stanford-ai-lab
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Michelle Lee
Michelle Lee is the founder and CEO of Medra, a San Francisco company building 'Physical AI Scientists' - robot arms with cameras and sensors, governed by AI, that run wet-lab biology experiments around the clock. A Stanford AI Lab PhD who worked at NVIDIA, SpaceX, and McKinsey, she walked away from an assistant professor post at NYU after AlphaFold 2's 2021 release convinced her that biology's real bottleneck was not algorithms but data, and that data is a robotics problem. Medra runs in production with partners including Genentech and raised a $52M Series A in December 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $63M.
Samir Sen
Samir Sen is the founder and CEO of Flair Labs, a Y Combinator-backed startup building lifelike AI voice assistants that work as a 24/7 digital concierge for real estate brokerages and mortgage lenders. A Stanford computer science graduate who researched at the Stanford AI Lab and built machine learning systems at Apple and Microsoft Bing, Sen spun Flair out of Stanford to chase what he calls 'graceful AI' - software that handles the calls, follow-ups and lead nurturing humans drop, while sounding near-human. Flair reportedly reached $1M in revenue within four months and helps brokerages cut call-center costs by roughly half.
Raphael Townshend
Raphael Townshend is the founder and CEO of Atomic AI, a South San Francisco biotech fusing machine learning with structural biology to make RNA a druggable target. A Stanford AI Lab PhD who trained 18 known RNA structures into a model that beat far larger labs, he turned a Science cover paper into a company that has raised $42M to build ATOM-1, a foundation model for RNA structure. Forbes 30 Under 30, ex-DeepMind AlphaFold, ex-Google.
Pika
Pika is a San Francisco-based generative AI company building a consumer video platform that turns text, images, and clips into short cinematic videos. Founded in 2023 by Stanford AI Lab alumni Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, Pika has shipped a string of fast-iterating model releases (Pika 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2) and viral features like Pikaffects, Scene Ingredients, and Pikaframes. The company has raised roughly $135M from Spark Capital, Lightspeed, Greycroft, and others.
Snorkel AI
Snorkel AI is a Redwood City-based enterprise AI company spun out of the Stanford AI Lab in 2019. Its Data Development Platform lets enterprises programmatically label, curate, and evaluate the training and evaluation data that powers custom LLMs, RAG systems, and AI agents - turning expensive manual annotation into a software-engineering discipline.