Sara Hooker is Co-Founder of Adaption Labs, an AI startup building systems that continuously adapt and learn in real time. She is a leading researcher in model efficiency, interpretability, and multilingual AI.

Hooker earned her PhD in Computer Science from Mila Quebec AI Institute and spent five years as a research scientist at Google DeepMind. She joined Cohere in 2022 as VP of Research, leading Cohere Labs and founding Cohere For AI.

Hooker pioneered the Hardware Lottery concept and was named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI 2024 and Fortune's 13 Top AI Innovators. She founded Delta Analytics in 2014 and was a founding member of Google's first AI research office in Accra, Ghana.

Adaption Labs raised $50 million in seed funding led by Emergence Capital in February 2026, with participation from Mozilla Ventures, Fifty Years, and Threshold Ventures. The company challenges the AI scaling paradigm by focusing on gradient-free learning and efficient adaptation.

Under her leadership at Cohere Labs, the Aya project collaborated with over 3,000 researchers across 119 countries to expand multilingual AI to 101 languages. She built globally diverse research teams and hired talent from underrepresented regions including Africa.