For institutions
Bring a treasuryout of the stacks.
We help libraries, museums, archives, literary estates and cultural institutions move up the stack—from preservation and search to dynamic, personalized instruction that expands demand.
Your library isthe foundation.
We help you build on top of it.
From knowledge to wisdom
Turn your knowledge base into a learning system.
01
Library
Your source of truth
02
Structure
Ontology + knowledge graph
03
Instruction
Dialogue + guided pathways
04
Practice
Memory + application
05
Wisdom
Understanding that compounds
Ways we buildEvery organization
Every organization
has a library.
For individuals
Turn a worldviewinto a learning product.
We help thinkers, experts, authors and curators define their library, articulate the relationships inside it, and turn a way of seeing into a product others can learn with.
For organizations
Anchor executionin what you believe.
We turn principles, values, methods and accumulated experience into shared skill—so daily work remains accountable to the organization’s grounding wisdom.
For civilizations
Make an inheritanceavailable to everyone.
We build public-benefit learning systems that make the great books and inherited wisdom of civilizations accessible as living, personalized dialogue.
Our methodThree disciplines.
Three disciplines.
One learning system.
Ontology
Give the knowledge a shape.
Pedagogy
Decide how someone learns.
Aesthetics
Make the difficult desirable.
Ontology × Pedagogy × Aesthetics = Knowledge you can take to heart
How we work
From first principlesto a living product.
We work as an embedded studio across learning design, product, engineering, and launch. Each stage produces something concrete. What we learn from real use shapes what comes next.
Discovery
Define the source, the learner, and the ambition.
Ontology
Give the knowledge a structure the product can reason with.
Pedagogy
Design how the learner will explore, practice, and grow.
Prototype
Make the learning experience tangible before scaling it.
Build
Engineer the product, intelligence, memory, and integrations.
Launch
Put it in the hands of real learners.
Iterate
Learn from use and improve the system over time.
The team
Scholars who ship
Founder | Chief Executive Officer
Zohar Atkins
Philosopher, rabbi and educator who shapes the ontologies, pedagogies and intellectual worlds behind Lightning’s products. A Rhodes Scholar and Hiett Prize winner, he previously served as Chief Culture Officer and a board member at Invisible.
Co-founder | Chief Operating Officer
Alex Jakubowski
Educator and serial entrepreneur who turns ambitious learning ideas into partnerships, products and companies that can endure. He built a study-abroad organization acquired by a top-ten global humanitarian group, led $18M+ in fundraising and helped scale Switch to 50,000+ users.
Co-founder | Chief Design Officer
Bobby George
Philosopher, Montessori educator and product leader who translates learning theory into coherent, useful and beautiful products. He founded Montessorium, acquired by Higher Ground Education, and helped lead product and design at Microsoft Flip as it reached 100M educators, students and families.
Chief Technology Officer
Phil Galebach
Data-focused technologist and AI systems architect who turns corpora, agents, memory and workflows into reliable products. His career spans statistics, senior data engineering, digital-health operations, full-stack development and AI optimization.
Principal Designer
Samuel Mensah-Bonsu
Principal Product Designer at Microsoft AI who gives complex systems clear, distinctive experiences. His career spans award-winning work for Nike, Google and Virgin, C-suite advising at McKinsey, and judging for D&AD, Eurobest and DesignWeek.
Product Engineer
Harrison Otieno
Equal parts support, design, web development and data, with a gift for turning complex problems into simple, effective solutions. He's the person who covers the ground between specialties: troubleshooting it, building it, or quietly making it better.
Engineer
William Galebach
William Galebach has led technical organizations for over a decade — including a 20-person Marine intelligence team supporting a division of 5,000. A veteran systems architect with experience spanning data engineering, full-stack development, mobile apps, distributed systems, and product design.
Build with us
Your wisdom isworth transmitting.
We work with people and institutions whose knowledge should become educational, not merely informational.