# Nilou Salehi

> Niloufar (Nilou) Salehi is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-founded Across AI, a San Francisco startup building 'agentic memory' systems for enterprise sales teams. An associate professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information known for human-centered AI and social computing research, she put her professorship on pause to serve as Across AI's Chief Product Officer. Across came out of stealth in December 2024 with a $5.7M seed round co-led by Cota Capital and Village Global. Her academic work spans crowd-worker organizing (Dynamo), reliable machine translation for high-stakes settings, and equity in algorithmic systems.

- **Role:** Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at Across AI
- **Organizations:** Across AI, UC Berkeley School of Information, Berkeley AI Research Lab (BAIR), NVIDIA (advisory board)
- **From:** Iran
- **Nationality:** American-Iranian
- **Education:** B.Sc. in Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, PhD in Computer Science, Stanford University
- **Known for:** Co-founded Across AI and raised a $5.7M seed round co-led by Cota Capital and Village Global, W. T. Grant Foundation Scholar for work on equity in student assignment algorithms, Outstanding Paper Award, EMNLP 2023

## Career timeline

- **2015** — Co-authored 'We Are Dynamo' on collective action among crowd workers
- **2018** — Completed PhD at Stanford; joined UC Berkeley School of Information as faculty
- **2020** — Received NSF grant on restorative justice and social media conflicts
- **2022** — Began collaboration with Timnit Gebru on translation tools for high-stakes settings
- **2023** — Won Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP 2023
- **2024** — Co-founded Across AI; company emerges from stealth with $5.7M seed round
- **2025** — On leave from UC Berkeley, leading product at Across AI as CPO

## Achievements

- Co-founded Across AI and raised a $5.7M seed round co-led by Cota Capital and Village Global
- W. T. Grant Foundation Scholar for work on equity in student assignment algorithms
- Outstanding Paper Award, EMNLP 2023
- Member of NVIDIA's generative AI advisory board
- Built Hive, a community-teaming system adopted by Mozilla to improve Firefox accessibility
- Co-created Dynamo, an organizing platform for Amazon Mechanical Turk workers
- Research covered in Wired, The Guardian, and VentureBeat

## Latest updates

- **2024-12** — Across AI emerged from stealth with a $5.7M seed round and launched its agentic-memory platform for enterprise sales.
- **2025-03** — Profiled by UC Berkeley iSchool while on leave, leading product at Across AI.

## Links

- Website: https://niloufar.org/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilou-salehi/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/nilou-salehi
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-21