Fangchang Ma and Edward Zhang, co-founders of Nuance Labs, just announced a $50 million Series A round last month. Now they're joining us at AI House for a conversation about building a Seattle research lab and taking it to market.

What we'll cover:

  • Building Nuance Labs: the founding story, product development, and what the team is learning along the way.

  • From research to GTM: how a research-first team is shifting toward go-to-market.

  • The tech: a high-level look at how Nuance builds one model for real-time audiovisual conversation.

Who should come:

Seattle founders, builders and technical talent. Capacity is limited, and approval is based on your registration answers.

We track no-shows, and it affects approval for future events. If you can't make it, please cancel your registration in Luma.

About the speakers:

Fangchang Ma (CEO) and Edward Zhang (CTO) worked side by side on applied research at Apple, building core technology and prototyping new experiences across iPhone, Vision Pro and Apple Intelligence. Fangchang holds a PhD in robotics from MIT. Edward holds a PhD in graphics and vision from the University of Washington. They started Nuance on a simple premise: the next leap in AI won't come from what models say, but from how they say it.

About Nuance Labs:

Nuance Labs is a Seattle-based research lab building a foundation model for audiovisual conversation: AI you can see and hear, that listens, reacts and responds in real time. Rather than putting a face on top of a text exchange, Nuance models the full dynamics of human interaction, including timing, backchannels, facial expression and gaze. In September the company raised a $50 million Series A round led by Lightspeed, with participation from Accel, South Park Commons, NVIDIA and Define Ventures.