Ben Ray

Ben is a generalist focusing on existential risk. While attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he founded vrtumind, an AI alignment startup building recommendation algorithms for meditation. He graduated magna cum laude in Molecular Biology, leaving college early to work on his startup full-time. After fighting with the AI cold-start problem, he ventured into hardware, engineering low-cost EEG sleep wearables and deploying products to beta users.

Prior to heading Automation at Retro, he built zero-knowledge circuits for the coordination of trust between agents. He sees the translation of aging biology into therapeutics as a critical public interest and envisions open source tooling as the ultimate source of leverage on hard problems in aging therapeutics. At Retro, Ben hacks low-cost robots into performing skilled, highly replicable biological protocols.