Hey, I'm Jan Carbonell 👋
I deeply enjoy building with LLMs.
Background
- Born in Barcelona, raised in Europe. Bullish on America. Now based in San Francisco.
- Taught myself to code through hackathons and started working in AI in 2017.
- Started and sold akademy.ai and steelshift.com. Still chasing my unicorn 🦄
- Came to the US on a full-ride “la Caixa” Foundation fellowship to attend Cornell Tech.
- Built for OpenWork (YC P26), SciPhi (YC W24), Krea & Strive School (YC S19).
- Still tinkering. Always keen to meet new people building cool things. Send me a DM!
Things I've built
Sort:
- A New Sense: Obstacle detection via Ultrasound for the visually impaired (2017)
- ASL Texter: ASL real time translation with CNNs (2019)
- BG3 Overlay: Keeps BG3 Honour Mode runs on track (2026)
- Caveman Sauvant: Make LLMs speak less but think same. (2026)
- FlowToken: Animates streaming LLM text (2024)
- Fluid Reality: First underwater AR experience (2017)
- GMeets Agent: AI agent that can join Google Meets (2025)
- Instant Translate: Live bilingual transcription and translation (2026)
- InsureGPT: Health insurance matching from 100+ PDFs (2023)
- Local Browser Use: Fully local, single-file browser agent (2025)
- Missed Call Agent: A voice agent that acts as your voicemail (2026)
- Motherload re:built: A modern twist on the classic game built in WebGPU (2026)
- NegotiateGPT: An agent to coach you for job interview negotiations (2023)
- Omniguide: Haptic navigation for visually impaired people (2016)
- Open Ventilator: Low-cost ventilator approved for human trials (2020)
- PubMedQA Benchmark: RAG vs. frontier models on medical questions (2024)
- Simplicaid: TurboTax for Medicaid PDFs (2023)
- Splitbot: Splits group expenses on Telegram (2017)
- Tunerkit: Observability and data to fine-tuning your LLMs (2024)
- Vertex: Tried to kill Google Search in a weekend. Failed, made great friends. (2017)
- Window.ai Chat UI: The first Chat UI for what later became OpenRouter (2023)
- ZoningGPT: Extracts key zoning data from hundreds of US municipalities (2023)
Hackathons and events
I started in Barcelona with HackUPC, then co-organized BCN.ai and Social Impact, followed by Maritime & Blue Logistics. At Cornell Tech, I organized HackGPT, LlamaHack, and OSSHack. I spent my final semester trying to build a startup in Boston and interning in SF, but still squeezed in IvyHacks in NYC and the BCI NeuroHackathon in SF.
Still curious? The longer story
- My first computer arrived when I was six. I built websites in Dreamweaver and played strategy games. Ogame gave me a reason to code: keeping my fleets safe while I slept.
- At 13, when I could not afford a Mac to develop iPhone games, I learned to jailbreak iPods and helped my friends and others do the same (thanks Geohot!).
- As a teenager, I babysat, worked as a lifeguard, and waited tables. The first time I made real money was selling roses on Sant Jordi: $2,000 in 16 hours. That was also the day I decided to become a founder :)
- If we ever grab coffee, ask me how I accidentally got food and drink service outlawed at the beaches in Barcelona.
- I studied Industrial Engineering because I couldn't commit to one engineering discipline and wanted to learn a bit of everything. It taught me to break messy systems into smaller problems.
- I interned at Accenture and spent a year pursuing a second degree in Business. I would rather build things than sell decks about things that have already been built.
- But I also learned this: "If we're all going to eat, someone has to sell."
- In 2017, I got into AI, before it was cool. I started Saturdays.AI so people could learn by building, then bootstrapped akademy.ai, which Strive School acquired. At The Motley Fool, I implemented BERT and a knowledge-search system at scale before GPT-3 and ChatGPT were a thing.
- A full-ride "la Caixa" Foundation fellowship brought me to Cornell Tech. I earned a dual degree, researched long-context RAG with Sasha Rush, and organized several LLM hackathons.
- After Cornell, I moved to San Francisco and the rest is history. Well, a history that's still developing :)
