Luke Zettlemoyer

Luke Zettlemoyer is a Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He is also a Senior Research Director at Meta, where he is site lead for FAIR Seattle. He received his Ph.D. from MIT and was a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh.

Before Meta, he was a Senior Research Manager at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence from 2015 to 2018, and he has led the AllenNLP project there. His research covers natural language semantics, large-scale language model pretraining and how to train and deploy large language models. He co-developed RoBERTa.

His honors include being named an ACL Fellow, a PECASE award, an Allen Distinguished Investigator award and multiple best paper awards. He was named a 2025 AI2050 Senior Fellow by Schmidt Sciences. His public profiles describe him as a researcher and academic. They do not describe him as a fund manager or as someone who founded a company.

Public information about his angel activity is limited. He has no known fund or syndicate, and he has not published an investment thesis. The record comes from funding announcements that name him as an angel investor or founding advisor, and from one third-party database entry.

In April 2026, NeoCognition emerged from stealth with a $40M seed round co-led by Cambium Capital and Walden Catalyst Ventures, with participation from Vista Equity Partners. Press coverage names Zettlemoyer among the angel investors and founding advisors. The others named include Lip-Bu Tan, Ion Stoica, Dawn Song and Ruslan Salakhutdinov. NeoCognition is building AI agents that learn from their environments and specialize into domain experts over time.

CB Insights also lists him as a co-investor in the mid-2025 seed round of Kotoba Technologies, a Japanese AI company. That entry shows the round at $11.83M and dated 6/30/2025. It appears on a profile page for another investor, so treat it as a database listing and not a company announcement.

The public record shows seed-stage investments in AI companies, particularly ones with research-driven founding teams. He has not published check sizes, a target stage or a geographic focus. Those details are not public, so none are given here.

• NeoCognition: builds self-learning AI agents that specialize into domain experts. Angel investor and founding advisor in its $40M seed round (April 2026).
• Kotoba Technologies: Japanese AI company. CB Insights lists him as a co-investor in a seed round dated 6/30/2025.

• pulse2.com/neocognition-40-million-raised-for-specialized-ai-agent-pla
• thenextweb.com/news/neocognition-40m-seed-self-learning-ai-agents
• finsmes.com/2026/04/neocognition-raises-40m-in-seed-funding.html
• cbinsights.com/investor/toru-shimada
• ai.meta.com/people/1450721039196474/luke-zettlemoyer
• cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/luke-zettlemoyer
• alphaxiv.org/@luke-zettlemoyer
• ai2050.schmidtsciences.org/fellow/luke-zettlemoyer