About

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I'm Ilse Funkhouser, a startup specialist with a background in machine learning and data science. For about the last three years I've been using AI in startups and helping them integrate it. I live in Funchal, on Madeira.

Right now I'm CTO at Science to People, where we're building a science-communication platform. It fights disinformation by making it easier for content creators to produce fact-based content.

Before that I was Chief Product Officer and Head of AI Engineering at Careerspan, a career-coaching platform. The core idea was that you're always seen through a particular lens, so your career coaching and your resume should be too. We built a multi-agent system that talks people through their past jobs using the self-reflection techniques career coaches use (it started on GPT-3.5), plus resume tailoring in production, and we tracked LLM costs from day one.

I've also started things. I founded One Roof, a family communication app that turned daily life updates into a personalized weekly summary for everyone, wherever they lived. Before that I was cofounder and founding engineer at ProdPerfect, which built automated QA tests from real user traffic. I wrote the product's initial core architecture and was its sole maintainer until late 2018; the company went on to raise a $2.6 million seed and then a $13 million Series A.

Earlier still, I was a software engineer at MobCraft Beer in Milwaukee, where I built the e-commerce site from scratch before the company went on Shark Tank. They got an offer and turned it down.

I have a B.A. from Northwestern in mathematics and economics, with a minor in psychology, and a master's in data science from the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay.

This blog is where I write about what I'm building and what I think about it. The projects page has the longer list.

You can reach me at ilse@corporateshill.com, or find me on LinkedIn.