Kanjun Qiu

Kanjun Qiu is the co-founder and CEO of Imbue, a San Francisco AI company that builds tools to put software under its users' control. Trained in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, she wrote Sew Electric with Leah Buechley at the MIT Media Lab, served as chief of staff to Dropbox cofounder Drew Houston, and co-founded the AI recruiting company Sourceress in 2017. With Josh Albrecht, she co-founded the research company Generally Intelligent in 2021; it came out of stealth in October 2022 and renamed itself Imbue in September 2023 while raising a $200 million Series B. Her other work includes A Vision of Metascience, a 2022 essay with Michael Nielsen, and Sculptor, a 2025 Imbue app for running coding agents in parallel.

Now at: Imbue and Outset Capital
Badges: Founder
Links: X and LinkedIn

Timeline

By 2014

Sew Electric at the Media Lab

After a B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, she joins the High-Low Tech group at the MIT Media Lab as an M.Eng. student of Leah Buechley, building LilyPad Arduino projects and DIY tutorials for her master's thesis. By February 2014, she, Buechley and Sonja de Boer publish the tutorials as Sew Electric, a book of e-textile projects that teach electronics and programming.
2017–2019

From Dropbox to Sourceress

After serving as chief of staff to Dropbox cofounder Drew Houston, she co-founds Sourceress with Josh Albrecht in 2017; the AI recruiting startup goes through Y Combinator's Summer 2017 batch and raises $13 million. In December 2019, Forbes names her to its 2020 30 Under 30 list in enterprise technology.
2020–2021

Co-founding Generally Intelligent

In December 2020, she and Albrecht launch Generally Intelligent, a podcast of conversations with deep learning researchers. She co-founds the research company Generally Intelligent with Albrecht in 2021, after shutting down Sourceress.
October 2022

An essay on metascience

In October 2022, she and Michael Nielsen publish A Vision of Metascience, an essay on improving the social processes of science such as peer review and grant funding. The essay is cited in the White House report Science: A New Golden Age.
October 2022

Out of stealth with $20 million

Generally Intelligent comes out of stealth in October 2022 with $20 million in initial funding from backers including former GPT-3 engineering lead Tom Brown and Dropbox cofounders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. With Qiu as CEO, the lab plans to study the fundamentals of human intelligence that machines lack through tasks set in complex 3D worlds.
September 2023

Renaming the lab Imbue

In September 2023, the company raises a $200 million Series B led by the Astera Institute at a valuation of over $1 billion and renames itself from Generally Intelligent to Imbue. With access to 10,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, Imbue trains its own models and builds AI agents that reason, starting with agents that code.
2025

Sculptor for coding agents

Imbue releases Sculptor as a research preview in 2025, and in September 2025 she announces a rebuilt version that runs multiple coding agents in parallel inside safe containers.
As of October 2026

CEO of Imbue

She is co-founder and CEO of Imbue, the San Francisco AI company that builds tools to put software under its users' control, and aims to rekindle the dream of the personal computer through Imbue Studio. With Ali Rohde and Josh Albrecht, she also invests in early-stage founders at Outset Capital.