Katherine Ivanova.

From Siberia to San Francisco.
I build things, hustle a lot, and love a good book and a good, deep conversation.
Slavic soul. Stoic by day, romantic by night.
Check out my book collection at the bottom.

HistAI

Tried to cure cancer. Failed halfway. Along the way, we built a massive pathology dataset, annotation pipelines, and open foundation models to speed up cancer diagnostics and research.

Models & datasets on Hugging Face

Pantio

Tried to make something of us last forever. Think Character.AI meets Replika, aiming for fewer existential hazards (read: no AI girlfriends, no suicide-related lawsuits). At Pantio, we were preserving voices, memories, and personalities while navigating grief and the funeral space. Tried to build something thoughtful. Learned some hard lessons.

Good Place

Turns out, death needed better infrastructure. I’m now building Good Place, a new generation of funeral homes. The plan: buy a funeral home, make it good, repeat. Better spaces, clearer choices, and goodbyes that feel like the person.

UGC queen

Big fan of brainrot and internet culture. Turned scrolling and trend-watching into a side hustle: making videos for Fluently.

A look at the wider Fluently campaign:
22 accounts, 200M views

Read for fun

One of my greatest treasures was the collection of books I’d read and couldn’t bring with me to America. This is its new home.

If you want to know me a little better, pick a book. Let it change you a little. And if you want to talk about any of them, I’m always up for a good book rabbit hole.

The ones I keep coming back to

Back home

Other lives, other places

A little less reality

Things that stay with you