Sara Hooker

Sara Hooker is an Irish computer scientist, co-founder and chief executive officer of Adaption Labs, prior vice president of research at Cohere where she led Cohere Labs and the Aya multilingual project, and the originator of the Hardware Lottery framing.
Nextomoro
6 min read
Sara Hooker

Bio

Sara Hooker is an Irish computer scientist, born in Dublin, who works on machine-learning model efficiency, algorithmic bias, and continual learning. She is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Adaption Labs, the San Francisco AI research startup she established in 2025 with Sudip Roy, prior senior director of inference computing at Cohere. She previously served as vice president of research at Cohere from 2022 to 2025, where she led the lab's research arm Cohere Labs (formerly Cohere For AI) and the Aya multilingual project. As of May 2026, she leads Adaption Labs following its February 2026 $50 million seed round at a reported approximately $500 million valuation, led by Emergence Capital Partners.

At a glance

Origins

Hooker was born in Dublin to Irish parents who served as teachers in remote African villages. She grew up across South Africa, Mozambique, Lesotho, Eswatini, and Kenya through age nineteen. The cross-cultural childhood and the exposure to underrepresented populations in technology has been characterized in her public framing as a structural influence on her subsequent research and program-building emphasis on multilingual and low-resource AI.

She entered Carleton College on a Davis United World College Scholarship and completed dual majors in economics and international relations, graduating in 2013. She earned her PhD in computer science from Mila - Quebec AI Institute, the Montreal-based deep-learning research institute founded by Yoshua Bengio, with research on model interpretability, sparsity, and efficient learning at scale.

Career

Hooker's professional career organizes around three sequential research-leadership roles, with the founding of Adaption Labs as the principal entrepreneurial transition.

She founded the Bay Area nonprofit Delta Analytics in 2014, an organization providing technical capacity-building to nonprofits and underserved communities. The Delta Analytics work continued in parallel with subsequent industrial research roles.

She joined Google Brain in 2017 as a research scientist, where she focused on model interpretability, sparsity, and the broader question of how compute-architecture constraints shape AI research directions. The principal published artifact from the Google Brain period is "The Hardware Lottery" (2020), a widely cited paper arguing that ideas in AI often succeed or fail based on whether they happen to fit existing hardware rather than their inherent merit. The paper established the "Hardware Lottery" framing as a recurring reference point in subsequent AI-research methodological commentary. During the Google period she also helped establish Google's first AI research office in Accra, Ghana, expanding the company's research footprint in Africa.

She moved to Cohere in April 2022 as Vice President of AI Research and head of the Cohere Labs research division (formerly known as Cohere For AI). Under her leadership, Cohere Labs ran the Aya Project, a multilingual large-language-model program covering 101 languages with contributions from more than 3,000 researchers, and shipped the Aya Expanse 8B and 32B multilingual models in 2024. The lab also launched the Cohere For AI Scholars program for early-career researchers from underrepresented regions, extending the multilingual-and-distributed-research thesis Hooker had built from the Google Ghana period.

She co-founded Adaption Labs in 2025 in San Francisco with Sudip Roy, Cohere's prior senior director of inference computing. The company was announced quietly on October 7, 2025 with a contrarian public framing against the dominant scaling thesis of frontier AI labs. Hooker stated publicly that "the formula of just scaling these models hasn't produced intelligence that is able to navigate or interact with the world." The seed round closed in February 2026 at $50 million led by Emergence Capital Partners, with Mozilla Ventures, Fifty Years, Threshold Ventures, Alpha Intelligence Capital, E14 Fund, and Neo participating, at a reported approximately $500 million valuation. The company has stated plans for worldwide hiring through 2026 and organizes its research around three thematic pillars: adaptive data, adaptive intelligence, and adaptive interfaces.

Affiliations

  • Delta Analytics: Founder, 2014 to present.
  • Google Brain: Research Scientist, 2017 to 2022.
  • Cohere: Vice President of AI Research and head of Cohere Labs, April 2022 to 2025.
  • Adaption Labs: Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, 2025 to present.

Notable contributions

Hooker's published record runs through model-efficiency, interpretability, and multilingual-AI research artifacts at Google Brain and Cohere, with the founding of Adaption Labs as the principal entrepreneurial output.

  • "The Hardware Lottery" (2020). The widely cited paper framing how hardware constraints shape AI research directions. The "Hardware Lottery" terminology has become a recurring reference in AI methodological commentary.
  • Cohere Labs (April 2022 to 2025). Founding leader of the research arm of Cohere; expanded the lab's footprint and shipped the Aya program output.
  • Aya Project (Cohere, 2023 to 2024). Multilingual large-language-model program covering 101 languages with contributions from more than 3,000 researchers; Aya Expanse 8B and 32B models released in 2024.
  • Adaption Labs (2025). Co-founded the AI research startup with Sudip Roy. Adaptive-data, adaptive-intelligence, and adaptive-interfaces research pillars; the contrarian-thesis framing against scaling-and-compute strategy.
  • Recognition. Fortune top 13 AI innovators 2023; TIME 100 AI 2024; founding member of Google Brain's first AI research office in Accra, Ghana.

Investments and boards

  • Adaption Labs (AI): Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, 2025 to present. Privately held; reported approximately $500 million valuation following the February 2026 seed round.
  • Delta Analytics (nonprofit): Founder, 2014 to present.

No public personal angel-investor activity is on record outside the founder-and-operator role at Adaption Labs as of May 2026.

Network

Hooker's longest-running professional relationships span the Cohere Labs research-and-program team, the Google Brain interpretability-and-efficiency cohort, and the Mila academic-research community. The Adaption Labs co-founder relationship with Sudip Roy, also a former Google and Cohere colleague, anchors the new company. The Cohere Labs Scholars program network and the broader 3,000-researcher Aya contributor base extend her professional network across multilingual and low-resource AI research worldwide. The Delta Analytics nonprofit work parallels these professional relationships and connects Hooker to the broader nonprofit-and-community technology-capacity ecosystem.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Hooker is one of the principal research-leaders to transition from a frontier-AI-lab research-arm head role to founding a contrarian-thesis Insurgent lab. The closest peer comparisons in the recent founder cohort are research-first founders of 2024 to 2025-vintage Insurgents who departed senior research roles at Cohere, Google DeepMind, or OpenAI to pursue alternative architectural or methodological directions. Hooker differs in the explicit "continuous-learning" research framing that Adaption Labs has organized around, which positions the company against the dominant scaling-and-compute strategy of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind rather than competing within it.

Industry coverage has characterized Adaption Labs as a high-profile research bet on a non-consensus paradigm, with Hooker's prior research-leadership tenure at Cohere Labs and Google Brain as the principal credibility signal. Whether the bet produces measurable research output that converts into capability evidence is one of the more-watched questions for 2026 and 2027 in the Insurgent cohort.

Outlook

Open questions over the next 6 to 18 months:

  • First published research output. Specific gradient-free learning techniques and any empirical demonstration at scale.
  • First model release. Whether Adaption Labs ships a model and how it benchmarks against frontier-tier comparators.
  • Commercial strategy. Translation from research output into a stated commercial thesis (own consumer or enterprise product, licensing of adaptive techniques, or hybrid posture).
  • Series A timing. Whether the company accepts follow-on capital at a higher valuation, and on what timeline relative to the February 2026 seed.
  • Hiring momentum. Particularly from Cohere, Google, and the broader academic ML community.
  • Durability of the continuous-learning framing. As competitor labs incorporate similar adaptive techniques into their inference pipelines.

Sources

Person Adaption Labs
About the author
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