William Falcon — Founder

I created PyTorch Lightning & founded Lightning AI to make building, training, and deploying AI more accessible. My path into tech was unconventional. I began my career as a U.S. Navy officer in the SEAL training pipeline (BUD/S), but was injured in training and was medically dropped. After leaving the military, I searched for a second calling worth dedicating my life to - moving through finance, startups, and academia before finding my home in AI. I later co-founded and sold an AI fintech company, then entered AI research during my PhD at NYU, where I worked under AI pioneers, Kyunghyun Cho and Yann LeCun, with research support from the NSF and Google DeepMind, and conducted research at Facebook AI Research. During my PhD, I built PyTorch Lightning to remove friction from AI research and development. What started as an open-source project has grown into a global ecosystem with over 380M downloads. Today, as CEO of Lightning AI, I’m focused on building the AI cloud that developers actually want - one that unifies research, training, and inference into a simple, scalable workflow on the reliable infrastructure. Lightning is used by over 350,000 developers worldwide and has powered hundreds of millions of model runs.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a leader in AI and deep learning technologies.

Location: New York, New York, United States

Experience: 15 yrs 8 mos

Skills

Ai
Deep Learning
Product Management

Career Highlights

Creator of PyTorch Lightning with 380M+ downloads.
Founded Lightning AI, serving 350k+ developers.
PhD research under AI pioneers at NYU.

Work Experience

Global AI Frontier Lab

Advisory Council Member (2 mos)

Facebook AI

Facebook AI Research (FAIR) - Research Scientist intern (6 mos)

Lightning AI

Founder, CEO (6 yrs 11 mos)

NYU Center for Data Science

PhD Student, Deep learning (CILVR lab) (on leave) (4 yrs 7 mos)

CommonBond.co

NextGenVest (acquired by Commonbond) - Co-founder and CTO (1 yr 8 mos)

Columbia University

Deep Learning Researcher - Liam Paninski lab (1 yr 9 mos)

Goldman Sachs

Software Engineer - Marquee Strategy Studio (11 mos)

Freelance iOS Developer

Founding PM & iOS Lead (7 products launched) (2 yrs 2 mos)

Merrill Lynch

International Financial advisor (1 yr 11 mos)

Naval Special Warfare Command

Special Reconnaissance Team 1 (SRT-1) - temporary assignment (LTJG) (1 yr 1 mo)

Naval officer - BUD/S candidate (Ensign) (2 yrs 4 mos)

Education

Doctor of Philosophy - PhD at New York University

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) at Columbia University

William Falcon

Founder

New York, New York, United States15 yrs 8 mos experience

Highly StableAI ML Practitioner

Key Highlights

Creator of PyTorch Lightning with 380M+ downloads.
Founded Lightning AI, serving 350k+ developers.
PhD research under AI pioneers at NYU.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a leader in AI and deep learning technologies.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

AiDeep LearningProduct Management

Other Skills

Cloud ComputingPythonNLPReinforcement LearningComputer VisionFintechiOS DevelopmentiOSUser ExperienceMachine LearningObjective-CSwift

About

Experience

Global ai frontier lab

Advisory Council Member

Jan 2026 – Present · 2 mos

Facebook ai

Facebook AI Research (FAIR) - Research Scientist intern

Jun 2019 – Dec 2019 · 6 mos · New York City Metropolitan Area

Pretraining computer vision models. (Unsupervised deep learning research).

Deep LearningComputer Vision

Lightning ai

Founder, CEO

Apr 2019 – Present · 6 yrs 11 mos · New York City Metropolitan Area

Lightning AI is the first AI cloud (the AWS for AI).
Creator of the deep learning framework PyTorch Lightning - which makes large-scale model training accessible to everyone, not just frontier-labs.
$500M+ ARR. 400k+ users. 38k GPUs. 7 datacenters.
(https://github.com/williamFalcon/pytorch-lightning).

Deep LearningAICloud ComputingPython

Nyu center for data science

PhD Student, Deep learning (CILVR lab) (on leave)

Aug 2018 – Mar 2023 · 4 yrs 7 mos · New York City Metropolitan Area

Advisors: Yann LeCun, Kyunghyun Cho.
I develop biologically inspired deep learning and reinforcement learning techniques with applications to neuroscience, NLP and computer vision. Pretraining large-scale models on 4,000+ GPUs.

Deep LearningNLPReinforcement Learning

Commonbond.co

NextGenVest (acquired by Commonbond) - Co-founder and CTO

Dec 2016 – Aug 2018 · 1 yr 8 mos · New York City Metropolitan Area

Co-founder, CTO, 4mm+ in VC funding. We help 65k+ students receive 85mm+ of financial aid.

AIFintech

Columbia university

Deep Learning Researcher - Liam Paninski lab

Sep 2016 – Jun 2018 · 1 yr 9 mos · New York City Metropolitan Area

Pretraining computer vision models to decode neural activity. Published paper: "Neural Networks for Efficient Bayesian Decoding of Natural Images..." (NIPS 2017, CCN 2017).

Deep LearningComputer Vision

Goldman sachs

Software Engineer - Marquee Strategy Studio

Aug 2015 – Jul 2016 · 11 mos · New York City Metropolitan Area

Marquee strategy studio founding team.

Freelance ios developer

Founding PM & iOS Lead (7 products launched)

Jun 2013 – Aug 2015 · 2 yrs 2 mos · New York City Metropolitan Area

Built and launched 7 iOS apps from scratch, serving millions of monthly users in aggregate. Led product and engineering for multiple early-stage startups as founding PM and lead engineer. Products were featured in major press outlets including TechCrunch and Business Insider.

iOS DevelopmentProduct Management

Merrill lynch

International Financial advisor

Jul 2011 – Jun 2013 · 1 yr 11 mos · San Diego, CA

Part of team managing 100mm+ of HNW assets.

Naval special warfare command

2 roles

Special Reconnaissance Team 1 (SRT-1) - temporary assignment (LTJG)

May 2010 – Jun 2011 · 1 yr 1 mo

Temporarily assigned in a non-operator augment role supporting SRT-1 while recovering from BUD/S injuries and actively training to return to BUD/S. Ultimately medically discharged when post-Iraq drawdowns eliminated SEAL junior-officer holding billets.

Naval officer - BUD/S candidate (Ensign)

Jan 2008 – May 2010 · 2 yrs 4 mos

Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL (BUD/S) trainee (classes 272, 277).
Selected to attend training as an officer (12 spots from 1,200 applicants nationwide). Completed Junior Officer Training Course (JOTC), a leadership and mission-planning course for SEAL officer candidates.
Progressed through training multiple times and was medically rolled due to training injuries. Did not complete BUD/S and did not earn the SEAL Trident due to repeated medical rolls.