Our Founders

Vanessa Yan

Vanessa Yan

Co-Founder & CEO

Yale — First in Yale history with 4-year combined BS/MS in CS & Statistics
Meta — AI Researcher
Apple — Product Leader
Noah Verke

Noah Verke

Co-Founder & CTO

Amazon — Senior AI Engineer
OctoAI — Sr. ML Engineer — acquired by NVIDIA
Michelle Yan

Michelle Yan

Co-Founder & CRO

McKinsey — Management Consultant
Wharton — MBA

Backed by Silicon Valley's best venture capitalists

Sequoia
Craft Ventures
Pear VC

Trusted by leading brands

SamsoniteASWEveredenShortyLOVEAlly ShoesSimanChouChouJ Martin
SamsoniteASWEveredenShortyLOVEAlly ShoesSimanChouChouJ Martin

Our 'Why'

Our founding story
Back when Michelle and I (Vanessa) lived in Hong Kong, we built a lifestyle brand infused with cosmopolitan sensibilities while rooted in local culture. In this venture, we felt the pain of committing a lot of capital and time upfront to build up our brand presence. We needed a way to create a more efficient content flywheel that establishes our premium brand positioning.

Years later, I met Noah at an AI infrastructure startup. We bonded as colleagues and shared a similar excitement over democratizing brand-building using cutting-edge technology. Coupled with Michelle’s experience at McKinsey serving Fortune 500 retail companies and observing their marketing needs, we decided to found Ise AI.
Our mission
Our mission is to enable the next generation of entrepreneurs to build their brands quickly and cost-effectively.
Ise (pronounced 'ee-say'): What's behind a name?
We came up with the company name “Ise” because it is reminiscent of the iconic brand Issey Miyake, one of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’s favorite brands. Jobs loved the brand so much that he chose an Issey Miyake mock-neck turtleneck as his everyday uniform. As a former Apple employee, I aspire to Apple’s dedication to excellence at the intersection of technology and retail.
Our core thesis
  1. We live in an attention economy. The brands that win are the ones that consistently produce high-quality content at scale.

    Creating that volume of content manually is too expensive and too slow. AI makes it possible.
  2. As AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from traditional production, the competitive advantage shifts.

    It’s no longer about who can produce content — it’s about who knows what content to produce.

    The winners will be the companies that:
    • Identify the right ideas
    • Test creatives systematically
    • Use data to determine what drives conversion and loyalty

    In the AI era, distribution and analytics — not production — become the moat.