Meet the Inflection Fellowship cohort at Edge Esmeralda 2026

Introducing the six founders who will be participating in the Inflection Fellowship at Edge Esmeralda 2026.

The Inflection Fellowship is a month-long residency for builders chasing ideas that feel too early, too weird, or too ambitious for traditional investors. It's supported by Long Journey, whose team has collectively backed 30+ unicorns. This year's fellows will build and live together, tackling frontier problems across human-computer interaction, machine learning, and healthcare.

With Long Journey mentors, founder dinners, and the full Edge Esmeralda village behind them, the cohort are working on social digital cameras, quantum data sharing, new AI canvases, and more.

Meet this year’s fellows.

Meet the Residents

Heewon Ahn

Heewon is working on next-generation AI interfaces, inspired by Xerox PARC’s invention of the GUI. At Edge, he wants to run experiments on non-text AI interaction: a drag and drop canvas that translates spatial actions and multimodal inputs.

Heewon has been working at startups since age 16, and most recently was the Founding Designer Stan, a startup which scaled from 0 to $30M building online stores for Creators.

Krystal Grover

Krystal is an incoming medical student at McMaster University. At Edge, Krystal will be assisting with Alethios studies taking place during the village, with a particular interest in the wearable-based work exploring how physiological signals, social connection, and wellbeing can be measured in real-world community settings.

Previously, she founded The Bloom Red Project, a period equity initiative that has donated thousands of menstrual products and worked to reduce stigma around menstrual health. Her recent research has focused on vaping and smoking cessation, substance co-use, and translating health research into practical, public-facing tools.

Sebastian Kot

Sebastian is the co-founder of London Quantum Group (LQG) building a blind data platform that enables secure, privacy-preserving healthcare analysis without exposing raw medical records.

Previously, Sebastian filed a patent in cryptographic acceleration and won awards from quantum computing companies, the UK National Health Service and the world’s largest hedge fund. Before working on the health data problem, Seb founded one of Central Europe’s largest nightlife brands, with a successful exit, along with chairing entrepreneurial and charitable non-profit initiatives.

Jake Lewin

Jake Lewin is the founder of dijie.me, a modern point and shoot camera connected to a social network. At Edge, Jake is excited to meet fellow entrepreneurs, scale dijie.me sales, and continue to improve the customer experience.

Previously, Jake studied at the University of Michigan before dropping out to co-cofound tabschocolate.com, a viral dietary supplement brand, which he exited in 2023.

Ryaan Aqid

Ryaan is researching how to engineer the conditions that produce human flourishing at civilizational scale. His thinking is rooted in the moments history bent forward, like Newton’s annus mirabilis, Nietzsche at Sils-Maria, Franklin’s Junto, and Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, the small, deliberate environments where the future was decided. At Edge, he is raising a fund around this thesis, running experiments at the frontier of his thinking, and building the next iteration of memetic housing and deep-tech research environments.

Ryaan is a junior at Cornell, has lived at The Residency in San Francisco, and has founded several startups in AI infrastructure and data reinforcement learning. He founded the first hacker house and the first longevity association at Cornell, and is now building a YC for nonprofits, beginning with a hacker house in San Francisco.

Pranjali Awasthi

Pranjali Awasthi has spent the last few years building AI products from the ground up. Most recently Slashy, an AI-native email client that understands your relationships, not just your inbox (YC S25). Before that, an AI copilot for researchers at HF0. These days she’s most interested in where AI meets neuroscience: software that works more like the mind it’s helping. Always down to meet thoughtful people and riff on ambitious ideas.

Pranjali is working on software that reads your situation—who you’re talking to, what’s at stake, the history—and tells you how to play your next high-stakes message. She’s building it and prototyping it at Edge.

Lucas, Fellowship Director

Lucas is a founding team member of ten communities where founders raised over $100m. At Edge, Lucas is excited to cultivate a magical experience for these great builders.

Previously, Lucas co-founded startups backed by Mark Cuban, A16Z CSS, and HF0 and studied EconCS at Harvard.

Want to follow their progress? We’ll be sharing updates from the Long Journey fellows throughout the month. Make sure to follow along on X @JoinEdgeCity.

— The Edge Esmeralda Team ☀️

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