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Ben Schmidt

Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Corporate Startup Lab

Bio

is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Carnegie Mellon's Corporate Startup Lab, where he works with fellows and corporate partners to develop innovations inside their own organizations and unlock more of their teams' potential. He has spent nearly two decades building artificial intelligence, across the field's major shifts from early machine learning research to today's agentic systems. He is the founder and CEO of HeyLoopy, an AI company in Pittsburgh that helps organizations keep the knowledge their teams depend on accurate and usable as it changes, and he brings to the Lab both the view of a startup founder and the experience of driving innovation inside a large global corporation.

Ben co-founded RoadBotics in 2016 and led it as CEO. The company used computer vision and machine learning to turn street-level imagery into objective infrastructure assessments for cities and engineering firms, and was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer in 2020. Michelin acquired RoadBotics in 2022, and Ben stayed on as Chief Technology Officer of Michelin's Mobility Intelligence group, leading the integration across teams in the United States and France. Earlier, as a data scientist and then chief technology officer at kWantera, he shipped production machine learning for energy markets when that was still rare.

His work in AI began in research. Ben holds a PhD and a BS in Bioengineering from the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied how networks in the brain communicate using non-invasive recording and machine learning on neural signals. Today he builds by running an AI and agentic software factory, an approach that lets a small team ship like a much larger one.