
Raised millions of dollars in funding

Lexion

lexion.ai

“An intelligent Dropbox, for your contracts.”

Lexion reads your contracts, extracts terms, and organizes them — saving you time and money. The product supercharges not just Legal teams, but everyone in the organization who touches contracts.

FOUNDERS
Gaurav Oberoi, Emad Elwani & James Baird

MILESTONES
— Raised $4.2M in funding
— Backed by and partnered with Wilson Sonsini

Blue Canoe

bluecanoelearning.com

“It’s good business, spoken clearly.”

Blue Canoe uses AI and speech recognition to increase business productivity by helping non-native English speaking employees communicate clearly with colleagues and customers. Productized into an engaging game experience, Blue Canoe teaches basic and specialized vocabulary and rewires the brain’s library of language sounds for better pronunciation and retention.

FOUNDERS
Sarah Daniels & Tony Andrews

MILESTONES
— Raised $3.9 million dollars in funding
— 2019 Winner, Qualcomm Ventures, Female Founder of the Year

KITT.AI

kitt.ai

“Conversational understanding as a service.”

KITT.AI makes technology to enable voice interaction with digital devices and services, including a platform that allows people to “wake up” devices with a defined word or phrase, and systems for natural language understanding and dialogue management.

FOUNDERS
Xuchen Yao, PhD & Guoguo Chen, PhD Kenji Sagae

MILESTONES
Acquired by Baidu in 2017

PANDA AI

getpanda.ai

Today’s work is complex. Working everywhere and all the time. Stuff scattered across many apps. It’s painful to keep up. PANDA is about getting more done, working less, and being happier. PANDA works by applying breakthrough Natural Language Processing AI in ridiculously practical ways to help teams stay on the same page. PANDA is currently available through its early access program.

FOUNDERS
Aaron Goldfeder & Yue Ning

MILESTONES
Raised $3.3M from PSL Ventures, Ascend and AI2.

WhyLabs

whylabs.ai

“Run AI with certainty”

WhyLabs is on a mission to build the interface between humans and AI applications. As teams across industries adopt AI, WhyLabs enables them to operate with certainty by streamlining model monitoring, preventing costly model failures, and facilitating cross-functional collaboration.

FOUNDERS
Alessya Visnjic, Sam Gracie, Andy Dang & Maria Karaivanova