# Ari Morcos

> Ari Morcos is the Co-Founder and CEO of DatologyAI, a Redwood City-based startup that automates the curation of training data for AI models. A Harvard-trained neuroscientist who spent two years at DeepMind and five at Meta AI Research (FAIR), Morcos pivoted from studying how biological brains learn to solving how artificial ones should eat - coining the phrase 'models are what they eat.' His company has raised $57.65M across seed and Series A rounds backed by Felicis Ventures, Radical Ventures, and angel investors including Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Jeff Dean. With an h-index of 35 and over 12,000 citations, Morcos bridges rigorous ML research and venture-scale ambition, targeting the data layer as AI's most underinvested frontier.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at DatologyAI
- **Organizations:** DatologyAI, Meta AI Research (FAIR), DeepMind
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** PhD, Neurobiology, Harvard University, BS, Physiology and Neuroscience, UC San Diego
- **Known for:** Outstanding Paper award at NeurIPS 2022 for data pruning research, Outstanding Paper award at ICLR 2023 for navigation agent research, Best Paper at ICLR Multimodal Representation Learning Workshop 2023

## Career timeline

- **2008-2012** — Undergraduate at UC San Diego, worked with Rusty Gage at the Salk Institute on REST/NRSF in adult neurogenesis
- **2012-2018** — PhD at Harvard University under Chris Harvey, studying population dynamics in parietal cortex during decision-making
- **2015** — Serendipitous meeting with DeepMind researchers at NIPS conference led to job offer
- **2016-2018** — Research Scientist at DeepMind, London, working on neural network generalization and representation
- **2018-2023** — Senior Staff Research Scientist at Meta AI Research (FAIR), Menlo Park; joined September 2018; worked on lottery ticket hypothesis, data pruning, self-supervised learning
- **2022** — Outstanding Paper award at NeurIPS 2022 for 'Beyond neural scaling laws: beating power law scaling via data pruning'
- **2023** — Outstanding Paper award at ICLR 2023 for 'Emergence of maps in blind navigation agents'
- **2023** — Co-founded DatologyAI with Matthew Leavitt and Bogdan Gaza
- **2024-02** — DatologyAI announced $11.65M seed round led by Amplify Partners; angels include Hinton, LeCun, Jeff Dean
- **2024-05** — DatologyAI raised $46M Series A led by Felicis Ventures; total funding reaches $57.65M

## Achievements

- Outstanding Paper award at NeurIPS 2022 for data pruning research
- Outstanding Paper award at ICLR 2023 for navigation agent research
- Best Paper at ICLR Multimodal Representation Learning Workshop 2023
- H-index of 35 with over 12,343 citations on Google Scholar
- Mentored 20+ researchers now at Google Brain, Apple, Anthropic, Harvard, and Mosaic ML
- Raised $57.65M total for DatologyAI from top-tier investors including Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Jeff Dean
- Led research at Meta FAIR contributing to breakthrough papers including Model Soups (1,786 citations) and ConvIT (1,291 citations)

## Latest updates

- **2024-05** — DatologyAI raised $46M Series A led by Felicis Ventures, bringing total funding to $57.65M
- **2024-02** — DatologyAI announced $11.65M seed round with participation from AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Jeff Dean
- **2025-05** — Appeared on WBUR's On Point podcast discussing synthetic data and AI training quality
- **2023-11** — Co-founded DatologyAI with Matthew Leavitt and Bogdan Gaza after leaving Meta FAIR

## Links

- Website: http://www.arimorcos.com/
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/arimorcos
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/arimorcos

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/ari-morcos
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-07