new-york-ai
(3)
Deeptune
Deeptune is a New York AI company that builds high-fidelity simulation environments - 'training gyms' - where AI agents practice real digital work such as accounting, customer support, DevOps, and spreadsheet and CRM tasks before being deployed. Its reinforcement-learning environments recreate the day-to-day software of roles like accountants, lawyers, and engineers so agents can learn multi-step 'computer use' the way a pilot trains in a flight simulator. Founded in 2025 by Tim Lupo and Lukas Schmit, Deeptune raised a $43M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in March 2026 and was acquired by AI unicorn Mercor in July 2026.
Tim Lupo
Tim Lupo is the co-founder and CEO of Deeptune, a New York startup that builds high-fidelity reinforcement learning environments - which he calls 'training gyms' or 'flight simulators' - where AI agents learn to do real digital work across enterprise software like Salesforce and Slack. In early 2026 the company raised a $43M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. Deeptune started life as an AI video-dubbing tool that landed Lupo and co-founder Lukas Schmit on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, then pivoted to become RL infrastructure for frontier AI labs. A former founding engineer at Hebbia and a full-merit USC scholar, Lupo pitches the roughly 20-person, in-person team as one of the only early-stage places in New York to work on AGI.
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.