Recognition LabsTM

The builder matters.

We’re a team of pioneering behavioral scientists and builders whose AI tools and products have reached hundreds of millions of people. We believe technology should help us lead richer, more fulfilling lives and then get out of the way. But that’s not how tech products typically operate. We aim to change the standard.

We built Recognition Labs as a nonprofit and designed it to stay that way, because the incentives of product makers inevitably show up in the products they make. Our incentives will remain lined up with those we serve.

Builders

• 

  Nick Obradovich

  Cofounder
  Chief Executive Officer

  Highly-cited behavioral scientist and nonprofit leader who laid the groundwork for examining AI behaviors and their impact on humans. Millions of people interacted with generative AI projects he created while at MIT and Harvard. His science is regularly published in top scientific venues and has been covered by all major media outlets.
• 

  Bjarke Felbo

  Cofounder
  Chief Technology Officer

  AI researcher who developed open-source algorithms at MIT that now serve 300 million people a day. He has been named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and awarded the MIT Media Lab’s Marvin Minsky Fellowship. His last startup raised $10 million from Y Combinator and other top investors.
• 

  Renee Wurth

  Cofounder
  Chief Product Officer

  Behavioral scientist and product leader who trained at Northeastern and Harvard, with fellowships at MIT and UC Berkeley. She founded a startup at Harvard’s Innovation Lab and was a Menlo Ventures fellow. She has spent the past decade leading research and product in tech, including billion-dollar consumer brands.
• 

  Piotr Borowian

  Cofounder
  AI Director

  Software engineer trained at the Technical University of Denmark who has spent 15+ years finding simple solutions to hard technical problems. At Deltek, he designed programming languages, built compilers and developer tools, and shipped software used by nearly a million people. He now turns AI advances into products, taking them from idea to launch.

Advisors

• 

  Martin Paulus

  Cofounder
  Scientific Advisor

  Neuroscientist cited more than 75,000 times, Martin has led the Laureate Institute for Brain Research since 2014 and is a lead investigator on the largest long-term study of brain development ever conducted in the United States. He has received more than $50 million in NIH funding, studies how screens shape children’s developing brains, and examines peak performance in Navy SEALs.
• 

  Tal Flanchraych

  Product Advisor

  Serial entrepreneur and product pioneer, Tal launched smartphone ride-hailing before Uber as cofounder of Flywheel, then drove product innovation at Amazon and generative AI at Indeed. She has shaped Silicon Valley’s next generation of product leaders and built Yat’s product and user experience from an idea into a business generating $20 million in its first year.
• 

  James Fowler

  Scientific Advisor

  Guggenheim Fellow and UC San Diego professor cited more than 70,000 times, James pioneered the science of how behaviors spread through social networks. He coauthored Connected, an award-winning international bestseller translated into 20 languages, and co-led a 61-million-person experiment on how friends shape each other’s behavior.
• 

  Evan Friis

  Product Advisor

  Google AI leader and Breakthrough Prize-winning physicist, Evan built Google Assistant from the ground up and now leads the technology powering Gemini for Home and Health, shaping products used by hundreds of millions of people. Before joining Google, he was part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the century.
• 

  Sune Lehmann

  Scientific Advisor

  Professor of social data science and former Harvard fellow, Sune led a groundbreaking study that uncovered how friendships form and made global headlines showing information overload is shrinking the world’s attention span. He has won the EliteForsk Prize, the Danish government’s top research prize, and is a chief scientist at Denmark’s National Center for AI in Society.