Jaclyn Rice Nelson is co-founder and chief executive of Tribe AI, an AI services firm she started in 2019 with Noah Gale. She is known for turning a network of independent AI engineers into a services business that builds AI products for companies (TechCrunch).
Eight Years at Google
She spent most of her career at Google, working with enterprise customers and incubating new products. She joined Helpouts, Google’s marketplace for live video sessions with experts, as one of its first business staff; it was her first close work with engineers and her first time building a marketplace for expertise. Helpouts launched globally and grew to 150 people before Google shut it down (Unite.AI).
Learning the Talent Problem at CapitalG
She moved to CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth equity fund, as an early employee and built an expert network of Google specialists for its portfolio companies. Advising companies such as Airbnb and Stripe, she saw that even well-funded growth companies struggled to hire data scientists and machine learning engineers.
Starting Tribe AI
That observation led to Tribe AI. It began as a way to place contract AI talent and grew into a services firm that builds projects with a network of more than 500 contractors. Tribe was bootstrapped for six years before raising a $3.25 million seed round in 2024. Read our review of Tribe AI.
“AI is the next gold rush. Advances in generative AI create the urgency and means for every company to become an AI company.”