Irina Kukuyeva

Dr. Irina Kukuyeva is a business operations-focused technology leader who helps companies understand and unlock customer behavior and feedback loops to build scalable, profitable companies with market fit.

She has collaborated with over 100 companies and is a frequent speaker on the topic of building and scaling companies with product-led growth and AI, most recently for Slauson & Co.

She’s invented and implemented algorithms on a global scale, led global data and AI teams, and taught graduate students best practices for developing real-time AI algorithms.

Irina mentors over 100 start-ups a year at many accelerators, including Techstars, the Founder Institute, and the UCLA Venture Accelerator.

She is an advisory board member for a pediatric MedTech accelerator (CTIP) and the UCLA Master of Data Science program.

She holds a PhD in Statistics from UCLA, where she invented a novel image compression algorithm for her PhD thesis — and found similarities between two storms on Jupiter, a finding confirmed by NASA Juno’s mission years later. It is now a special case of the many popular AI models today.