Thank you,
John Whaley
We built this to say thank you. Everything on it is public and cited, and none of it came from anywhere you did not put it yourself.
He built an accelerator that takes no equity, on purpose, so that experienced founders would not be deterred from taking part.
John Whaley is co-founder and CEO of Inception Studio, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose mission is to help experienced founders build the next generation of AI companies. It started small: a pilot in Lodi in November 2022. It grew to seven cohorts in 2023, launched MIT AI Build Week, and reached fourteen cohorts in 2024 with an expansion to Tokyo. The community has now welcomed 264 founders who have started more than 68 companies and raised over 259 million dollars.
Before Inception Studio he founded three cybersecurity companies: Moka5, UnifyID and Redcoat AI. As founder and CEO of UnifyID he built passive authentication and behavioural biometrics that Prove acquired in June 2021. He is an expert in compilers, cybersecurity and machine learning, holds a Stanford PhD awarded the Arthur Samuel Best Doctoral Thesis Award, and holds EECS degrees from MIT.
Speaking at the AI Summit at Stanford on The Cure Is a Computation: AI and the Future of Healthcare.
This page exists to say thank you for showing up and doing the work in public. Every claim on it is cited below and checkable. The fuller picture our research put together is not published here, and will not be. It is yours the moment you claim it.
The record
Every line below is cited to a primary source you can open.
Co-founder and CEO of Inception Studio, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that takes zero equity, first cohort November 2022
Inception StudioInception Studio has welcomed 264 founders who started 68+ companies and raised over 259 million dollars
Inception StudioFounder and CEO of UnifyID, acquired by Prove, announced 1 June 2021
ProveFounded three cybersecurity companies: Moka5, UnifyID and Redcoat AI
Inception Studio
@john-whaley
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This name is held for you, not by us. Claim it and the fuller model we researched becomes yours, on your own storage, for you to correct or delete.
There is more we found than is shown here. It is not published and it will not be. It is yours when you claim it.
Sign in and it is yours.
John, one tap is all this takes. Use an account you already have and @john-whaley is yours. Nothing new to sign up for, and no password to invent.
Signing in only proves the name is yours. Nothing is posted anywhere, nothing is shared, and it stays free.
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Both cards, your spaceID and your 🤫 ID, are designed to live in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet so a check-in is a tap rather than a form.
Not yet issuable. A pass has to be signed with an Apple Pass Type ID certificate, and we do not hold one yet. The pass itself is built and waiting; we would rather say so than show you a button that quietly fails.
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Where this came from
- Role and session read from the event programme, captured 31 July 2026, via AI Summit at Stanford
- Title, mission, timeline and programme statistics, via Inception Studio
- Independent confirmation of the UnifyID founding and acquisition, via Prove