Pursuit

Our mission is create economic opportunity. We transform lives by training talented adults to build careers in tech and raise their salaries from $18K to $85K+.

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In 2025, we made a deliberate shift at Pursuit: to become an AI-native organization.

Not just in what we teach, but in how we work.

This meant rethinking how every team operates — from recruiting to curriculum, from admissions to employer partnerships. We created space for learning, experimentation, and building in-house.

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Every team in the room shipped something live by the 9pm deadline. Not a pitch. Not a prototype. A working product with a real link.

Congrats to Bo Moldenhauer, Dikshyant Giri, and Michael Fehdrau, Team CYA on the Other Side, this hackathon's winners. They built the CYA NYC Adventure App (https://t.co/PBhDnGwVjo), a randomizer that generates a custom NYC night out based on your vibe, crew, and budget.

This is what cross-cohort learning is for: put newer Builders next to people further along, give everyone the same deadline, and let the work prove what they're capable of.

Learn more about Pursuit's AI-Native Program at https://t.co/zFz7Uo6d6r.

See the full story at https://t.co/SUfsgN1S8Q.

#pursuit #ainativeprogram #ai #hackathon #community

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Ken Chenault sat in a room with our Builders last week and said something worth repeating: Interviewing is dead. You're auditioning.

Ken is the founder of Benchstrength, a VC firm that backs founders the industry has historically overlooked. Groups that make up 75% of the world's population — just like the Builders at Pursuit — receive about 5% of global capital. His firm is a direct bet against that.

When he evaluates founders, he's not looking for pedigree. He's looking for boundless curiosity. In a world where everything is changing by the minute, that's what keeps you valuable.

He walked our Builders through the "flashlight test": build something that gets better as AI models improve, not something the models eventually replace. Flashlight apps once flooded the App Store. Then Apple shipped a native flashlight, and an entire category disappeared overnight. Uber, for example, is different. Better AI models make Uber faster, smarter, more efficient. They strengthen the product rather than replace it.

Then there is the Pursuit Lookbook:
https://t.co/Huy7nYvUOc

Before the event even began, Ken had reviewed six Builder projects. One tackled the same problem as a real estate startup he had recently evaluated for investment. The difference? Pursuit Builder had created it in six weeks as a class project.
That's curiosity made visible. Just as engineers have GitHub, Pursuit Builders have the Lookbook. It is not a résumé. It is proof of what you can build.

If you were planning to spend five hours on yours, spend ten. The audition is already happening.

The barrier was never talent. It was always access.

That is what rooms like this one exist to rebuild. That's why Pursuit exists.

Read the full recap below:
https://t.co/yTtMDdnLnb

#Pursuit #AI #AIJobs #TechCareers #NewYorkTech

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Join us at Pursuit Bash 2026 on November 18. We're taking over David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, one of the cultural icons in New York City.
This year marks a pivotal moment in our journey. New partnerships took root. New pathways to good jobs came to life. And Builders who completed the AI-Native Program are landing roles at the forefront of the AI economy. It is proof that when we invest in people, they transform.
This is just the beginning. The only way to create the right conditions for everyone to flourish in the age of AI is to build them together.
Tables and tickets are coming soon.
Questions?
[email protected]
#Pursuit #PursuitBash #AIWorkforce #fundraising #gala

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Seven months of showing up and putting in the work. Congratulations to the 21 Builders who completed Pursuit's AI-Native Program and delivered at Demo Day at @blackstone.

Getting to Demo Day is earned. In the final stretch of the program, each team of Builders was matched with a real partner company and a real business challenge. They worked with their clients to define the problem, write product requirements, and build working AI-powered prototypes while receiving client feedback throughout the 4-week build process. At Demo Day, they presented working live demos to a room of employers, funders, and industry leaders. All the amazing projects are on our Lookbook now: https://t.co/TQsx3JXya3

This is what our AI-native Builders proved: they can take a problem they have never seen before in an industry they have never worked in, get up to speed fast enough to ask the right questions, scope a solution, and ship something that works. From healthcare to energy to real estate to design, 7 teams built 7 working AI products in 4 weeks. That is the speed at which they can build.

Thank you to our capstone partners for bringing real challenges and trusting our Builders to solve them: Apoll Opportunity Foundation, Assured Healthcare Partners, Adonis, @alley_corp, @ConEdison, RXR, and Snarkitecture.

And thank you to our panelists for sharing your valuable insights with our Builders: Ameya Agge (Managing Director, AHP), Alex Mustonen (Co-Founder and Partner, Snarkitecture), and Youssef Kalad (Principal, @alley_corp ).

And most importantly, thank you @blackstone for your continued support and partnership, and providing a space for our Builders to showcase their talent.

Interested in bringing on talent with this unique skillset onto your team? Reach out to: Avni Nahar Head of Job Outcomes [email protected]
#pursuit #aibuilder #aiworkforce #techjobs #futureofwork

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Pursuit is proud to announce a $2.5 million grant from @Googleorg to power the AI Jobs Institute, our dedicated hub for bringing AI opportunity to low-income New Yorkers, small businesses, public school classrooms, and community colleges across New York State.

This partnership goes beyond training workers for AI jobs. It's about bringing the AI economy into every corner of New York, starting with the communities that have historically been left out.

New York is building the blueprint. Grateful to https://t.co/4CWBdOTFh0 for helping make it real.

Learn more:
https://t.co/hFzgm2ZfDu

#Pursuit #AIJobsInstitute #GoogleOrg #WorkforceDevelopment #FutureOfWork

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Ninety-three percent of the buildings damaged in NYC during Hurricane Ida were outside FEMA's flood zones. Fourteen people died that night, most in basement apartments in Queens.

The storm was forecast. The data existed. The system to reach the people who needed it didn't.

That's the gap Flood Voice was built to close.

Six Pursuit AI-Native Builders – Erica Rowe-Owen, Ethan Davey, Jessenia Cintron, Josue Villalona, Kelvin Saldana, and Shanell Holback – built it over a weekend at Columbia's Narrative 2 Numbers Mixed Methods Hackathon in October 2025, winning Best Use of Open Source Data. In December 2025, they were invited to present at the Columbia Preparedness and Recovery Institute's quarterly meeting. In May 2026, they returned for the PRI Innovation Forum Demo Expo and won Most Community-Minded Innovation. Erica also spoke as part of a Student Innovation panel. The team is now fundraising to launch a six-month pilot across Queens neighborhoods.

This is what AI deployment looks like at street level. Pursuit's AI-Native Builder Program trains non-traditional talent to become the deployment layer. The Flood Voice team reframed flooding as a public-health communication failure, connected existing systems that weren't talking to each other, and built around the community-based organizations residents already trust. They don't just use AI. They build with it to solve real challenges.

Read the full story and watch the demo:
https://t.co/8TS6JlEGhm

#pursuit #AIDeployment #ForwardDeployedEngineering #PursuitBuilders #ClimateResilience

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Most people think AI careers follow a straight line. They don’t. Vlahinos Anstine went from Off-Broadway to GTM Director at @OpenAI . No traditional path. No technical background at the start. Just endless curiosity, persistence, and the willingness to ask for help.

At a recent fireside chat with Pursuit Builders, she shared what actually matters in the AI economy. AI fluency is starting to matter more than years of experience. The biggest barrier to AI adoption isn’t technology; it’s leadership alignment. And the hardest skills to automate are still human: empathy, storytelling, connection.

But the most important takeaway was simpler. The people who succeed are the ones who show up curious, and build from there. That’s exactly what we see every day at Pursuit. Our Builders don’t wait for permission. They learn, experiment, and create new paths into careers they were told weren’t for them.

Thank you, Erica, for sharing what it really takes to succeed in this moment, and for inspiring our Builders as they do the work of building their own paths in AI.

Read the full recap on our blog:
https://t.co/qEjJk0IxXy

#Pursuit #AIEconomy #FutureOfWork #openAI #AInative

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A community of 30 Pursuit Builders and staff. Every team received credits to build with @zeroxyz , a brand-new product for AI agents. Amazing things get built when we give talented people the right tools.

In partnership with @zeroxyz (https://t.co/oQlmYXs8wf) — a search engine for AI agents that indexes hundreds of live APIs so Builders can discover and use capabilities on the fly — we hosted our third cross-cohort mini hackathon. Thank you Brian Luscombe and Lindsey Pozzuto for sharing Zero and your passion with the Builders.

Theme: Unlocked. Every team got Zero credits and a simple question: what do you build when the barrier to capabilities is gone?

Two hours later, they had live, deployed products.

Winner
Curtain Call (https://t.co/8hehQPLYOk) — Input a scene description, and an AI agent interprets the world of your play, generates a moodboard, and finds your best-matched conceptualizer. Team Unlocked Spotlight: Beatrice Mackenzie, Christina Ruiz, Kalila Green, Yaasameen Perez, and Nylah Lee.

Crowd Favorite + Zero Award
Fanzone Unlocked (https://t.co/J3WJnzpnsU) — Real-time city guide for sports fans following their team on the road. Team PainPoint: Bo Moldenhauer, Brandon Jackson, David Kim, Mitra Kermanian, Rob Walker.

Why Didn't I Think of That
CivicReel (https://t.co/1hyKaqjl3i) — Convert benefits flyers to short-form videos in any language, so more people claim what they're owed. Team DreamTeam: Edwin Perez, Lebert Mcdonald, Raphael Ribot, Schiffon Lola Wise.

It was great to see everyone coming together for another fun night. We'll keep pushing the boundaries.

#pursuit #ainative #hackathon #ai #nyc #tech

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RajvMehta and Anushka Gupta showed up at a hospital and didn’t write a single line of code for days. They were following nurses through their shifts. Sitting with operations staff. Identifying bottlenecks and constraints through observation — things that would have otherwise never made it into a brief.

That’s what Raj and Anushka of @percepta do as Applied AI Engineers. They embed inside organizations — hospitals, governments, financial services, manufacturers — understand their operations, and build AI tools that actually deliver transformation. The work is more fieldwork than ML. More listening than coding.

Scoping, Raj told our Builders, is the hardest part: "Nowadays, building software is becoming easier and easier. The real challenge now is…[to] really consider: what is the problem, and what should I make?”

One example? Nurse scheduling that took hours to set manually each week was replaced with a streamlined tool so the nurse manager can focus on the hard calls instead. The routine work, handled. The human judgment, preserved.

“This job will be on the rise,” Anushka said. “And you guys are getting in on it very early on.”

As Forward Deployed Engineers, Pursuit Builders are already doing this work. Many came in with years of frontline experience in healthcare, education, construction, logistics. That experience isn’t a detour. It’s a head start.

Full recap at the link:
https://t.co/G1BlsxfaWr

Want to inspire the next gen AI-native talent? Be the next fireside chat speaker.
Email: [email protected]

#pursuit #appliedai #forwarddeployedengineer #ai #futureofwork

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Our second Pursuit Mini Hackathon. 57 Builders. 14 teams. 2 hours to build. The theme was Play, and they took it seriously.

Builders from L1, L3, L3+, and Bridge program alongside Pursuit staff came together for another night of Mini Hackathon. Thank you Ian Mundorff, Director of NA Strategy & Operations at HP, for joining as a judge.

Fourteen teams. Every team deployed a build. An emotional intelligence playground where players read signals and navigate scenarios, with scores reflecting empathetic choices. A bodega-style AI concierge fronted by Bernie the cat, whose attitude and prioritization give the experience real character. A voice-dictated improv game that helps you practice job interviews. A collaborative chess variant where three teams share one side and each player takes the next move in a relay. A Pokemon Go-style civic mapping app that turns neighborhood engagement into a game.

Congrats to the Hackathon Winner: The People's Game, a live QR-driven icebreaker that gets any room talking. Fast.

When you give Builders a blank canvas and two hours, they don't just play. They build.

#pursuit #ainative #hackathon #vibecoding #nyctech #futureofwork

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To land a job in the age of AI, make a human connection. Build in public. Be persistent.

Our AI-Native Builders sat down with @emmamariecryer, founding Business Development Representative at @OpenRouter, for a fireside chat led by Devika Gopal Agge, Chief Development & Employer Services Officer at Pursuit. OpenRouter is the API gateway connecting developers to 350+ AI models. Co-founder @alexatallah sits on Pursuit’s board, and the team has been a real partner to us.

Emma came to AI without a computer science or software engineering degree. She studied humanities, trained as an actor, and produces short films on the side. She’s worked in business development for five years, now at OpenRouter working with the engineering and product teams at companies and universities building with frontier AI.

Her advice to Builders looking to break in: “The bar has never been lower.”

OpenRouter recently hired their second BDR. Out of thousands of applicants, only two reached out to Emma directly on LinkedIn. The one they hired didn’t pitch himself. He reached out like a person, showed her his work, and named the problem he could help solve. Then he kept following up, even when she didn’t reply. This is the humanist approach to employment in the age of AI.

That story landed hard. Show, not tell. Build in public. Find the pain point at the company you want to join. Reach out like a person, not a transaction. Build a real connection. Then keep following up. And that’s what our Builders do.

Thank you, Emma. The letters are coming.

#Pursuit #OpenRouter #AI #futureofwork #tech

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We’re proud to announce a $4 million grant from @AscendiumEd @AscendiumEP, a substantial programmatic investment in our AI program. This partnership supports the programmatic engine of the AI Jobs Institute, Pursuit’s dedicated workforce hub launching in Long Island City in 2027, and advances a question at the center of our work:

As AI reshapes every industry, who gets access to the jobs it creates?

Ascendium’s pivotal investment will help fund the full infrastructure to meet that moment:
→ Scaling Pursuit’s AI-native training for low-income New Yorkers
→ Creating new career pathways for low-income New Yorkers, and
→ Setting new standards for Registered Apprenticeships in the AI economy.

The initiative will also expand Registered Apprenticeship pathways in AI and technology, creating more paid, earn-while-you-learn opportunities for learners from low-income backgrounds while demonstrating how apprenticeships can scale as a long-term strategy for developing the future tech workforce.

This work builds on Pursuit's track record of connecting low-income New Yorkers to good jobs and launches the AI Jobs Institute as a national model for how workforce systems can keep pace with the AI era.

We’re deeply grateful to Ascendium for their partnership and shared belief that the AI economy should expand economic mobility by democratizing access to the jobs and opportunities it creates.

Read the press release:
https://t.co/os6TI5SxS7

#Pursuit #AIJobsInstitute #WorkforceDevelopment #FutureOfWork #Ascendium

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https://t.co/8WVjX5Latg

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https://t.co/kvZtkDFbxW

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80 Builders. 14 teams. 2 hours to build.

Last week, Pursuit hosted its first cross-cohort mini hackathon — bringing Builders from every level of the AI-Native program and partners from the United Federation of Teachers together around one theme: Community.

They shipped an AI neighborhood matching platform, a gamified financial literacy app, an LGBTQIA+ wellness tool, a mutual aid board, and an NYC emergency preparedness router. All in two hours.

The winning team built https://t.co/wdue3n1JBX — an app that uses AI to match NYC neighbors by skills, hobbies, and music taste, with a built-in Block Party Hub for planning community events.

What we learned: The right tools in the right hands don't just change one life. They transform their communities.

#pursuit #ainative #hackathon #vibecoding  #nyctech #futureofwork

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"You have an opportunity to level the playing field — you're embracing AI early, versus engineers who've done one thing for 20 years."

That's what Jake Yang told Pursuit Builders at our fireside chat.

Jake is the CTO of S&P Global Energy. He's spent 20+ years in financial technology: NASDAQ, NYSE, S&P Global. He's watched every major wave of transformation roll through the industry. His read on this one is different.

AI hasn't just changed the tools — it's changed who has the advantage. Engineers who learned to code before AI have to unlearn years of habits to keep up. Builders who grow up with these tools carry a real structural advantage.

S&P Global has already changed how it hires. First question in every interview: "What does your toolkit look like? How do you use these tools to improve your work?"

His top criteria: critical thinking and curiosity. Not technical skill. Critical thinking because AI makes it dangerously easy to stop questioning — "Don't outsource your critical thinking. That is super critical in the age of AI." Curiosity because the people who thrive are the ones who keep asking what's possible.

Pursuit Builders are trained for exactly this. The AI-Native program exists to build that edge — so when someone like Jake walks into the room, our Builders are already the answer to the question he's asking.

#pursuit #ainative #futureofwork #nyctech #spglobal

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Jacob. Kelvin. Ariel. Three AI-native Builders. Three AI-native engineer positions at JPMorganChase co-created by Pursuit X JPMC specifically for Pursuit’s Builders.

This is Pursuit's and NYC’s first AI-native Engineering apprenticeship — six months building inside one of the world's largest financial institutions. Not a simulation. Not a project. A placement.

This new employment pathway reflects what’s possible when big companies come together with workforce training providers like Pursuit as One Big Team, creating opportunity in an AI-first Economy . Thank you to JPMC for pioneering the future of work and expanding opportunity for all.

Congratulations to Jacob, Kelvin, and Ariel. You earned this.

#pursuit #jpmorganchase #aibuilder #workforcedevelopment #futureofwork

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https://t.co/nAHj6xRKzc

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With New York State, Pursuit is scaling AI literacy statewide through AI Prep for Jobs—turning access into opportunity in the AI-first economy.

→ 420 New Yorkers trained through Pursuit’s AI-Native Program
→ 200+ placed into AI-enabled roles
→ Starting this spring

We’re delivering this work in partnership with @LeMoyne, @CenterStateCEO, @PerScholas, and @techbuffaloinc.

The future of work is here. Let’s build pathways for every New Yorker.

Learn more:
https://t.co/UebvITL0a0

#Pursuit #AILiteracyDay #AINative #FutureOfWork #AIJobs