# Lucky Gunasekara

> Lucky Gunasekara is the co-founder and CEO of Miso.ai, an AI media lab that builds private answer engines for news publishers and learning platforms. A trained interaction designer who once built an RSS crawler to track global disease outbreaks, he now partners with 45-50+ publishers worldwide on what he calls 'liquid content' - adaptive, machine-readable information that pays royalties back to the writers and sources it draws from. His pitch to the news industry is blunt: AI is an asteroid coming for all of us, so we had better get to dinner and figure it out together.

- **Role:** Co-Founder and CEO at Miso.ai (Miso Technologies Inc.)
- **Organizations:** Miso.ai (Miso Technologies Inc.), Cornell Tech - Small Data Lab, Peterson Center on Healthcare, Tapstack, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Metabiota
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** B.A., Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Doctor of Medicine (MD) studies - did not complete, Stanford University School of Medicine
- **Known for:** Co-founded and leads Miso.ai, an AI media lab partnering with 45-50+ news and media publishers worldwide, Built the new O'Reilly Answers, described as the first example of generative royalties in the AI era, Pioneered an answer-engine architecture using an 'assembly line of LLM workers' that reason about query intent and cite sources

## Career timeline

- **2010-2012** — CIO at Metabiota, leading initial R&D for an epidemic surveillance system
- **2012-2014** — Advisor at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
- **2014** — Technologist in Residence at Cornell Tech, working on small data projects
- **2015-2016** — Senior UX Researcher and Designer at Tapstack
- **2015-2017** — Senior Advisor, Product at the Peterson Center on Healthcare
- **2016** — Co-founded Miso.ai with Andy Hsieh and Scott Lloyd
- **2022** — Miso raised a seed round (~$340K reported)
- **2024** — Launched the new O'Reilly Answers with Miso - 'generative royalties' paying sources for AI answers
- **2025** — Speaking at FIPP World Media Congress, journalism and media festivals on AI and news

## Achievements

- Co-founded and leads Miso.ai, an AI media lab partnering with 45-50+ news and media publishers worldwide
- Built the new O'Reilly Answers, described as the first example of generative royalties in the AI era
- Pioneered an answer-engine architecture using an 'assembly line of LLM workers' that reason about query intent and cite sources
- Originated 'Project Sentinel,' monitoring roughly 7,000 publishers daily to track AI bot traffic and content scraping
- Veteran of Cornell Tech's Small Data Lab, advancing private, personalized AI approaches
- Built an RSS crawler tracking global disease outbreaks that became the technical seed of Miso.ai

## Latest updates

- **2025** — Speaking at FIPP World Media Congress and journalism festivals on AI's impact on news and 'liquid media.'
- **2024-06** — Co-authored the O'Reilly Radar piece 'The New O'Reilly Answers: The R in RAG Stands for Royalties.'

## Links

- Website: https://miso.ai
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luckorchance
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlDaLFGPnHM

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/lucky-gunasekara
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-27