# Josh Lewis

> Josh Lewis is the co-founder of Sensible, a document extraction platform for developers. His background spans cognitive science research at UC San Diego, engineering and product leadership at Ayasdi and Alpine Data, and work at Newfront, where insurance paperwork inspired the product problem behind Sensible.

- **Role:** Co-founder & CEO at Sensible
- **Organizations:** Sensible, Newfront, Alpine Data, Ayasdi, State Design, UC San Diego, Keynote Systems
- **Education:** BA, Cognitive Science & Philosophy, Pomona College, PhD, Cognitive Science, UC San Diego
- **Known for:** Co-founded Sensible with Ming Lu to turn documents into structured data for developers., Sensible announced a $6.5 million seed round led by Craft Ventures in November 2022, bringing total funding at that time above $8 million., Developed internal document-query tooling at Newfront before starting Sensible.

## Career timeline

- **2002-2006** — Contract engineer at Keynote Systems.
- **2006** — Graduated from Pomona College.
- **2011-2013** — Postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego.
- **2012-2013** — Co-founder at State Design.
- **2013-2015** — Director of Engineering at Ayasdi.
- **2015-2017** — Vice President, Product at Alpine Data.
- **2018-2020** — Head of Newfront Portland; his Newfront work exposed the document extraction problem.
- **2021** — Sensible’s current company history dates its start to 2021; Lewis co-founded it with Ming Lu.
- **2022** — Announced Sensible’s $6.5 million seed round on November 17.
- **2024** — Appeared on Build vs. Buy to discuss engineering decisions and Sensible.

## Achievements

- Co-founded Sensible with Ming Lu to turn documents into structured data for developers.
- Sensible announced a $6.5 million seed round led by Craft Ventures in November 2022, bringing total funding at that time above $8 million.
- Developed internal document-query tooling at Newfront before starting Sensible.
- Completed doctoral and postdoctoral research focused on making machine learning useful to people without formal computer science training.

## Latest updates

- **2026-02** — Sensible’s article on hybrid document processing quoted Lewis’s decision to stop building document automation internally at Newfront.
- **2025-04** — An article credited to Lewis explained using LLMs to split multi-document PDFs.
- **2024-07** — Featured in the July 23 Build vs. Buy podcast episode.
- **2024-06** — Co-contributed a technical article with Tash Patel on completions-only retrieval for document extraction.

## Links

- Website: https://www.sensible.so/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshlewisml

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/josh-lewis
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-08