Matthew Barnett is Co-Founder and President at Mechanize, a pioneering AI startup building virtual work environments, benchmarks, and training data to enable the full automation of the global economy.

Matthew earned a degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and spent two years as a researcher at Epoch AI, where he specialized in empirical forecasting of AI progress and its economic consequences.

A bold and data-driven thinker, Matthew co-authored influential research arguing that the primary value of AI lies in broad labor automation rather than concentrated R&D breakthroughs.

At Mechanize, Matthew and his co-founders secured $9.1M in seed funding at a $500M valuation from investors including Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and Google AI chief Jeff Dean.

Mechanize's focused strategy on high-quality RL environments and coding evaluations attracted the attention of Google, which entered talks for a deal valued at over $1.5B for the company's technology and talent just over 100 days after its seed round.