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Oruk
Speech foundation models that understand people: words, tone of voice, emphasis, intent, and emotion.
As AI tools become mainstream and robots enter the workforce, conversation is replacing the text box as the only interface fast enough to keep up with critical demands. The voice layer behind every agent, coding session, robot command, and phone call needs the full context: words, tone of voice, emphasis, intent, and emotion. When someone says "I'm fine," they could be reassuring you or asking you to leave them alone. The words are the same. The meaning is in the voice. We are speech, AI, and linguistics researchers from Stanford, Cambridge, and Berkeley, building Oruk to train speech foundation models that actually understand people. We've already set new records across speech understanding benchmarks, deployed to hundreds of thousands of users, and assembled the world's largest speech perception dataset.
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Meet the Team
CEO at Oruk
Nathan Roll
Nathan Roll is co-founder and CEO of Oruk, the first company selected for both a16z Alpha and Speedrun. He paused his Stanford Linguistics PhD to build speech foundation models that understand words, emotion, and delivery. A Stanford EDGE Fellow affiliated with Stanford NLP, Nathan works at the intersection of speech AI, computational neuroscience, and model interpretability. His research has appeared in JASA Express Letters, the Journal of Surgical Research, EMNLP, and CoNLL. His first-author EMNLP 2025 paper with Dan Jurafsky and collaborators demonstrated a 19.7% relative reduction in speech-recognition word error rates using roughly 50 seconds of example speech. His collaborative research has received Cambridge Language Sciences funding twice, for work on recognition bias and adapting speech models to neurodivergent speakers. Before Oruk, Nathan founded Strype Analytics and worked as a data scientist at Nalu.ai, which was subsequently acquired. He graduated from UC Santa Barbara with honors and distinction in Economics and Linguistics and earned the department's Top Paper award.
Co-founder and CTO at Oruk
Vianney Grenez
My background sits at the intersection of systems engineering, mechanical and electrical design, and thermal management. I studied at Arts et Métiers and UC Berkeley, then spent four years as an innovation engineer working with Data Center teams at Meta, NVIDIA, and Google. I hold 14 U.S. patents—with more to come—and am most energized by turning physical constraints into product advantages. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with Data-Center thermal optimization: reducing the energy, hardware, and operating cost required to scale compute. I care deeply about efficiency as a way to make powerful technology more accessible, affordable, and sustainable for everyone. And I want to start with Speech AI, the most natural way to interact with the future of technology !