Iz Beltagy
Co-Founder, Chief Scientist. 

Iz builds the core sophisticated algorithms behind Envive's agentic intelligence.

A recognized leader in the open-source LLM movement, he has been at the forefront of advancing transparent, reproducible language model research—narrowing the gap between open and proprietary systems.

Before co-founding Envive, Iz was the Research Lead of the OLMo project at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), a flagship effort to develop a truly open, state-of-the-art language model from scratch. The project was recognized with two Best Paper Awards at ACL 2024.

His past work includes Longformer (a breakthrough transformer for long sequences), BLOOM (the first open multilingual LLM), and OLMo itself—models now downloaded millions of times each month. His research has received over 20,000 citations and earned multiple honors, including Best Paper Runner-Up at ACL 2020 and an Outstanding Paper Award at AKBC 2021.

Iz holds a PhD in NLP from UT Austin and was an early ML engineer at Quora. He's driven by a mission to bring cutting-edge AI into real-world products that serve billions.