# Max Spero

> Max Spero is the cofounder and CEO of Pangram Labs, a New York based startup building the most accurate AI-text detector on the market. A Stanford-trained machine learning engineer who worked at Google, Two Sigma, Yelp, and the self-driving company Nuro, Spero co-founded Pangram in 2023 with college dormmate Bradley Emi to draw a clean line between human and machine writing. His obsession is the false positive rate: he refused to ship at one wrong call in a hundred and pushed his team to one in ten thousand. Pangram now powers AI verification for journalism platforms, schools, and trust and safety teams, and raised about $4M in seed funding in 2025.

- **Role:** Cofounder & CEO at Pangram Labs
- **Organizations:** Pangram Labs, Nuro, Google, Two Sigma, Yelp, Stanford University
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** B.S. in Theoretical Computer Science, Stanford University, M.S. in Artificial Intelligence, Stanford University
- **Known for:** Co-founded and leads Pangram Labs, used by thousands of businesses for AI detection., Pushed Pangram's detector from a 1-in-100 to a 1-in-10,000 false positive rate., Raised about $4M in pre-seed and seed funding (Haystack VC, ScOp, Script Capital, Cadenza).

## Career timeline

- **Stanford** — Studied machine learning and AI; met future cofounder Bradley Emi in their freshman dorm.
- **Pre-2023** — Deployed machine learning products at Google, Two Sigma, and Yelp.
- **Pre-2023** — Led the active learning effort on autonomous vehicles at Nuro.
- **2023** — Co-founded Pangram Labs with Bradley Emi to detect AI-generated writing.
- **2025-04** — Pangram released a new AI writing detection model.
- **2025-06** — Pangram closed roughly $4M in seed funding, led by ScOp Venture Capital.
- **2025-09** — Pangram integrated into HARO and Qwoted, key journalism source platforms.
- **2025-12** — Launched Pangram 3.0 with sentence-level transparency into AI-written text.

## Achievements

- Co-founded and leads Pangram Labs, used by thousands of businesses for AI detection.
- Pushed Pangram's detector from a 1-in-100 to a 1-in-10,000 false positive rate.
- Raised about $4M in pre-seed and seed funding (Haystack VC, ScOp, Script Capital, Cadenza).
- Won full market share in journalist-sourcing tools via HARO and Qwoted integrations.
- Shipped Pangram 3.0, adding granular, sentence-level AI-detection transparency.

## Latest updates

- **2025-12** — Launched Pangram 3.0, giving users sentence-level insight into text written or modified by AI.
- **2025-09** — Pangram integrated into HARO and Qwoted, two leading journalist-sourcing platforms.
- **2025-06** — Closed about $4M in seed funding to expand operations and development.

## Links

- Website: https://pangram.com
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/maxspero
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/pangramlabs
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2Kmq-JYhY8

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/max-spero
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-22