Make AI that is beautiful and safe for individuals to use to depict themselves by building the tools for anyone to secure and leverage the generative power of their identity and ideas.
Our story
Dr. Sarah Laszlo founded Sublimate in 2025. She is a computational neuroscientist with over 20 years of experience in AI and a former tenured professor whose career cuts across some of the world’s most well-known academic institutions (MIT, Carnegie Mellon, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Binghamton University) and companies (Google X, Google Research, and Visa). Sarah has over 50 patents and a legacy of students, interns, and team members who continue to contribute meaningfully to the field.
Sarah leveraged her extensive knowledge of artificial intelligence and the human brain to develop light weight AI image models that can generate hyper-realistic human likeness. The models sit within a unique, consent-based architecture alongside a suite of novel editing and reinforcement learning tools that allow every model’s output to automatically improve over time on the basis of real-world feedback.
Sarah is passionate about giving people whose likeness and data power a model the ability to give or deny consent at every stage of the model’s training and every time it’s used.
Our co-founder, Emi Kolawole has spent her career working across media, technology, and design. She has degrees from Wellesley College, American University, and The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her first job out of college was working for Bill Moyers, and she eventually went on to work at FactCheck.org, Washington Week with Gwen Ifill,The Washington Post, the Stanford d.school, and Google X. Emi is deeply passionate about the future of media in all forms and firmly believes that joy and invention walk hand-in-hand. When we experience joy, hard things don’t get easier, but they definitely feel easier and more rewarding.
After leaving Google X (where Sarah and Emi started on the same day), the two stayed in touch, discussing Sarah’s passion for K-pop and Emi’s passion for media. In late-night chats, Emi would encourage Sarah to keep following her love of K-pop as she tinkered, putting her skills towards moving the AI image model SOTA forward.
That’s why Joy is our core value at Sublimate. We don’t build simply because something needs to exist in the world; we find a way in to the problem that lights us up from the inside first.