Josh has a deeply personal connection to Meela’s mission. His firsthand experience with his family members’ struggle with loneliness and medical decline motivated him to design the first iteration of Meela. The overwhelmingly positive reception from the senior living industry inspired Josh to take the bold step to depart Head of Product at Lyft in 2024 to found Meela. Josh’s work with senior living teams is grounded in compassion and a profound sense of duty.

Prior to Meela:

• Founding member of Lyft Ads, helping launch and scale a new business line from $0 to $40M and grow the team from 0 to 70 employees in ~1 year
• Product Manager at Microsoft, contributing to core Windows products

Outside of work:

• Trying to play a game of pick-up basketball by the United Nations

Proud Moment:

• “We’re building Meela to be the trusted companion that every older adult deserves,” says Josh.

Jake loves building product experiences at Meela that feel personal. That the companion is helpful, thoughtful, and trustworthy is a top priority for him. He is focused on making sure Meela shows up with the correct context at the right time.  For example, Jake assures Meela can discuss current events and recognize the important people in a user's life.

• Prior to Meela
  Jake spent the last several years building the behind-the-scenes systems that make products feel fast, reliable, and personal. Prior to Meela, he worked across data infrastructure, platform engineering, and search. He spent ~5 years at Flipboard, contributed to Mastodon, open source project, and later did platform work at Vannevar Labs.

Outside of work 

• You can catch Jake reading or brewing his own beer.

Working at the intersection of machine intelligence and human connection, Ray is deeply involved in pushing the company’s technical vision forward while helping cultivate a strong, innovation-driven engineering culture.  He helps shape Meela’s personality, behavior, and long-term memory, spanning graph RAG systems, persona design, analytics, and data-driven iteration, to make Meela a genuinely engaging and meaningful companion. 

Prior to Meela

• Ray spent nearly six years at Google working on multiple products including Jamboard, Google Meet, Google Speech, and Lune. As an original founding team member of Jamboard, Ray helped build the product from the ground up. He later became the founding engineer and first employee at Masterful AI, partnering closely with the founders through multiple product iterations and a major pivot, culminating in the company’s acquisition in January 2025.

Outside of work

• Ray spent 3.5 years as a digital nomad working from around the world across Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia. He’s an avid photographer and once chased the Northern Lights for 20 days straight across Iceland in a camper van. His motto is curiosity and love for exploration can and should be present in both work and personal life.

Proud Moment:

• “Devoting my energy & expertise toward a technology that makes humans feel they’re not alone.”

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Nathan joined Meela to work on growth, spanning go-to-market, partnerships and implementation, product, medical research, and hiring, plus whatever else needs attention at a given moment. Founder Josh introduced Nathan to Meela by bringing him to a New York City-based nursing home to see Meela in action; after witnessing its impact for residents and staff and the scale of the problem, Nathan joined early—before funding or a salary—driven by belief in the mission and founder.

Prior to Meela:

• Before Meela, Nathan worked at SES, a global satellite company, where he partnered across product, finance, and corporate strategy (M&A) on initiatives spanning multiple teams and priorities. He graduated summa cum laude from Macaulay Honors College, where he studied biochemistry and political science.

Outside of Work:

• In his free time, he re-watches The Sopranos or anything directed by Quentin Tarantino, and enjoys reading about geopolitics, psychology, and World War II. He has run three marathons (slowly).

Proud Meela Moment:

• ‍The close relationships I’ve been lucky to be part of, both with some of our users and with the rest of the team.

Jake is an engineer who cares deeply about building technology that genuinely improves people’s lives. At Meela, he brings that experience into creating conversational AI that feels human, patient, and trustworthy, with a strong focus on reliability and thoughtful product design, especially for older adults.

Prior to Meela 

• Prior to Meela, Jake spent two years at Amazon working on deep infrastructure systems, developing highly reliable, durable software at scale. He holds a degree in Computer Science and Statistics from the University of Michigan.
  

Outside of Work

• Jake enjoys travel, board games, and exploring new restaurants around the city – an interest that’s closely tied to his fascination with cartography.
  

Proud Moment

• “The first time I spoke directly with one of our users really stuck with me. I expected to hear feedback about the product, but instead I saw how much it meant to them to simply talk through their favorite topics with someone who listened patiently and actually knew what they were talking about. It was eye-opening to realize how big the gap can be for some people when it comes to feeling heard. That conversation helped me understand the real impact of what we’re building at Meela, and it’s something I think about daily as I’m working to improve the product.”