creators

Sara Hooker: Adaption Co-founder and CEO

Sara Hooker is co-founder and CEO of Adaption, building AI that keeps learning after training. She was VP of research at Cohere and led Cohere Labs.

Sara Hooker is co-founder and chief executive of Adaption, the San Francisco company registered as Adaption Labs, Inc., which she started in 2025 with Sudip Roy, formerly director of inference computing at Cohere. The company builds AI systems that keep learning from what they meet rather than being frozen at the end of a training run; it raised a $50 million seed round led by Emergence Capital, announced on 4 February 2026, and brought in Hugo Larochelle as scientific lead in July 2026. She was VP of research at Cohere, where she led Cohere Labs, the company's nonprofit research lab, and its multilingual Aya initiative; Cohere's own page says the lab was called Cohere For AI until it was renamed in April 2025. She left Cohere in 2025. Before that she was a research scientist at Google Brain and Google DeepMind, where from 2017 she worked with Geoffrey Hinton and Samy Bengio, helped establish Google's research lab in Ghana, the first of its kind in Africa, and wrote “The Hardware Lottery”, on how the hardware that happens to exist decides which research ideas look like they work. She grew up moving between Mozambique, Eswatini, Kenya and Liberia, and went to middle school in Mozambique in Portuguese. She took her PhD in computer science at Mila supervised by Hugo Larochelle and Aaron Courville, and graduated from Carleton College in 2013. TIME named her to its TIME100 AI list in 2024.

Specialization

model efficiency, multilingual AI, adaptive learning systems, ML research leadership

Country

United States