NOW Co-Founder & CEO of PixieBrix RAISED ~$26M · Series A THESIS Browser extensions are the most powerful vehicle for permissionless innovation TRAINING PhD, Programming Languages · University of Washington BEFORE Analytics tools for the world's largest hedge funds BASED Boston · PixieBrix HQ in New York NOW Co-Founder & CEO of PixieBrix RAISED ~$26M · Series A THESIS Browser extensions are the most powerful vehicle for permissionless innovation TRAINING PhD, Programming Languages · University of Washington BEFORE Analytics tools for the world's largest hedge funds BASED Boston · PixieBrix HQ in New York
Founder · Engineer · Programming-Languages PhD

Todd
Schiller

He spent his doctorate proving that software does what it claims. Then he built a company whose entire pitch is that your software doesn't - and you should be able to fix it yourself.

PixieBrixLow-CodeBrowser ModsCustomer Experience AI
Todd Schiller, co-founder and CEO of PixieBrix
Todd Schiller in a PixieBrix tee and a jacket in every color the brand owns. The bald head, the grin, the loading-dock window behind him - a founder who looks like he is about to show you a keyboard shortcut you did not know existed.
The short version

Todd Schiller runs PixieBrix, a nine-person company in New York that sells software for editing other people's software.

The idea is narrow and, once you hear it, a little obvious. Every team lives inside web apps it did not build - Zendesk, Salesforce, a support console, an internal dashboard - and every one of those apps is about ninety percent right. The last ten percent is where people lose an hour a day, clicking between tabs, copying an order number, looking up the same policy for the fortieth time. PixieBrix lets someone build a browser mod that closes that gap without waiting for the vendor to ship a feature, and without filing a ticket with their own engineering team.

Schiller calls the browser extension "the most powerful vehicle for permissionless innovation," which is the sort of phrase you can only say with conviction if you have spent a long time thinking about who gets to change software and who has to wait. He has. Before PixieBrix he built knowledge-management and analytics tools for some of the largest hedge funds and consumer companies in the world, the kind of institutions where the people closest to the work are almost never the people allowed to touch the tools. The company he started in 2020 is, in a sense, a rebuttal to that arrangement.

By the numbers

A small team, a large claim.

2020
PixieBrix founded
$26M
Total raised
9
Employees
3
CS degrees (BS, MS, PhD)

“Browser extensions are the most powerful vehicle for permissionless innovation.”

— Todd Schiller, on why the extension is the whole company
What PixieBrix actually does

Change the UI of everything for a better UX.

That eight-word line, which Schiller used as the title of a 2022 podcast episode, is the most honest description of the product. PixieBrix is a low-code extension builder. You point it at a web app you already use, and you layer things on top: a button that summarizes a ticket, a sidebar that pulls in a customer's history, a decision tree that walks an agent through a refund, an AI prompt that drafts a reply. The underlying app never knows it has been modified. The person doing the modifying does not need to be an engineer.

Over time the emphasis has shifted toward customer experience and support - the messy, high-volume, human-in-the-loop work where a four-minute saving per call is real money. PixieBrix's material leans on the language of that world: case backlogs, agent guidance, escalation reduction, AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic wired directly into the tools support teams stare at all day. One 2023 webinar was titled, without apology, "Tinder for Zendesk: Clearing your case backlog with PixieBrix & AI."

The through-line from Schiller's earlier life is consistency. He built analytics for institutions where the software was rigid and the users were powerless to change it. PixieBrix inverts that: the software stays, but the power to reshape it moves to the person using it.

01

Mod, don't replace

PixieBrix layers on top of the apps a team already lives in, rather than asking them to migrate to a new one.

02

Low-code, not no-team

The people closest to the work build the fix, closing the gap between who feels the problem and who can solve it.

03

AI where the work is

Models from OpenAI and Anthropic get wired straight into support consoles - drafting, summarizing, guiding.

Where he comes from

A rigorous training in making software behave.

Schiller earned his PhD in software engineering and programming languages at the University of Washington, working with Michael Ernst on verification, contract specifications, and pluggable type-checkers - the discipline of getting a program to prove, formally, that it will not misbehave. The work was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, with additional funding from a DARPA grant. He presented "Encouraging Effective Contract Specifications" at ICSE in 2014.

Before Seattle there was Washington University in St. Louis, where he took a BS and an MS in computer science and worked on dependently-typed languages, machine learning, and action planning under Aaron Stump, Yixin Chen, and Ron Cytron. His bibliography is eclectic in the way of a genuinely curious researcher: a paper on building a Wikidata for genetics sits near one on automatically optimizing interview effectiveness.

There is a small irony in the arc. The academic work was about constraint - proving software correct, pinning down what it is allowed to do. The company is about freedom - letting people do things with software that its makers never sanctioned. Both, it turns out, are about taking software seriously enough to insist it serve the people using it.

PhDUniversity of Washington - Software Engineering & Programming Languages, advised by Michael Ernst
BS & MSWashington University in St. Louis - Computer Science
FundingNSF Graduate Research Fellowship + DARPA grant
Earlier venturesFounder of FinLingua; Head of Engineering at MOKA; Technology Advisor at Independent
The path

From theorem provers to the front line.

2014
Presents "Encouraging Effective Contract Specifications" at ICSE, mid-PhD, deep in software verification.
2018
Talks "Using Optimizers in Business Analytics" at the NYC Python Meetup, the finance-and-analytics chapter in full swing.
2020
Co-founds PixieBrix with Mike Mirandi and becomes CEO. Teaches "Intelligence Analysis 101" at the HOPE hacker conference.
2021
PixieBrix's funding draws coverage from Fast Company and Yahoo.
2023
Raises a Series A - JetBlue Ventures among the backers - and starts showing up on podcasts about generative AI in customer success.
2024
Speaks on AI in customer experience at TaskUs Forward and on operationalizing GenAI at scale.
2026
Presents "Making AI Coding Work for Enterprise-Grade Browser Extensions" at the AI Coding Summit.
The money

An airline's venture fund backed a company that will never own a plane.

PixieBrix's roughly $26M in total funding includes a Series A with JetBlue Ventures on the cap table - a bet that has nothing to do with aviation and everything to do with the software frontline workers actually use. The logic is the same one that runs through all of Schiller's work: the tools people are handed are rarely the tools they need, and closing that distance is worth paying for.

The company stays deliberately lean. Nine employees building an enterprise-grade platform is a particular kind of ambition, the sort that only makes sense if you believe the leverage is in the product, not the headcount. For a founder whose research was about doing more with formal guarantees than brute force, it tracks.

Total funding~$26M across rounds
Latest roundSeries A
Notable backerJetBlue Ventures
HQ245 8th Ave, New York
Quirks & footnotes

The details that don't fit the résumé.

A

Tinder for Zendesk

He ran a webinar with that exact title - swipe through a case backlog, clear it with PixieBrix and AI. Not every enterprise founder would sign off on the joke.

B

Intelligence Analysis 101

In 2020 he taught a workshop by that name at HOPE, the long-running hacker conference. The founder résumé and the hacker-con résumé rarely overlap this cleanly.

C

A Wikidata for genetics

His publication list includes a paper on building one, filed near another on optimizing interview effectiveness. Curiosity that refuses to stay in a lane.

D

Everywhere at once

Bluesky, Hacker News, Keybase, Stack Overflow - he keeps a presence on the platforms engineers actually respect, not just the ones founders are told to be on.

E

From constraint to freedom

His PhD was about proving software can't misbehave. His company is about helping it misbehave, on purpose, for you.

F

Rationality on the interest list

He lists rationality, reasoning, and how humans interact with AI systems among his primary interests - which reads less like a hobby and more like a product roadmap.

“PixieBrix is the platform for everyone to customize and extend the web apps they use most.”

— Todd Schiller, describing the company in a single sentence
Find him

Links & profiles

Personal Site PixieBrix LinkedIn X / Twitter Bluesky GitHub Medium Hacker News Stack Overflow AI Coding Summit Talk Crunchbase GenAI in CX (YouTube)
Share this profile
Sources
toddschiller.com/pages/about.html toddschiller.com/pages/speaking.html crunchbase.com/person/todd-schiller theorg.com/org/pixiebrix/org-chart/todd-schiller sky-vc.com/blog/why-we-invested-in-pixiebrix themasters.ai/episodes/interview-todd-schiller-pixiebrix linkedin.com/in/tschiller gitnation.com - AI Coding Summit 2026

Quick facts: Todd Schiller

Todd Schiller is the co-founder and CEO of PixieBrix, a low-code platform that lets teams customize, extend, and automate the web apps they already use through browser mods. A programming-languages PhD who studied software verification under Michael Ernst at the University of Washington, he spent years building knowledge-management and analytics tools for hedge funds and consumer companies before starting PixieBrix in 2020. The New York-based company has raised roughly $26M, including a Series A backed by JetBlue Ventures, and has increasingly focused on AI-assisted customer-experience and support workflows.

Role
Co-Founder & CEO at PixieBrix
Organizations
PixieBrix, FinLingua, MOKA, Independent
Nationality
American
Education
PhD, Software Engineering & Programming Languages (advisor: Michael Ernst; NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, DARPA grant), University of Washington, MS, Computer Science, Washington University in St. Louis, BS, Computer Science (advisors: Aaron Stump, Yixin Chen, Ron Cytron), Washington University in St. Louis
Known for
Co-founded and leads PixieBrix, which has raised roughly $26M in total funding including a Series A, Earned a PhD in software engineering and programming languages from the University of Washington on an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship with additional DARPA support, Built knowledge-management and business-analytics tools for some of the world's largest hedge funds and consumer companies

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