Babak
Pahlavan

The engineering team at CleverSense spent weeks building serious features. Smart personalization. Local recommendations. A navigation layer that knew you better than your GPS did. Then someone snuck a spinning mustache into the app as a throwaway easter egg. Analytics told the story - the mustache got more love than most of the real features. Babak Pahlavan filed that away. Delight isn't decoration. It's the product.

That was around 2010. By December 2011, Google had acquired CleverSense and folded the technology into Google Maps. Babak was 30-something, had just sold his first AI company to one of the most powerful technology firms on earth, and could have stopped right there. He didn't.

He spent the next eleven years inside Google as a Senior Director of Product Management. Not coasting - building. He led more than twenty product teams: Google Analytics, Data Studio, A/B Optimizers, Security, HR, and Legal solutions. The kind of organizational surface area that most product people never touch in a career. He won the Google Manager Award. He built things at planet scale.

And then, in October 2022, he walked away.

NinjaTech AI - his fourth startup - was founded in partnership with SRI International, which happens to be the original institutional home of Siri's research team. The symmetry is not accidental. Babak has been thinking about AI assistants since before Siri was a public product. CleverSense was a personalized assistant for navigating the physical world while Siri was still being incubated. He was effectively competing with Apple in stealth mode, from Stanford, before either product had launched.

He studied engineering at UC Berkeley - a dual degree in electrical engineering and computer science, with honors. Then a master's at Stanford, also with honors, focused on EE with an emphasis on data mining. He considered staying for a PhD in AI agents but made a self-diagnosis that would define his career: he was "more of a product tinkerer than a deep engineer." That clarity sent him toward building rather than researching, toward shipping rather than publishing. His fourth startup is the result of two decades of that choice compounding.

The company he co-founded with Sam Naghshineh (formerly of Meta) and Arash Sadrieh (formerly of AWS) is backed by SRI, DCVC, and Candou Ventures. It has raised $5 million in seed funding, has 34 employees, and its product - MyNinja.ai - reached 722,000 monthly active users in 2024, with 55,000 daily active users. AWS CEO Matt Garman called out NinjaTech AI by name in a public keynote. These are not the numbers of a company still figuring out what it is.

Babak describes NinjaTech's mission with the kind of precision that only comes from having lived inside large organizations: "Collapse the distance between idea and impact." He knows what it costs when smart people spend half their day on calendar management, email triage, and administrative busywork. He spent eleven years at a company where that problem applied to millions of professionals simultaneously. Now he's building the solution.

He immigrated to the United States from Iran at seventeen. He arrived with enough curiosity and persistence to earn honors degrees at two of the country's most competitive engineering schools. His story is the kind that Silicon Valley loves to mythologize - but Babak's version doesn't come with the clean narrative arc. It comes with a spinning mustache, three previous startups, a Google career that most founders would trade their equity for, and a quiet bet that the next phase of AI isn't about chatting. It's about working.