Our Founders

Sinan Aral is a scientist, entrepreneur and investor, who has been ranked among the top 50 management scholars in the world and was rated the World's "Top Digital Thinker" in 2021. One of the youngest tenured faculty members in the history of the MIT Sloan School, Sinan is the David Austin Chaired Professor of Management, Marketing, IT and Data Science at MIT, and Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE). He has been called "the Indiana Jones of Data Science" by Stern Strategy Group and "one of the first and most prescient scholars of social media" by former U.S. Undersecretary of State Richard Stengle.

Sinan is a seasoned entrepreneur, having built and sold two startups while getting tenure at MIT. He was the Chief Scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012) and at Humin, a social platform that the Wall Street Journal called the first "Social Operating System" (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). He is also a co-founder and general partner of two venture capital firms: Manifest Capital (a Series A firm investing in applied machine learning for marketing automation and enterprise performance) and Milemark Capital (a Seed and Pre-Seed fund investing in applied AI). He has served on the Advisory Boards of the Alan Turing Institute (the British National Institute for Data Science in London), the Center for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Norway, and C6 Bank, the first all-digital bank of Brazil. He advises Fortune 100 companies, international organizations and heads of state on AI and digital strategy.

Sinan's research and teaching has earned several awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Fulbright Scholarship, the Jamieson Award for Teaching Excellence (MIT Sloan's highest teaching honor), and the Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award. In 2018, he became the youngest ever recipient of the Herbert Simon Award of Rajk László College in Budapest, Hungary. In the same year, his article on the spread of false news online was published on the cover of Science and became the second most influential scientific publication of the year in any discipline, and his TED talk on "Protecting Truth in the Age of Misinformation," which received over two million views in nine months, set the stage for today's modern approaches to the misinformation crisis. His first book, The Hype Machine, which New York Magazine called "prophetic," was named a 2020 Best Book on Artificial Intelligence by WIRED.

Sinan earned his PhD at MIT and his Master's degrees at the LSE and Harvard. You can find him on X @sinanaral and Instagram @professorsinan.