Tim Shi

Tim Shi is the co-founder and former CTO of Cresta, the AI platform for contact centers that grew to over $100M ARR and raised $401M from Sequoia, a16z, and Greylock. A Tsinghua CS graduate who did early AI research at OpenAI alongside Andrej Karpathy — including the 'World of Bits' paper on web-based reinforcement learning agents — he co-founded Cresta in 2017 with Zayd Enam after both dropped out of Stanford's AI PhD program. In 2025, he co-founded Recursive Superintelligence, which emerged from stealth with $650M at a $4.65B valuation to build self-improving AI systems.