Rural Lebanon in the late 1980s, then a civil war, then a new country with a language May Habib had never learned. Her parents - the eldest of their children, too - became entrepreneurs not because they wanted to, but because Canada demanded it of them. Her father and uncle bought used cars, fixed them, and sold them. May watched all of it and filed it away.
That immigrant fluency - the kind that comes from navigating multiple languages, multiple cultures, and the constant low-level stress of not quite fitting - turned out to be the exact preparation for building an AI company aimed at making language work for everyone. "The language you were born speaking shouldn't impact the kind of life you end up leading," she has said. She has spent the last decade and a half building technology to prove it.
At Harvard, she studied Economics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations - a combination that signals not mere academic curiosity but a genuine obsession with how language shapes power and possibility. She ran the news desk at The Harvard Crimson, graduated with highest honors in 2007, then walked directly into Lehman Brothers as an analyst. Fourteen months later, the firm collapsed. She watched it happen in real time and took the lesson: stability is not something institutions grant you. You build your own.