Google alumni founded or led 76 other organizations, the most among the labs we compare
Data as of
Labs linked to at least 2 other organizations
16
Organizations founded or led by their alumni
162
Of these, founded by an alum
98
Which AI labs have the largest networks of alumni founders and leaders? Among the labs we compare, our data puts Google first. We link 76 other organizations to its alumni.
Key findings
We link alumni of 16 AI labs to 162 other organizations.
Alumni founded 98 of those organizations.
We count 170 moves between the labs since 2010.
Which labs have the largest families?
We use alumni to include current and former staff. A founding must come after the year a person joined the lab; a top role can count from that year on. Company units count separately in these family trees.
Google alumni founded the most organizations: 53Organizations outside the lab that its former or current staff founded or led from the year they joined it. Universities are left out. Founded by an alumLed by an alum only
Stacked bars for 8 labs, split into organizations founded by alumni and organizations led by alumni only.
Source: People of Superintelligence career records from biographies and OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.
Data table
Lab
People who worked there
Organizations founded
Led only
Founders
Google
340
53
23
52
Microsoft
195
19
22
18
Meta
127
19
6
18
IBM
84
10
11
6
OpenAI
82
8
3
12
Amazon
65
2
7
2
Apple
15
8
0
5
Alibaba
19
3
1
2
Salesforce
8
3
0
2
Baidu
11
2
0
2
Tencent
10
2
0
2
xAI
4
2
0
1
Cohere
10
1
1
1
NVIDIA
41
1
1
1
Huawei
14
0
2
0
Samsung
6
0
2
0
We identify 100 distinct alumni who founded the 98 organizations. A person can found several organizations, and a founding team can connect an organization to several lab families.
Larger labs have more people who could become founders; fuller public career histories can also increase a lab's count, so family size alone cannot show how much an employer helped later organizations form.
The family trees
We list founded organizations for the 3 largest families. Each entry gives the founding year and founders we identified. Organizations with more founders come first, then the oldest.
Intent Lab connects to the most lab families through its founders: 4. Intent Lab links to Google, Meta, Alibaba and NVIDIA through 1 founder.
Moves between the labs
The moves chart groups company units under their parent company. Anthropic had the largest balance of moves in minus moves out: 15. These counts include added positions.
The largest flows between the labs run from Google to OpenAI and from Microsoft to Google: 15 moves each170 moves from 2010 on between the AI labs we study, by the lab a person left (left) and joined (right). A move can be a full move or a second position.
A flow diagram of 170 career moves between large AI labs since 2010.
Source: People of Superintelligence career records from biographies and OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.
Career data comes from the biographies on this site and from OpenAlex author records, as of 15 October 2026. People whose OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mixed are left out of citation figures.