Lewis Hemens

Alright, so let me tell you about Lewis Hemens, this guy’s a straight-up data geek turned startup legend, and his story’s pretty wild. No bullshit.

Lewis kicked things off with a solid education at Cambridge, tech nerds, you know. After that, he jumped into the finance world at Barclays Capital, where he cut his teeth in big data pipelines and software engineering. Basically, he was already working with some serious data stuff early on, and you could tell he’s all about making sense of massive info flows.

Then, he jumps into the startup scene big time with Dataform, which was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 batch. Dataform’s all about making data pipelines for warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift, pretty much the backbone of data teams trying to get their shit together and automate their workflows. Lewis was the co-founder and CTO, which means he was deep in the trenches building this thing from scratch, making it easier for companies to manage their data, no cap, a real big change.

And here’s where it gets even more interesting. Dataform crushed it, so much so that Google Cloud saw the possible and scooped it up in December 2020. That’s a massive vote of confidence. After that, Lewis didn’t just cash out, he joined Google, first as an Engineering Manager, then as a Senior Staff Software Engineer. Dude was working on some of Google’s biggest data products, like AdSense recommendation engines and A/B testing platforms. Basically, he was shaping how billions of ads get optimized and tested. That’s some serious influence in the data world.

But Lewis isn’t just about business and big tech. He’s got a real passion for pushing the boundaries of AI right now. As of 2025, he’s deep into AGI research, working on ARC-AGI projects. That’s some advanced shit, trying to build machines that can think and learn like humans. It shows he’s not just resting on his laurels but genuinely chasing the future of intelligence.

And if you think that’s all, he’s also the guy behind asciiflow, an online ASCII diagram tool, just a nerdy side project that’s super useful and shows he loves making cool tools for the community.

So, what does his process tell us? Lewis isn’t just about tech for tech’s sake. He’s driven by a real desire to solve big problems, whether that’s organizing data at scale, building tools that enable others, or pushing AI into new frontiers. He’s the kind of guy who jumps into complex shit, figures it out, and then moves on to the next big challenge. That’s the essence of startup energy, building, scaling, and then always looking ahead.

In short, Lewis Hemens is a rare breed. A data wizard who’s built real stuff, sold it to Google, and now is out here trying to crack the code on AGI. No cap, he’s someone to watch, because he’s not just riding the wave, he’s trying to create the next one.