About
I'm Alec, co-founder and CTO of ThunderPhone. We build AI voice agents that handle real phone calls for businesses.
Based in San Francisco, I’ve spent most of my career building applied AI systems, starting before the current LLM era, working across computer vision, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and conversational AI.
I got my start on self-driving cars at Uber ATG, then worked on conversational AI at Expedia, building intent classification and language-understanding systems before large language models made that kind of work dramatically easier. At Sea Machines, I worked on computer vision and autonomous systems for marine vessels.
In 2023, I was the solo founder of SensorSurf (YC W23), where I built data infrastructure for robot fleets. Today, I’m building ThunderPhone, which helps businesses automate phone calls with AI.
I studied computer science at Ohio State and CU Boulder, where my graduate research in computer vision was published at ECCV 2022. You can find the fuller chronology on my Background page.
ThunderPhone
AI voice agents that handle real phone calls — answering inbound lines and placing outbound ones — from 2¢ a minute. Alex and I started it together; I run engineering as co-founder and CTO. It's the second company I've built, after SensorSurf (YC W23).
thunderphone.com ↗Other projects
TranslateMyCall
A free app that interprets phone calls between languages in real time, with no human interpreter in the loop.
Genealogy
My genealogy research published as an interactive family tree: generations of Bells, traced and sourced.
Photos
Blog
All posts →Hello, world
What this site is, and what I plan to put here.