
From a community-built visualization cookbook to enterprise AI deployments, the Cincinnati engineer has followed one durable idea: technology matters when people can actually use it.

Before Handshake AI had a public name, Igor Arkhipov was helping write its first lines of code. His route there began with a student experiment in teaching software to read the mood of a sentence.

Before helping build Handshake AI, Frederick Kim turned the humble spreadsheet into a studio for exploring generative images. His quiet through-line is simple: powerful systems become useful when people can see what they are doing.
Yang Zhao is the Chief Business Officer of Handshake AI, where he runs business and operations for a fast-scaling human-data business serving frontier AI labs. He spent four years at Scale AI as Head of Product Deployment and Operations before joining Handshake, and earlier led growth and strategy at the consumer-rentals company Zumper. He pitches Handshake's edge not as tooling but as raw access to the largest expert network in the US.