We build the way we're asking you to show up.

Directly. Honestly. With care for the people involved. We think how you build something says as much about it as what you build.

Anastasia Uglova

Co-Founder & CEO

Anastasia helped coin the term "agentic tech" and has spent years taking that thinking directly to builders and capital, shaping how the ecosystem understands AI built for human agency. She holds an MS in privacy and information security from UT Austin, spent six years as CIO of an East Africa edtech startup, and led AI security at Deloitte. She founded Better Half on the conviction that the most important problem in AI right now is a human one.

Diana Chen

Head of Brand & Growth

Diana brings a wide range of expertise to the work: she started her career as a lawyer, became a tech founder, and spent the past several years leading content and marketing at web3 and blockchain companies, including building Rehash: A Web3 Podcast into a leading voice in the decentralization space. She is drawn to problems that sit at the edge of what technology can do and what people actually need. When she is not working, she is usually in the mountains with her dog.

Meredith McBranch

Psychology Intern

Meredith holds a psychology degree from Whitman College and brings research experience across behavioral science, neuroscience, violence prevention, and trauma-informed advocacy. She is drawn to the intersection of psychology and technology, and to the question of how systems can be designed to support rather than undermine human wellbeing.

Bernhard Borges

Co-Founder & CTO

Bernhard holds a PhD and brings an unusual combination of cognitive science, distributed systems, and cryptography to the work of building AI that actually serves people. He built advanced reasoning models at SFU, Max Planck, and PwCC, served as a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, and was Chief Scientist at Fluence, where he designed protocols for verifiable compute and zero-knowledge proofs. He believes the hardest problems in AI are not technical ones.

Suriel Arnold

Prompt Engineer

Suriel shapes how Better Half thinks, talks, and listens. He has been training custom AI agents for years and brings a strong operational background from seven years as operations liaison to the Bank of America CIO. He is drawn to the intersection of language, behavior, and design, and thinks carefully about how systems communicate and what they communicate about themselves. A martial artist and violinist outside of work, he brings unusual precision to the craft.

HOW WE WORK

The team has to practice
what the product teaches.

We are a small team, and we think that is a feature. Fewer people means more accountability, clearer communication, and less room to avoid the conversations that need to happen. We give direct feedback. We repair things when they break. We don't pretend everything is fine when it isn't.

Small and intentional

We hire slowly and carefully. Every person here carries real weight, and we would rather have fewer people doing meaningful work than more people doing diluted work.

Honest over comfortable

We say the hard thing instead of the easy thing. We assume good intent and expect directness in return. Disagreement handled well is how good decisions get made.

Deliberate over fast

We don't manufacture urgency. We move carefully through things that deserve care, and quickly through things that don't. Quality isn't something we sacrifice for speed.

ADVISORY BOARD

Guided by people who've spent
their careers on this problem.

Ahmed Ghappour, Privacy Architecture

Ahmed is an Associate Professor at Boston University School of Law and former General Counsel at Nym Technologies. His career spans legal scholarship, product counseling, and litigation across surveillance, national security, and privacy-enhancing technologies. He brings deep expertise to the question of what it actually means to build a system that cannot betray its users.

Roshni Lulla, Eval Design

Roshni is a neuroscientist at USC's Brain & Creativity Institute studying how large language models develop antisocial traits and how to identify AI misalignment before it causes harm. Her research on emotion processing and behavior uses neuroimaging and is supervised by Antonio Damasio and Jonas Kaplan. She brings rare precision to the question of what it means for an AI system to behave well.

Nathanael Fast, AI Ethics

Nathanael is Director of USC's Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and co-founder of the Psychology of Technology Institute. His research on algorithmic management and tech ethics has been featured in the WSJ, NPR, and HBR, and he serves on the National Academy of Sciences committee on AI risk management. He brings both scholarly depth and practical experience to the question of how AI systems should be held accountable.