Portrait No. 001
Piper Cyterski
CEO
Build Pipelines
Raised — 3.5M
I started Pipelines because I had a product vision I couldn’t ignore. In my previous role, I often saw the right decisions months before they were made, yet had no ownership to act on them. That frustration crystallized into a realization: I had both the intuition and ambition to build something better myself. The AI industry is full of breakthroughs, yet teams still struggle to turn research into reliable, production-ready AI systems. There’s no shared infrastructure, no consistent playbook, and no way to iterate quickly with confidence. I felt compelled to address that gap. Pipelines is my answer: an end-to-end software platform for AI R&D that helps teams build better AI - collecting high-quality data, evaluating model behavior, and training agents with assurance and speed. The turning point was recognizing that I wasn’t just observing what should exist in this industry - I was capable of creating it.
In her words
“I started Pipelines because I had a product vision I couldn’t ignore.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
Women are still a minority in tech, and that shaped much of my early career. At my last company, I was the first woman hired, and it took more than six months for the team to reach even 20% women. To this day, none of the key strategic roles are held by women. Operating in that environment taught me how to build credibility without formal authority, advocate for product direction, and trust my judgment even when I was the only one with my perspective in the room. Leaving to start Pipelines was both a challenge and an opportunity. I’m not an engineer, yet I set out to build an end-to-end AI R&D platform and convince world-class technical talent and investors to join me. That required clarity of vision, speed in decision-making, and the willingness to own the full weight of the outcomes. I’m proud that investors backed the company quickly and that I was able to assemble a founding team that believed in what we’re building from day one. The hardest part of being a founder isn’t the chaos - it’s learning to direct it. The freedom is real, but so is the responsibility to prioritize well, delegate early, and keep moving with conviction even when the path isn’t neatly defined.
Chapter II
Your vision.
I’m obsessed with the gap between what AI could do and what teams are actually able to build today. Companies have extraordinary ideas, but turning them into working AI systems still requires reinventing the wheel: collecting data from scratch, designing evaluation workflows, building custom RL setups, coordinating feedback cycles, and stitching together tools that were never built to work together. Pipelines exists to remove that friction. We’re building an end-to-end platform that gives teams a shared environment for developing AI - where data collection, human evaluation, and agent training happen in one coordinated loop. The change I want to see in the world is simple: AI teams should spend their time creating new capabilities, not rebuilding infrastructure. When the foundation is finally standardized, teams will be able to iterate faster, learn from one another, and bring far more ambitious, reliable AI systems into reality.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
I want to build software that becomes a household name in tech - not for the recognition, but because it would mean we truly changed how people develop AI. AI will reshape the world, and I want Pipelines to give people the ability to build systems that reflect their passions and missions, not just what big labs decide is possible. If my work leaves one lasting impact, I hope it’s this: that women see proof that they can bet on themselves, define their own path, and build something that reflects the full value they have to offer - without being boxed in by anyone else’s expectations.