Sasha Sheng

Sasha Sheng is a software engineer and entrepreneur, co-founder and chief operating officer of the artificial intelligence company TypeSafe AI TypeSafe AITypeSafe AI is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco, founded in 2024, that develops “System One” models which software calls directly and which output structured judgments with probabilities rather than text; its first public model is Jev. The company came out of stealth on September 15, 2026, announcing a $40 million seed round led by DCVC, and on October 9 of the same year announced an $870 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $7.5 billion valuation.Open the full entry. She worked on mobile apps and machine learning systems at Yahoo and Facebook (Meta MetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry), won a number of AI hackathons after leaving Meta, and in 2024 co-founded TypeSafe AI with Diogo Almeida and Erik Gafni.

Contents7 sections

Key facts

Early Life: Education

Sheng was admitted to Shanghai Jiao Tong University through China’s national college entrance exam and later moved to the United States to complete her studies at the University of Michigan. Public accounts of her degrees differ: one says she finished a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Michigan; another says she earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Michigan.⁠[1][2][1]

Since 2014Yahoo and Facebook

In 2014, Sheng joined the iOS team of Yahoo Mail and soon became its technical lead. She then worked at Facebook for seven years, first on mobile products for the feed and later, at her own initiative, on back-end machine learning; she led the development of a training-data labeling system that was adopted by several internal research teams. In all she spent about nine years at large technology companies in San Francisco, working on mobile apps and AI systems; she was a research engineer at Meta and its AI research unit FAIR.⁠[1][1][1][1][2][3]

2023Leaving Meta for AI Hackathons

After Meta’s layoffs ended her time at the company, Sheng did not join another large company but instead immersed herself in the new wave of AI tools and entered AI hackathons: in less than a year she took part in about 15 competitions and won 7 of them. On August 3, 2023, the official freeCodeCamp podcast aired an interview with her titled “Laid off from FAANG to Winning AI Hackathons,” covering AI engineering, AI safety, and how to bring more women into tech.⁠[1][1][2][2][2]

2024Co-Founding TypeSafe AI

In 2024, Sheng co-founded TypeSafe AI with Diogo Almeida and Erik Gafni and became its chief operating officer. She described the moment Almeida told her about the company’s vision as “taking a big breath of fresh air.”⁠[3][3][1]

September 15, 2026TypeSafe AI Comes Out of Stealth

On September 15, 2026, TypeSafe AI came out of stealth, released its model Jev, and announced a $40 million seed round; in October of the same year the company completed a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry at a $7.5 billion valuation.⁠[4][4][5]

Related Organizations, Websites, and Public Accounts

TypeSafe AI: Official website: https://typesafe.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

X: Public account: https://x.com/hackgoofer (opens in a new window)⁠[2]