# Misha Laskin

> Misha Laskin is the co-founder and CEO of Reflection AI, a New York lab building open-weight frontier models and autonomous coding agents. A theoretical physicist by training (Yale, University of Chicago), he led reward modeling for Google DeepMind's Gemini and worked in reinforcement learning at Berkeley and DeepMind before launching Reflection in 2024 with AlphaGo co-creator Ioannis Antonoglou. In 2025 the company raised roughly $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, positioning itself as America's open-source answer to DeepSeek.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at Reflection AI
- **Organizations:** Reflection AI, Google DeepMind, UC Berkeley, Sequoia Capital
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** BS, Physics and Literature, Yale University, PhD, Theoretical (many-body quantum) Physics, University of Chicago
- **Known for:** Led reward modeling for Google DeepMind's Gemini, Co-founded Reflection AI and raised roughly $2.1B total funding, Built a team of ~60 researchers recruited from DeepMind and OpenAI

## Career timeline

- **pre-AI** — Founded a Y Combinator-backed startup focused on inventory prediction
- **post-PhD** — Postdoctoral researcher in reinforcement learning at UC Berkeley, inspired by AlphaGo
- **2021-2024** — Research scientist at Google DeepMind; led reward modeling for the Gemini project
- **2024-03** — Co-founded Reflection AI with Ioannis Antonoglou (co-creator of AlphaGo)
- **2024** — Joined Sequoia Capital as a partner
- **2025** — Reflection AI raised ~$2B at an $8B valuation; pivoted public message to open-weight frontier models

## Achievements

- Led reward modeling for Google DeepMind's Gemini
- Co-founded Reflection AI and raised roughly $2.1B total funding
- Built a team of ~60 researchers recruited from DeepMind and OpenAI
- Positioned Reflection AI as America's open frontier AI lab challenging DeepSeek
- Published reinforcement learning research (CURL, RAD and related work) during academic career

## Latest updates

- **2025-10** — Reflection AI raised ~$2B at an $8B valuation, led by Nvidia, to build open-weight frontier models.
- **2025** — Company targeting release of its first frontier language model trained on tens of trillions of tokens.

## Links

- Website: https://www.mishalaskin.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mishalaskin
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/MishaLaskin
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5QXWrHnTzw

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