A small team, one large idea.

Voices of History started on a study break. Josh and I were walking through Butler Library at Columbia during finals week, and instead of studying we got to talking about who we would sit down and have dinner with if we could choose anyone from history. He said Nikola Tesla and I said Leonardo da Vinci.

Then we realized that we could actually make those conversations happen. With the tech boom of the last few years, everything was finally there to build a faithful, source grounded AI representation of a historical figure, as long as they left behind enough of a record. So, rather than studying for finals, we got to work on an MVP and called it School of Athens, after the Raphael painting that brings great minds from different eras into one conversation. That was the original vision, and it still is: build source grounded historical figures anyone can talk with, and put figures from the past in conversation with each other.

We took a rinky dink first version, a GPT wrapper whose most sophisticated piece was the prompt engineering, with blocky characters we built in three.js, to a couple of Columbia entrepreneurship events. People kept telling us to turn it into a company. So we did, incorporating Voices of History on May 5, 2026, and it grew into four ways to meet the past: classrooms where a syllabus becomes people a student can question, a game you can play on your phone, exhibits for museums, and a studio for creators. Same standard of accuracy behind every one of them, and a different door into the same room.