Bardia Pourvakil

Co-Founder and CTO, GC AI

Bardia Pourvakil is the co-founder and CTO of GC AI, the legal AI platform built on his standard for verifiable, citation-accurate output. He's self-taught, having left two degree programs unfinished, and spent five years in engineering roles at Blockgeeks, Roam Research, and Replit before co-founding GC AI with Cecilia Ziniti in 2023.

Quick Facts

He was building with GPT-3 in production in 2020, two years before ChatGPT.: Most engineers had not yet shipped with large language models. Bardia already had, at Roam Research.
He built the Roam API, the infrastructure that launched the Roam App Store.: His Clojure work at one of the most sophisticated productivity tools in the knowledge-worker world created the developer ecosystem around it.
He built the citation standard other legal AI tools still haven't matched.: Exact Quote locks every quote to its source, character by character, because in legal work, a wrong citation is a liability.

Shipping with large language models before there was a playbook

Bardia Pourvakil put GPT-3 into a live product at Roam Research in 2020, back when most companies did not yet have a plan for large language models. By the time he joined Replit in 2021, he was one of a small number of engineers who had already watched LLMs perform in real products and understood the distance between an impressive demo and something reliable enough for professional use.

He studied International Business at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Bioarchaeological Anthropology at Western University in Canada, leaving before finishing either degree. He joined Blockgeeks in 2018 as a full-stack developer, then moved to Roam Research as a product engineer, writing Clojure and building the Roam API, the infrastructure that made the Roam App Store possible.

Bardia Pourvakil and Cecilia Ziniti at the GC AI booth

From Replit to co-founding GC AI

At Replit, he and Cecilia Ziniti were watching the same moment unfold from the engineering side: large language models arriving quietly in a production environment, before the public launch of ChatGPT made them unavoidable everywhere else. They were asking the same question (what does it take to make AI reliable enough for professional use), and they came to the same answer. That conversation became GC AI.

Bardia has led the technical foundation since day one. Every architecture decision, every feature, every shipping call belongs to him. His standard is specific: the output has to be verifiable enough that a practicing lawyer can stake their reputation on it.

GC AI now serves more than 2100+ legal teams, including more than 200 public companies. Bardia built the platform those teams run on.

Previously: Full-stack developer, Blockgeeks · Product engineer, Roam Research · Engineering and product, Replit

Press coverage

How Bardia builds

On the Standard for "Good Enough": For Bardia, "good enough" means output a lawyer can trust without double-checking it. That standard took shape working alongside Cecilia Ziniti, who reviewed every response for anything even slightly off and pushed until it was fixed. It's the same instinct behind Exact Quote: verify every citation before it reaches a user.
On Building Simple, Flexible Systems: Roam Research shaped how Bardia thinks about product: build small, flexible primitives people can combine however they need. That principle carried into GC AI's architecture, where features like Projects and Custom Instructions adapt to how each legal team actually works.
On What's Still Unsolved in Legal AI: The hardest problem left in legal AI is judgment: teaching a system to reason the way a good lawyer would in situations with no single right answer, like contract redlining. Bardia's bet is pairing serious legal expertise with serious AI engineering, and building the team to match.

Common questions

Who is Bardia Pourvakil?

Bardia Pourvakil is the co-founder and CTO of GC AI, a legal AI platform built for in-house counsel. He has been building AI-powered tools since before the ChatGPT era, with prior roles at Roam Research and Replit.

What is Bardia Pourvakil's background in engineering?

Bardia Pourvakil has been building AI-powered products since the GPT-2 era. He was a product engineer at Roam Research, where he wrote Clojure to build core platform features, and later served in engineering and product roles at Replit before co-founding GC AI in 2023.

What has Bardia Pourvakil built at GC AI?

Bardia Pourvakil has led product and engineering at GC AI since day one. Key features include Exact Quote (character-level citation accuracy), GC AI for Word (native Microsoft Word integration), Playbooks (automated contract review workflows), and Easy Prompt (plain-language-to-prompt conversion).

Who co-founded GC AI?

GC AI was co-founded by Cecilia Ziniti (CEO) and Bardia Pourvakil (CTO) in 2023. They met while working together at Replit.

Did GC AI acquire another company?

In 2026, GC AI brought on Jetify's engineering team, the group behind Devbox, Nixhub, and TestPilot. The move strengthened GC AI's infrastructure and shipping speed under CTO Bardia Pourvakil.

How many legal teams use GC AI?

GC AI serves more than 2100+ legal teams worldwide, including more than 200 public companies.

Where did Bardia Pourvakil work before GC AI?

Before GC AI, Bardia Pourvakil worked as a full-stack developer at Blockgeeks, as a product engineer at Roam Research, and in engineering and product roles at Replit.

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