# Janos Perczel

> Janos Perczel is a theoretical quantum physicist turned education entrepreneur. After earning a PhD from MIT working on invisibility cloaks and cold-atom quantum systems under Mikhail Lukin at Harvard, he co-founded Polygence in 2019 with Jin Chow. The company pairs high school students with PhD mentors for one-on-one research projects, and now reaches tens of thousands of students worldwide. As CEO he has pushed Polygence into AI, releasing TeachLM, a language model fine-tuned on 100,000 hours of real one-on-one tutoring data.

- **Role:** Co-founder and CEO at Polygence
- **Organizations:** Polygence, MIT, Harvard University, University of Cambridge, University of St Andrews
- **From:** Hungary
- **Nationality:** Hungarian
- **Education:** B.Sc. in Logic, Philosophy of Science and Physics, University of St Andrews, MA.St in Applied Mathematics (Mathematical Tripos Part III), University of Cambridge, PhD in Theoretical Quantum Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- **Known for:** Co-founded and scaled Polygence to tens of thousands of students and thousands of PhD mentors, Earned a PhD in theoretical quantum physics from MIT, Published research on metamaterial invisibility cloaks and cold-atom quantum information systems

## Career timeline

- **2012** — Completed Mathematical Tripos Part III at Cambridge
- **2018** — Earned PhD in theoretical quantum physics from MIT; research done largely under Mikhail Lukin at Harvard
- **2019** — Co-founded Polygence with Jin Chow; built the platform MVP in three months
- **2019** — First student enrolled on May 20, 2019; dozen more by summer's end
- **2020** — Polygence raised a Seed round
- **2025** — Polygence released TeachLM, an LLM fine-tuned on 100,000 hours of tutoring data

## Achievements

- Co-founded and scaled Polygence to tens of thousands of students and thousands of PhD mentors
- Earned a PhD in theoretical quantum physics from MIT
- Published research on metamaterial invisibility cloaks and cold-atom quantum information systems
- Member of the Forbes Business Council
- Led development of TeachLM, an education-optimized language model

## Latest updates

- **2025-10** — Polygence published TeachLM, an LLM post-trained on authentic longitudinal student-tutor interactions

## Links

- Website: https://www.perczel.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janos-perczel/
- Twitter/X: https://www.twitter.com/polygence/
- GitHub: https://github.com/janos-perczel
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/polygence/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/janos-perczel
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-01