Our Story
In 2022, as president of the Sciences Po student union, Cyril Estier was struck by how little impact and how much frustration mandatory sexual harassment training created among students across institutions. He later met Sasha Gutenmacher at UC Berkeley, where they saw how well-designed inclusion programmes could genuinely shift campus culture. Together, they developed a new idea: a conversational AI that listens, adapts, and engages. They tested it out during Sasha’s thesis at Oxford, and it worked! Learners retained more, changed attitudes, and demonstrated measurable behavioural improvements. In 2025, they founded Arti to help organisations drive real cultural change by delivering effective sexual harassment education.
Meet the Founders
Cyril Estier
Cofounder and CEO
Cyril leads Arti’s sales, partnerships, and product direction. With a background in Economics and Statistics from Sciences Po x UC Berkeley and Data Science for Public Policy at the LSE, his work focuses on the intersection of AI and social impact. Cyril conceived the idea for Arti after seeing first-hand the failures of traditional harassment training while leading the student union at Sciences Po. At Spotify, he built large-scale data infrastructure supporting machine learning teams across personalisation and search. His expertise in applied data science, public policy, and ethical AI informs Arti’s mission to deliver an impactful learning tool.
Sasha Gutenmacher
Cofounder and CTO
Sasha heads product development, design and technical operations at Arti. An engineer by training at EPFL, he is a Shirley and SSF Scholar at the University of Oxford, his academic research focused on proving the efficiency of using a personalised chatbot for sexual harassment prevention in the UK, setting the foundations of Arti. In the past, he has worked on promoting STEM learning for girls around the globe at Technovation and developed secure data-management systems at Katana Digital. Sasha brings deep experience in AI development, learning design and data security.
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