Introducing Cohort One of AIR
A first look at the founders turning AI into tools for creativity, care, civic life, and cultural discovery.
This summer, we welcomed Cohort One of AI Residency (AIR) , a design-led incubator for ambitious, culturally grounded application-layer AI. From more than 220 applicants, we selected ten* teams building across creativity, care, civic tech, and cultural discovery.
Each brings a distinct point of view and a shared belief that AI can be more than a productivity tool. It can shape new rituals, unlock expression, and connect people in meaningful ways.
Interested in joining a future cohort? Apply and we’ll be in touch when applications open.
Cohort One
Dalena Tran & Hirad Sab
Fuser is a unified creative environment for professionals working with generative AI across text, image, video, audio, and 3D—all in one remixable canvas. Built by longtime collaborators Dalena and Hirad, whose work spans art, engineering, and education, Fuser is designed for discovery, iteration, and creative flow. Currently in private alpha. Join the waitlist or share your use case in their Discord for early access.
Belen Tenorio & Cherri Hartigan
Pillowtalk is a voice-first mental wellness app that turns late-night thoughts into emotional insights. Combining conversational AI with psychology-backed frameworks, Belen and Cherri have created a safe, playful space for reflection and emotional understanding. Try Pillowtalk.
Nana Maia, Tre Palmer, Malik Dean, Ani Sivakumar (8LAB)
8LAB is building 8PASS, the global creative passport: a playlist-powered platform for discovering real-world experiences, where AI, curation, and culture collide. Inspired by the scenes and cities they’ve shaped, they’re reimagining discovery guided by taste, not algorithms. Sign up for their waitlist.
Kevin Tang, Marcelo Coelho, and Shannon Li
Geni is a screen-free, AI-powered storytelling toy that lets kids create endless audio adventures using physical tiles. With backgrounds in design, engineering, and education from MIT and Harvard, the team is reimagining play as hands-on, child-led, and endlessly inventive. Sign up for updates, or if you’re in New York with children ages 4–8, sign up to join a playtest.
Jake Harper
SOOT is a “a new species of filesystem” for visual information. Inspired by natural ecosystems, it offers spatial, organic ways to arrange data—making it easier for creative teams to work fluidly with research and ideas. Join their waitlist.
* And one stealth startup——shh!
Entrepreneurs-in-Residence
Alongside our main cohort, we’ve invited creative technologists, artists, and builders to join as Entrepreneurs-in-Residence (EIRs). These individuals are exploring what AI can enable, from new publishing tools to joyful wellness rituals.
Jon-Kyle Mohr
Assemblage is a publishing platform for the next wave of creators, offering calm, opinionated tools to assemble beautiful, linear pages of text, image, and video. It brings a deeply personal lens to the question: how do we tell stories in a machine-shaped internet? Watch the demo and join the waitlist.
Jack Saltzman
Ladder streamlines months-long benefits applications into a 30-minute guided process. By understanding users’ situations, organizing their documents, and tracking deadlines, Ladder ensures nothing falls through the cracks.
Piera Gelardi and Lakshmi Narayanee
NoomaLooma reimagines creative practice for daily life, turning commutes and coffee breaks into creative playgrounds. Drawing on their backgrounds at Refinery29, 29Rooms, and global product design, they help busy people rediscover joy, connection, and aliveness through micro-breaks that reset the brain and deliver an espresso shot to the spirit. Explore their website.
Greg Bresnitz
Greg Bresnitz is the CEO of Friends with Benefits (FWB) and former head of partnerships at Ace Hotel. As an EIR, he draws on his experience in partnerships, community building, and go-to-market strategy to help AIR teams frame and scale their work.
Cohort Zero Entrepreneurs-in-Residence
Cohort One builds on an earlier prototype round of AIR with a small group of residents, many of whom continue to shape the program as collaborators and contributors.
Los Mayers & Marc Müeller
Los and Marc are the duo behind Danger Testing, a collective that ships experimental apps like mixtapes—fast, emotional, and weird in the best way. They treat software as media, not just tools.
Kelin Carolyn Zhang
An MIT-trained designer and educator, Kelin builds social, AI-infused products like Poetry Camera, a camera that prints poems. Pre-order it here.
Emily Manges
A curator-turned-operator, Emily Manges combines her experience at MoMA and Artsy with an MBA from Harvard Business School to build an ambient AI wellness companion that blends biometrics and astrology.
Pedro Sanches
Pedro Sanches is a designer and coder with experience creating generative designs for clients like Telfar, Spotify, and Google, now building Spells, vibe-coded group chats where users author their space through conversation and build just-for-us social apps and artifacts.
Barron Webster
Barron Webster has shaped tools at Replit, Sandbar, and Google. Now, he’s putting the finishing touches on Chess2, which debuted at one of our demo events, and is currently in beta. Want to try? Ask Barron for access!
Jordan Alexander
A former software engineer at Anduril and Dark Forest, Jordan Alexander is building a mobile-first generative art platform designed to encourage daily creativity.
Interested in joining a future cohort? Apply here.
We are proud to support these founders and residents—past and present—as they gather in Brooklyn to prototype, test, and share their work, supported by the AIR team and each other. This is just the beginning, and we cannot wait to share what comes next.
Want to meet them in person? Join us for our next happy hour on Thursday, September 4th at 6pm in Brooklyn. RSVP here →
This is how you do it😮💨 Felicidades this is incredible!!!! The TALENT🔥🔥🔥
The companies and creative technologists featured here are next level. Thank you for curating an interesting group of people – can't wait to see how these incubated projects come to life in the coming months.
Soot especially stood out to me. I vibe coded a similar platform for my agency: an information bank that resurfaces insights and files. It was literal — surfacing words instead of images. Signed up to their email list!