ai-reasoning
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Carina Hong
Carina Hong is the founder and CEO of Axiom Math, an AI startup building an autonomous "AI mathematician" that can generate and formally verify its own proofs. A Guangzhou-born first-generation college student, she finished dual MIT degrees in math and physics in three years, won the Morgan Prize, became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, then left a Stanford PhD-and-JD track to start Axiom in March 2025. Her thesis is blunt: "Math is AGI." Within roughly nine months the company raised about $264M total, reached a reported $1.6B valuation, and pulled researchers from Meta FAIR, Meta GenAI, and Google Brain/DeepMind.
Tudor Achim
Tudor Achim is the cofounder and CEO of Harmonic, the Palo Alto AI lab he started in 2023 with Robinhood founder Vlad Tenev to build what they call Mathematical Superintelligence. Harmonic's system Aristotle reached gold-medal performance on the 2025 International Math Olympiad while formally verifying every proof in Lean 4, a feat that put a roughly 40-person startup alongside OpenAI and Google DeepMind. A former competitive pianist turned machine-learning researcher, Achim previously cofounded the self-driving company Helm.ai and worked on ranking at Quora. He argues that mathematics is the route to AI that does not hallucinate.
Scott Wu
Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the AI company behind Devin - widely recognized as the world's first autonomous AI software engineer. A three-time International Olympiad in Informatics gold medalist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Wu started coding at age 9, interned at a fintech startup as a high schooler alongside future Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, briefly attended Harvard, then spent five years building Lunchclub as CTO before co-founding Cognition in 2023 with fellow competitive programming champions. Under his leadership, Cognition grew from a 10-person apartment startup to a $10.2 billion company with over 200 employees, acquired Windsurf in July 2025, and raised $675 million in total funding - with Devin's annualized revenue surging from $1 million to $73 million in under a year.