Mike Lyons
Founding Engineer · Startup CTO
Email | mdl0394@gmail.com
City | San Francisco
Site | https://MikeLyons.org/
Github | https://github.com/frenchie4111
AI × firmware × software. I build products people love, and I’m looking to push what hardware can do.
Experience
hi finance
CTO / Co-Founder
May 2025 - Present
- Lead engineering as co-founder. Built a custom agent harness and software factory that writes and ships its own code. Built a company that helps students get grants. We helped >4,000 students earn more than $4m in grant funding.
Stealth AI Startup
CTO / Co-Founder
Mar 2024 - May 2025
- Co-founded a pre-seed startup and raised $2.5M with the goal of modernizing the HVAC controls industry by deploying AI/ML stacks on the edge
Verkada
Head of Software, Intercom
2021 - Dec 2023
- Built & Led the Software team (8 engineers) that shipped the Intercom product line. Required mastery of cameras, WebRTC (audio/video) and access control. Launched as Verkada’s most successful new product line (9 months to ship, sold $14m in the first year)
- Before that: Led the team to rebuild the Access Control product line’s firmware/backend to shift control logic & inference to the edge compute devices
Dor Technologies
Pre-Seed → Series A (Exited)
Head of AI/ML
Cofounder
2015 - 2021
- Founding engineer, later hiring, mentoring, and leading the AI/ML team as it grew to 10
- Responsible for the sensor-fusion based algorithms that powered our battery-powered IoT device for tracking customer foot traffic
- Built a camera powered data collection device and the supporting data pipelines for labeling data & retraining models
Mark One / MyVessyl
Software Engineer
2014 – 2015
- Designed and built the backend infrastructure behind an AI-driven consumer hardware device.
Apple
Software Engineering Co-op
2013 - 2014
- Worked on the Mobile Device Management (MDM) protocol, the interface that millions of Apple customers use to manage fleets of Apple devices
Earlier
- Technical Cofounder at CareerLabs (2015 – 2016). Software engineering intern at InstallNet & Aertight Systems, Annapolis MD (2011 – 2012).
Open Source
Ness
Creator & Primary Author
Open Source | 2026 - Present
- An open-source IDE for coding with agents: parallel agent sessions across git worktrees, each with its own terminal, shell, and a browser the agent drives directly.