I'm Alec, co-founder and CTO of ThunderPhone. We build AI voice agents that handle real phone calls for businesses.
Based in San Francisco, I've spent most of my career building applied AI systems, starting before the current LLM era, working across computer vision, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and conversational AI.
I got my start on self-driving cars at Uber ATG, then worked on conversational AI at Expedia, building intent classification and language-understanding systems before large language models made that kind of work dramatically easier. At Sea Machines, I worked on computer vision and autonomous systems for marine vessels.
In 2023, I was the solo founder of SensorSurf (YC W23), where I built data infrastructure for robot fleets. Today, I'm building ThunderPhone, which helps businesses automate phone calls with AI.
I studied computer science at Ohio State and CU Boulder, where my graduate research in computer vision was published at ECCV 2022.
More at alexandertbell.com.