Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.
Plenty of startup founders and product builders envision what they’re making as something that will simplify processes or improve workflow for customers. Kiana Ehsani sees her creation as a means to spending more time outdoors.
Certainly there’s much more to it than that, but when Ehsani — the co-founder and CEO of Seattle AI startup Vercept — is running an ultramarathon, climbing up a mountain or skiing down one, she can’t help but consider how her technology makes it all the more enjoyable.
“I’m just the happiest when I’m in nature, when I’m not behind my computer, letting my mind be present in the moment, listening to the steps of my foot on the trail, or on snow or ice,” Ehsani said.
It’s what motivated her and her colleagues at Vercept to build Vy, an AI product that “sees” and understands computer screens like a human would. It records a user performing tasks across different software or websites — and then autonomously runs the same workflow from a natural language command.
The idea is to use AI to automate repetitive tasks, like entering data, producing video content, organizing invoices, and more. And Ehsani said Vy makes it so not everyone needs to know how to work so many specialized software programs.
“I don’t want to become skilled in every single dimension that exists out there,” she said. “The more time you’re not spending on repetitive work that is not using your brain power, then the more time you have to be creative.”
Ehsani’s goal is to be able to send emails or check code and Slack messages when she’s somewhere in nature without good internet service. Vy handles the tasks on its own and reports back about what it completed.
“I am most creative when I’m on a hike,” she said. “If I could just have that more often, to be able to have that creative mind, flowing and producing more, and I didn’t have to be stuck behind the desk, then the world would be my playground.”
‘Repeatedly transformed herself’
Ehsani’s journey to AI innovator and Seattle startup founder started in Iran, where she lived until she graduated from Sharif University. She ranked 64th in the country’s University Entrance Exam.
“I was a geek,” she said. “I was publishing papers as an undergrad, and I would go and give talks at conferences internationally, and I was so proud of what I was doing.”
She came to the U.S. in 2015 to get her Master’s and PhD in computer science at the University of Washington.
“Within the first year I realized, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of possibility in AI and I want to get more involved,’” Ehsani said.
After internships at Google and Meta, she joined Seattle’s Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) where she spent four years, overseeing the Ai2 robotics and embodied artificial intelligence teams as a senior researcher.
At the end of 2024, Ehsani launched Vercept alongside Oren Etzioni, the longtime AI specialist and UW professor who was founding CEO of Ai2. They were joined by Matt Deitke, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick.
Etzioni said that while some people are “all heart” — good people with high emotional intelligence — or “all brain” — smart, sharp and cerebral — it’s rare to find someone who is both. Ehsani, who he called brilliant, dedicated and intuitive, is that person.
“One uncommon thing about Kiana is how she has repeatedly transformed herself,” Etzioni said via email. “From a brilliant theoretician in Iran to a creative and award-winning vision and robotics researcher at UW and Ai2, to kick-ass founder and CEO now. And the best is yet to come!”
Competing with fewer resources
Ehsani remembers being frustrated and bored by the challenges that AI was being tasked to solve, such as simple image classification, just 10 years ago. She wanted to solve real problems and show that AI could interact with the real world.
That mindset drove her interest in computer vision and robotics research. But again, she grew frustrated by the slow pace of hardware development and decided she wanted to work with AI models and virtual robots that take actions on behalf of a user.
Growing up in Iran she had become accustomed to limited resources. Working in academia and then in research for a nonprofit, she again had to think outside the box and find ways to compete against big AI labs.
She still embraces a scrappy startup mentality as Vercept competes against OpenAI (Operator), Google (Project Mariner), Amazon (Nova Act), and others with tools that automate tasks across browsers and apps, fueled by advances in generative AI.
“That’s the mindset that made me grow more, and that’s why at Vercept we are training models a lot more efficiently and less resource-heavy than anyone out there,” she said. “We love being scrappy and proving that you don’t need billions and trillions of dollars to make AI work.”
Just this week, Vercept launched a newly built version of Vy that works on both Windows and MacOS. Ehsani said the app is more robust and Vercept’s benchmark results have improved drastically.
The startup has grown to a team of 12 and in June raised a $16 million seed round. In July, Ehsani lost Deitke, one of her co-founders, who was lured by Meta to join its newly formed Superintelligence Lab.
Deitke called Ehsani “an incredible leader and visionary” whose strong background in robotics makes her extremely well suited for working at the frontier of computer use, which he said is really just robotics without many of the challenges of the physical world.
“Working with her is infectious and inspiring,” Deitke said. “She has an incredible work ethic and is constantly energized and comes up with amazing ideas while brainstorming that only become obvious to the rest of us after a while.”
But he said more than anything, Ehsani’s a “tremendous person” who leaves a lasting mark with her kindness and ambition.
“She’s truly an exceptional person,” Deitke said.
Several weeks ago, Ehsani was challenging herself in nature yet again, this time with a 50k ultramarathon that featured 8,000 feet of elevation gain.
Freezing, thirsty, and dragging herself up a hill, she likened the race to running a startup, writing on LinkedIn about how despite everything going wrong and plans changing last minute, she still had to stay flexible and believe she’d make it, even when others seemed ahead.
“That’s the story of my life,” she told GeekWire. “I live that every day.”
