About

I’m an AI founder, researcher, and writer, currently focused on how organizations can build AI that actually works with human expertise instead of trying to replace it. My path has run from academic research on language and sentiment, to founding NLP startups, to leading AI at BetterUp, and now to building Bigspin.

I grew up between German and American cultures and have spent most of my career in the Bay Area. A lot of my work sits at that intersection: systems thinking with a practical, product-driven bias — curious, fascinated by ideas, but always anchored in whether something actually helps people do better work.

Bigspin AI

I'm co-founder and CEO of Bigspin AI. We’re building tools that help teams shape AI behavior through structured feedback and collaboration—not guesswork. We work with companies in healthcare, insurance, and other high-stakes industries where AI needs to be both powerful and trustworthy.

Previously, I was VP of AI at BetterUp, where I led AI coaching products used by thousands of people. Before that, I co-founded Motive Software (acquired by BetterUp in 2021).
LinkedIn →

Research

Before founding companies, I did AI research with the Stanford NLP Group, focusing on natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and how social context shapes communication. This early work shaped how I think about AI today: not as a static model problem, but as an ongoing conversation between humans, data, and context.

• Measuring News Sentiment (Journal of Econometrics, with Shapiro & Wilson, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco) — Developed the Daily News Sentiment Index, which is still actively maintained and used by the Federal Reserve. →
• A Computational Approach to Politeness (ACL, with Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jurafsky, Leskovec, Potts) — Created computational methods for understanding social dynamics in language. Built the Stanford Politeness Corpus, which researchers continue to use in NLP and social computing work. →
• Sentiment Expression in Social Communication (KDD, with Potts and colleagues) — Developed models for understanding emotional expression in text and social contexts. →

My research has been cited more than 1,500 times and continues to be used by academic and governmental institutions.

Press

Featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company.

Contact

Email: moritz@bigspin.ai
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sudhof
Twitter: @mmooritz

Subscribe to Emergence: sudhof.substack.com