Alex Shan may not have been old enough to legally buy alcohol in 2023, but he was still old enough to start his own company and join the AI boom. Shan was 20 when he was first introduced to James Alcorn, an investment partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, through a fellow Stanford University classmate. Shan, who started college at 16, had studied new ways to evaluate and monitor the performance of AI models at the prestigious Natural Language Processing Group at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. (The NLP Group at that point was led by Stanford professor Christopher Manning, one of the most-cited NLP researchers in the world.) For months, Alcorn and Shan, along with his childhood friends, Andrew Li and Joseph Camyre, brainstormed ideas for startups before landing on one related to Shan’s area of research. Monitoring the performance of AI models is particularly en vogue as AI agents explode in popularity but still make lots of mistakes. Lightspeed last year led back-to-back financings of Shan’s company, Judgment Labs, most recently valuing it at $175 million, including $32 million in new capital, according to a person with knowledge of the round. (SV Angel and Valor Equity Partners, known for heavily backing Elon Musk-related firms, also participated.)
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