Published by The Boston Globe, June 10, 2025
Daniela Rus.
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Daniela Rus, cofounder, Liquid AI
Cambridge startup Liquid AI debuted its powerful analytical and chatting applications last year and raised $250 million from investors, marking the greatest success story for a local artificial intelligence startup in years.
The team behind the company, now chasing better known rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, included three MIT students and their adviser, computer scientist Daniela Rus.
Rus has been a fixture on the AI scene since she came to MIT in 2003, fresh off a MacArthur “genius” grant for her work developing robots. Nine years later, the university named Rus to lead the school’s famed Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Born in Communist Romania during the Cold War, Rus and her family immigrated to the United States in 1982. She studied at the University of Iowa before earning a doctorate at Cornell University in 1992. She taught at Dartmouth College before moving to MIT.
Inspired by the simple brain structure of a roundworm, Rus and her cofounders, Ramin Hasani, Mathias Lechner, and Alexander Amini, developed an AI technique with fewer software “neurons” than the large language models of OpenAI and others. That means Liquid AI requires less computing power (and electricity).
The company, valued at more than $2 billion, has about 55 employees at its Kendall Square headquarters.
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Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.
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