Who we are

World-class engineers and marketers who have built software at scale for top enterprises

Co-Founder and CEO

Vanessa Yan

Vanessa worked as an AI engineer for Meta and an AI product manager for Apple. Her work has been published in top AI conferences like NeurIPS and ACL. She later served as a Senior Principal Product Lead at OctoAI and Interim Head of Product at OrcaDB. Vanessa was the first in Yale history to earn a Bachelors and Masters in Statistics and Data Science as well as a Bachelors in Computer Science within four years.

Co-Founder and CRO

Michelle Yan

Michelle worked closely with Fortune 500 retail brands when she worked as a consultant in McKinsey's Marketing and Sales practice in the past 3 years. She led strategic programs on digital transformation and profit growth at these retail brands. Michelle is working towards her MBA in Marketing and Finance from Wharton, and she is a Magna Cum Laude graduate from Columbia University.

Co-Founder and CTO

Noah Verke

Noah was formerly an engineer at Amazon and OctoML, where he architected scalable Machine Learning systems for deploying LLMs and Computer Vision models.

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 retail brands quickly and cost-effectively, while ensuring creatives are beneficiaries in an AI-enabled future.

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 beliefs

1. We live in an Attention Economy. Virtually all businesses and individuals will require an exorbitant amount of high-quality content to build their brands, an expensive and time-consuming task without the help of AI.
2. Humans should be at the center of an AI-enabled future. Our customers drive the creative process. They are typically brand managers and creative directors who have a strong vision for their brands. They come to Ise because they need a much faster way to bring their creative vision to reality. With Ise, they can turn their ideas into campaign launches within minutes.
3. Humans should be compensated for their creativity. Since the beginning of Ise’s journey, we have engaged and hired photographers and artists to be in the driver seat of building category-defining technology. Our platform compensates creators who contribute their artistic vision in the form of photographic composition, helping them recurrently monetize past work. On the Ise platform, photographers and artists earn passive income from instant digital photoshoots, without being constrained by the boundaries of time and space with traditional photoshoots. Ise builds technology that serves humans, not replaces them.

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