Skip to main content
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.
Bio
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.
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 1,900 legal teams, including more than 200 public companies. Bardia built the platform those teams run on.
"We build what our customers want and we make it delightful."
— Bardia Pourvakil
Press Coverage
How Pourvakil Builds
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Bardia built GC AI where every citation is verified character by character.
Put it to work on your next contract.