On AI:AM

Mike Rizkalla

Co-Founder & CEO, Snorble

Mike Rizkalla is co-founder and CEO of Snorble, which makes a screen-free plush voice companion for young children. He founded the company in 2019 with Doug Hughes and has built the product deliberately without generative AI, using a state machine, on-device speech recognition and radar-based sensing rather than a camera or a cloud-hosted chatbot. Snorble raised $10 million from GK Venture Partners in 2022, and Rizkalla was first author on a 2022 IberSPEECH paper describing the device's architecture.