Iulian Serban
GenAI researcher, technical leader and product builder
I build AI products from first idea to market. For seven years I led Korbit, a Khosla Ventures-backed startup: first an AI Teacher that brought personalized learning to more than 20,000 learners in 50+ countries, then the Korbit Code Reviewer, which reviewed over 100,000 pull requests. Korbit was acquired by Boost Security in 2026.
Until recently I was Senior Director of R&D at LawZero, working alongside Yoshua Bengio. Before that I did my PhD in machine learning at Mila and the Université de Montréal, on conversational systems, natural language processing and reinforcement learning. I've published 40+ research papers and co-authored two books.
These days I'm building a city-building game played with real bricks.
Latest writing
- Built in 2 weeks: A living Lego town where my 8-year-old is mayor
My kiddo builds with real bricks on the living-room floor. Two webcams and a small neural network turn them into a living 3D city, and its citizens write him letters with problems to solve.
Selected work
- 2026Lego Town
A side project: two webcams read real bricks on the living-room floor and turn them into a living 3D city with problems for kids to solve.
- 2025–2026LawZero, Senior Director of R&D
Co-led research, engineering and product, and built the organization's product strategy and roadmap.
- 2019–2026Korbit, founder and CEO
Built an AI Teacher and then an AI code reviewer used by 180+ paying customers. Acquired by Boost Security.
- 2014–2019PhD research at Mila
Generative models for dialogue, evaluation of conversational systems, and reinforcement learning.