yale hacker house is yale's first live-in founder residency in san francisco. one cohort, ten weeks, shipping product and talking to real customers.
teams work from nob hill with operators and investors nearby. run by the leads behind yale entrepreneurial society and signal.
one summer in san francisco. everyone in the residency is full-time on product and customers.
This Yale founder residency is built for technical student founders who to accelerate and raise venture capital.
Meet our first cohort of founders.
cognitive science
Co-founder of Mylon (backed by Pear VC), building AI agents for research. Built the Luciano Floridi Agent, used across 107 countries. Previously led a U.S. State Department–backed platform documenting crimes against humanity in Kyiv. Yale's first Student AI Ambassador; advised the U.S. Senate and Department of Education on AI policy.
molecular biophysics, biochemistry & philosophy
Co-founder of Cortex, a neurosymbolic AI platform building the reasoning infrastructure for modern biology ($600K pre-seed led by Long Journey Ventures). Researches multi-omic cell maps at Yale School of Medicine; built E(3)-equivariant GNNs for 3D chromatin reconstruction. President of the Yale Entrepreneurial Society.
statistics & data science
Co-founder of UnitZero, which has raised $2.7M to scale the world's largest robotics data collection facility. Previously built a recycled-plastic clothing company backed by Cambridge, grew a tutoring platform to 10,000 users, and worked as a software engineer at Daemo.ai.
cognitive science
Co-founder of Mylon (Pear VC). Currently building a platform that accelerates multifamily construction approvals using AI to generate entitlement documents, financials, and renderings. Co-authored Yale's AI guidelines and researched behavioral addiction in the Yale Department of Psychiatry.
biomedical engineering & philosophy
Co-founder of Cortex ($600K pre-seed led by Long Journey Ventures). Previously at Schrödinger on free energy perturbation and molecular dynamics for drug discovery. At Yale School of Medicine, researched epigenetic regulation in cancer and built GNNs for RNA structure prediction.
computer science & economics
CTO of Cortex. Previously founded Assure5, a preventative healthcare platform that scaled to 13,000 users across hospitals in 40+ countries, and developed the Classifier for Demyelinating Disease, a novel ML architecture presented at IEEE BHI and ACCV.
computer science
Co-founder of UnitZero ($2.7M raised). Previously interned in a systems role at NVIDIA, co-founded Bwenge-Lab (a data labeling startup in Rwanda), and worked on a DoD project using drones and edge ML for threat neutralization.
statistics & data science
CTO of UnitZero. Previously a founding engineer at Conway building anomaly detection on petabyte-scale data, a quantitative research intern at Bridgewater, and a robustness researcher at Anthropic.
mathematics & computer science
Founder of NADE, a physical-layer intrusion detection system for optical inter-satellite links, being developed with the U.S. Military and the Space Development Agency (SBIR). Works with OpenAI on Codex. Design partner for Epicenter (YC S25). Prior research in algorithmic game theory at NYU Economics.
electrical engineering & economics
Building Pathlight, a voice assistant for the blind integrated into everyday software, piloted by 400+ blind and low-vision users and backed by the NSF, Princeton, Iowa, Penn State, and Yale. First high-school student to intern at both HHS and the Pennsylvania House.
history
Co-founder of Vault Kinetics, an intelligent flooring platform that tracks athlete performance in real time, leading the underlying Yale Engineering research. Nationally competitive collegiate powerlifter and experienced team lead. As a freshman, created Yale's largest student-led fundraiser, raising $60,000+. As a kid, built FPV racing drones and won national poetry competitions.
mechanical engineering & economics
Co-founder of Vault Kinetics, an intelligent flooring platform that tracks athlete performance in real time, leading the underlying Yale Engineering research. Grew up in New Hampshire playing 15+ sports; recently declined a team invitation to sail around the world.
computer science & statistics
Built Unseen, a personal finance assistant that connects bank and card data to detect subscriptions, forecast taxes, and draft dispute messages. Manages yalies.io (3,000 daily requests) at the Yale Computer Society. Shipped a forecasting engine that cut marketing spend 2% for a $32M DTC brand.
our partners underwrite the program and spend time with founders.
Seed fund, in the house all summer.
Legal for venture-backed startups.
Banking for operators and their funds.
operators, investors, or anyone who wants to collaborate or partner with us.
send a note through the form or open your mail app with the button beside it.
nicolas gertler, leïa ryan, oliver hime · yale.edu