About Amble

A living experience
of discovery.

What we do

We take any rich, culturally meaningful body of source material and turn it into a living experience of discovery.

How it works

We provide diverse tools to excavate and activate archives for researchers, educators, curators and collectors.

The most powerful OCR system on the market

Scanned documents become text you can work with—even the hard ones: non-standard typefonts, skewed scans, warped pages. Put in a PDF, get one back that's alive.

A historical chronicle with colored outlines around recognized words and passages. Enlarge
Text recognition on a chronicle page.

Semantic search: Trustworthy by design

Every finding stays visually verifiable and anchored to its primary source.

The BLOCKS interface maps Manhattan, with a story about 350 Fifth Avenue beside postcards and a source list. Enlarge
BLOCKS: a map, a place and its sources.

An explorable interface

A collection becomes interactive—a “smart” landscape you can move through, a living map.

The BLOCKS map with a 1930 fire-insurance atlas plate laid over today’s West Village, beside Washington Square. Enlarge
BLOCKS: a 1930 atlas plate laid over today’s West Village.

Who we are

We are educators, AI ethicists, builders and scientists who care how it feels to learn.

Our team.

Julienne LaChance, PhD

Co-founder and CEO

Julie is an interdisciplinary leader with a passion for creating AI-based technologies for social good. She holds five STEM degrees, including a PhD from Princeton University with specialization in computer vision, and spent the past five years working as a Senior Research Scientist in AI Ethics. She is committed to innovation within Amble and ensures that all Amble technologies are rooted in trustworthy AI to the highest ethical standards.

Max Halper

Co-founder, President and Chair

Max is an educator with a formal background in philosophy and literature. Ten years as an instructor—in private and public liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and state universities—have shaped how he views both the triumphs and failures of traditional education models across a diverse spectrum of students. He leads Amble's vision and keeps it grounded in the humanities it serves.

Gabriel Simmons

Co-founder, CPO and Vice President

Gabe is an AI researcher and former computer science lecturer at UC Davis, where he taught courses in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and ethics in technology. His research explores how large language models can represent and simulate human communities—work at the intersection of AI and the social sciences.

Lorenzo Seirup

Co-founder and CTO

Lorenzo spent the past decade in electricity markets, most recently as Principal Economist at the NYISO, where he built high-impact, cutting-edge ML models that influenced energy policy and markets in the northeastern US, ensuring that energy capacity expansion remained sustainable and affordable. He brings the same mix of rigorous modeling and applied AI to the systems at the heart of Amble.

Akiva Saunders

Co-founder and CIO

Akiva is a linguist and classicist specializing in educational innovation for the very young. For the past 14 years he has run a program in New York City elementary schools on the origin of words, and currently teaches at P.S. 77 Lower Lab School. Previously, he was faculty at the Latin/Greek Institute at the CUNY Graduate Center where he served as Chair of Latin.

Robert Olson

Co-founder and Technical Director

Robert studied creative writing at UC Santa Barbara and came to programming through music. He’s worked in generative art and shaders, and taught middle schoolers to build games in Roblox, Unity, and Unreal. He is interested in computing that people can explore with their hands and with one another. At Amble, he makes the connections between people, places, and ideas visible.

William Howard

Co-founder

Will studies how stories are told—across forms and across millennia, from film and animation to the ancient epics. He studied film, photography, and philosophy at Pitzer College and animation at NYU, and is a self-taught scholar of Homer and the epic tradition. He's drawn to how knowledge moves between people—through word, image, song, and myth—and what that long history can teach us about the age of AI.

Contact

Have a collection to activate?
We’re here to help.

contact@amblearc.com
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