Our mission

Our mission is to arm creatives and entrepreneurs for the new era of human-to-AI workflows.

We help small business owners personalize AI models with their own data, their own preferences, their own creative spark.

Founding team

Nathaniel Mahowald, CEO

Nathaniel is a serial founder and lifelong hacker. He started Pickaxe after leaving his position at ARK as a Research Associate. Prior to ARK, Nathaniel was the lead data scientist at Sivo, a debt-as-a-service fintech. His conviction is that generative AI is the key that will unlock the creator economy of knowledge work.
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Mike Gioia, COO

After working in Hollywood writers rooms for several years, Mike developed LLM pipelines that could produce realistic, high-quality, highly variable outputs from models. Now Mike is committed to building the no-code infrastructure that will usher in the mass adoption of AI as a consumer tool. He loves the rain.

Ian Eck, CDO

Ian is a designer, writer, and film-maker who now calls himself a “prompt designer.” He wants to convince the rest of the world's dilettantes they can be prompt designers too. Maybe in the future we won't call them prompt designers but instead use words like "explorer," "curator," or "artist."