Bio

Mike Knoop is an American entrepreneur and AI researcher, co-founder and chief executive officer of Ndea, the San Francisco AI research lab he established in January 2025 with François Chollet, the creator of Keras and the ARC-AGI benchmark. He is the co-founder of Zapier, the workflow-automation company he started in 2011 with Wade Foster and Bryan Helmig, and a co-founder and board member of the ARC Prize Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the annual ARC-AGI competition. As of May 2026, he leads Ndea following approximately $43.5 million in disclosed cumulative funding, with Y Combinator, Coatue Management, Factorial Capital, and Quiet Capital among the disclosed investors.

At a glance

• Education: Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering, University of Missouri; graduate research in finite element modeling and optimization at the University of Missouri.
• Current role: Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ndea, January 2025 to present. Co-founder and board member of Zapier and the ARC Prize Foundation.
• Key contributions: co-founder of Zapier (2011), one of the largest software-as-a-service workflow-automation companies; head of AI at Zapier prior to the Ndea transition; co-founder of the ARC Prize Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the annual ARC-AGI competition; co-founder of Ndea (January 2025), the AI research lab pursuing AGI through deep learning-guided program synthesis.
• X / Twitter: @mikeknoop
• LinkedIn: mikeknoop
• Personal site: mikeknoop.com

Origins

Knoop grew up in St. Louis and attended the University of Missouri for undergraduate study in mechanical engineering, completing the Bachelor of Science with research focused on finite-element modeling and optimization. He continued in graduate research at the same institution before transitioning to entrepreneurial work in software-as-a-service.

Career

Knoop's professional career organizes around two principal companies and the ARC Prize nonprofit, with Zapier the dominant operating output through 2022 and Ndea the primary current focus.

He co-founded Zapier in 2011 with Wade Foster and Bryan Helmig, the workflow-automation company that became one of the largest software-as-a-service businesses outside the traditional venture-capital fundraising path. Zapier's product allows non-developer users to connect software services through automated triggers and actions, an approach that scaled to support tens of thousands of integrations across consumer and enterprise software. The company has been characterized in industry coverage as having reached a private valuation north of $5 billion. Knoop led engineering and product development at Zapier and pioneered the company's early adoption of AI technologies, eventually heading Zapier's AI team.

In 2022 he transitioned out of his executive operating role at Zapier to focus on AGI research, motivated by his stated desire to determine for himself whether contemporary AI is on the path to general intelligence. The transition was characterized in his public framing as both a personal-curiosity decision and one motivated by Zapier's strategic positioning relative to AI capability progression.

He co-founded the ARC Prize Foundation with François Chollet, the creator of Keras and the ARC-AGI benchmark. The foundation was structured as a nonprofit for public advancement and education of open AGI, with the annual ARC Prize competition as its principal program. The ARC-AGI benchmark, originally introduced by Chollet in 2019 with the paper "On the Measure of Intelligence," is designed to measure abstract reasoning and pattern induction capabilities that scale-trained large-language models have historically struggled to match.

Knoop and Chollet co-founded Ndea in January 2025 in San Francisco. The company's name draws from the Greek terms ennoia (intuitive understanding) and dianoia (logical reasoning), reflecting the founding thesis that AGI emerges from combining deep-learning intuition with explicit symbolic reasoning. Knoop took the chief-executive role; Chollet anchors the research direction. The strategic premise is that progress toward AGI requires combining the pattern-recognition strengths of deep learning with the systematic-reasoning strengths of program synthesis, rather than relying on continued scaling of language-model parameter counts. PitchBook data through May 2026 indicates approximately $43.5 million raised across one or more rounds, with Y Combinator, Coatue Management, Factorial Capital, and Quiet Capital among the disclosed investors. The company has been hiring research scientists and research engineers since launch, with remote work supported.

Affiliations

• Zapier: Co-founder, 2011 to present (board member, departed executive operating role 2022).
• ARC Prize Foundation: Co-founder and Board Member.
• Ndea: Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, January 2025 to present.

Notable contributions

Knoop's published record runs through three principal organizational outputs: Zapier as the long-running software-as-a-service operating business, the ARC Prize Foundation as the principal AGI-evaluation infrastructure, and Ndea as the current research-and-AGI venture.

• Zapier (2011). Co-founded the workflow-automation company; private valuation reportedly north of $5 billion; head of AI before transitioning to AGI research focus in 2022.
• ARC Prize Foundation. Co-founded the nonprofit that runs the annual ARC-AGI competition; principal AGI-benchmark institution outside the frontier-foundation-model labs.
• Ndea (January 2025). Co-founded the AI research lab pursuing AGI through deep learning-guided program synthesis. Approximately $43.5 million reported cumulative funding through May 2026.
• AI investing. Personal investment portfolio across multiple AI companies including Braintrust, Limitless, Julius, Cognition, Cartesia, and adjacent ventures.

Investments and boards

• Ndea (AI research): Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, January 2025 to present.
• Zapier (workflow automation): Co-founder, 2011 to present (board member).
• ARC Prize Foundation (nonprofit): Co-founder and Board Member.
• AI portfolio companies: Personal investments include Braintrust, Limitless, Julius, Cognition, Cartesia, and adjacent AI and climate-technology ventures.

The combination of operating chief-executive role at Ndea, board roles at Zapier and the ARC Prize Foundation, and active personal-investment activity in AI is structurally distinctive among AI-research-lab chief executives.

Network

Knoop's longest-running professional relationships are with his Zapier co-founders Wade Foster (CEO) and Bryan Helmig, the long-running operating partnership that built Zapier from a 2011 founding to its current scale. The Ndea co-founder relationship with François Chollet anchors the AGI-research venture; the two also serve as co-founders and board members of the ARC Prize Foundation. The Y Combinator, Coatue Management, Factorial Capital, and Quiet Capital investor cohort overlaps with the senior-tier venture-capital base for AI research-first ventures. Knoop's personal-investment portfolio across Braintrust, Limitless, Julius, Cognition, Cartesia, and adjacent ventures extends his professional network across the broader AI-startup ecosystem.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Knoop occupies an unusual position among AI-research-lab chief executives. The combination of an operating-software-business co-founder credential at Zapier, a long-running nonprofit-AGI-evaluation co-founder role at the ARC Prize Foundation, and the current chief-executive role at Ndea differentiates him from peer Insurgent-lab founders who typically arrive from frontier-research-lab senior departures or from academic research programs. The closest peer comparator on a co-founder pattern is Eric Steinberger at Magic, or other software-business-to-AI-research co-founders; Knoop differs in the explicit AGI-paradigm bet that Ndea has organized around with Chollet.

Industry coverage has characterized Ndea as a "research bet" rather than a commercial competitor, with the principal value-add being the long-term resolution of the scaling-versus-program-synthesis debate. Knoop's commercial credibility from Zapier and the ARC Prize co-founder role anchor the institutional credibility for the bet, even at the modest disclosed capital base of approximately $43.5 million.

Outlook

Open questions over the next 6 to 18 months:

• Initial research-output milestones. Publications or model releases that demonstrate the program-synthesis-guided approach in practice.
• ARC-AGI progression. Whether scaling-laws-based foundation models continue to close the benchmark gap or whether the gap proves structurally durable.
• Series A timing. Subsequent fundraising as the next likely pricing event.
• Senior research-and-engineering hiring. Given the specialized talent pool for program synthesis and neuro-symbolic AI.
• Commercial product translation timing. Trade-off between basic-research depth and commercial-revenue urgency.
• Continued Zapier role. Whether the board-only Zapier engagement continues unchanged as Ndea operating-role demands grow.

Sources

• Mike Knoop personal site. Bio reference covering current roles and prior career.
• Mike Knoop LinkedIn profile. Career and education reference.
• Sequoia Capital Training Data podcast: Mike Knoop and the ARC Prize. Coverage of the AGI thesis and ARC Prize launch.
• TechCrunch: AI researcher François Chollet founds a new AI lab focused on AGI. Ndea launch announcement.
• VentureBeat: Forget Nvidia: Ndea wants to build AI that keeps improving on its own. Strategy and paradigm coverage.
• About Ndea. Company-page reference.
• ARC Prize Foundation. Benchmark and prize program co-founded by Knoop.