This profile has not been claimed and data may not be accurate.
Founder214Past founder
95th percentile
Investor0Not (yet!) an investor
Combined
fast.ai co-founder, Forbes Top 20 Women in AI, deep learning educator
Credibility
this founder typical founder (50th pct)
Domain Expertise · 99th percentile
- Selected by Forbes as one of the 20 most incredible women in artificial intelligence — a notable Tier 2 recognition.
- Wikipedia page for Rachel Thomas averages significant monthly views as a widely-known AI educator and researcher.
- Wikidata / Wikipedia entity exists for Rachel Thomas — confirmed notable public figure.
- Featured in The Economist, MIT Technology Review, and Forbes for fast.ai's deep learning course — Tier 3 press recognition for domain expertise in AI education.
- Google Knowledge Graph maintains a knowledge panel for Rachel Thomas as a recognized AI educator and researcher.
- Identified researcher with a mathematics PhD and deep learning research output at fast.ai and USF.
- Deep domain expertise in AI ethics and deep learning education, evidenced by founding the USF Center for Applied Data Ethics and creating the world's most popular free deep learning course.
Relationship Matrix
Founder score
- 98%Probability of being accurate (98%)Past founder and co-founder of fast.ai, a non-profit deep learning research lab and education platform.
- 98%Probability of being accurate (98%)fast.ai was co-founded with Jeremy Howard, confirming co-founders.
- 97%Probability of being accurate (97%)Selected by Forbes as one of the 20 most incredible women in artificial intelligence — a notable Tier 2 recognition.
- 97%Probability of being accurate (97%)Identified GitHub account @racheltho confirmed by name match and bio referencing fast.ai co-founder role.
- 95%Probability of being accurate (95%)fast.ai ranks #14,396 on the Majestic Million (global domain prominence).
- 95%Probability of being accurate (95%)15,121 LinkedIn followers — broad professional reach.
- 95%Probability of being accurate (95%)Wikidata / Wikipedia entity exists for Rachel Thomas — confirmed notable public figure.
- 95%Probability of being accurate (95%)Active builder with 31 public non-fork repos on GitHub.
- 95%Probability of being accurate (95%)GitHub account has 2,224 followers — a real developer audience.
- 95%Probability of being accurate (95%)Deep domain expertise in AI ethics and deep learning education, evidenced by founding the USF Center for Applied Data Ethics and creating the world's most popular free deep learning course.
- 95%Probability of being accurate (95%)GitHub account created in 2012, giving a tenured account age of over 12 years.
- 92%Probability of being accurate (92%)fast.ai created the most popular free deep learning course in the world, demonstrating significant product traction and distribution.
- 90%Probability of being accurate (90%)Founded the company behind fast/fastrace, a flagship open-source project with 1,092 stars on GitHub.
- 90%Probability of being accurate (90%)Recent public push to repo 'rachel-blog' 9 days ago, though no personal repo exceeds 500 stars.
- 90%Probability of being accurate (90%)Demonstrates personal technical depth: mathematics PhD from Duke University and early engineering roles at Uber, with deep learning research output.
- 88%Probability of being accurate (88%)Featured in The Economist, MIT Technology Review, and Forbes for fast.ai's deep learning course — Tier 3 press recognition for domain expertise in AI education.
- 88%Probability of being accurate (88%)fast.ai's deep learning course has been featured in The Economist, MIT Tech Review, and Forbes — corroborated press coverage of the company's product traction.
- 88%Probability of being accurate (88%)30 private/restricted GitHub contributions in the last year indicate active code shipping in private repos beyond the public profile.
- 85%Probability of being accurate (85%)Writing has made the front page of Hacker News 10+ times — strong community reach and thought-leadership distribution.
- 85%Probability of being accurate (85%)Delivered keynotes at ODSC West, SciPy, ICML AutoML Workshop, PyBay, QCon.ai, JupyterCon, and Linux Foundation Open Source Summit — strong thought-leadership reach.
- 85%Probability of being accurate (85%)Board of Directors and Diversity & Inclusion Chair at Women in Machine Learning — recognized community leadership in AI.
- 80%Probability of being accurate (80%)Contributed commits/PRs to 1 external repo they don't own — open-source collaborator signal.
- 80%Probability of being accurate (80%)Identified researcher with a mathematics PhD and deep learning research output at fast.ai and USF.
- 80%Probability of being accurate (80%)TEDx SF 2018 talk and O'Reilly AI Con 2017 talk demonstrate public thought-leadership distribution in AI.
- 72%Probability of being accurate (72%)Google Knowledge Graph maintains a knowledge panel for Rachel Thomas as a recognized AI educator and researcher.
- 65%Probability of being accurate (65%)Wikipedia page for Rachel Thomas averages significant monthly views as a widely-known AI educator and researcher.
What you likely need
As the co-founder of fast.ai and a leading voice in AI ethics and education, you'd benefit most from events that connect you with other technical founders and researchers working at the intersection of AI accessibility and responsible deployment. Your profile spans deep technical credibility, strong community reach, and a track record of building widely-used educational tools — events that let you exchange ideas with peers at that level would be most valuable. Given your current role at AnswerDotAI and your base in Brisbane, gatherings focused on AI research, open-source tooling, and the ethics of AI deployment would align closely with where you're building next.
Would you attend these IRL Festival events?
We will tune and customize your Founder Festival experience to make sure you get invited to the events that would be most valuable to you.
- tacticalA small roundtable dinner with AI ethics researchers and policy-focused founders to pressure-test responsible AI deployment frameworks.
- introsA deep learning founders dinner with fast.ai alumni and PyTorch ecosystem builders to explore open-source AI tooling opportunities.
- positioningA positioning workshop with other AI education founders on monetizing open-source courses and sustaining non-profit research labs.
- hiringA hiring happy hour targeting ML researchers and engineers interested in joining early-stage AI R&D labs like AnswerDotAI.
- introsA Women in Machine Learning leadership dinner with WiML board alumni and NeurIPS workshop organizers for community-building and co-authorship intros.
- tacticalAn open-source AI tools workshop with maintainers of popular ML libraries (PyTorch, Hugging Face, fastai) to align on community standards and contribution models.
- wellbeingA wellbeing and sustainability session for technical founders and researchers navigating the pace of AI development while maintaining research integrity.