Most businesses, when discussing AI, tend to fall into one of two traps. They often either treat the technology as an innovation poised to inevitably rebuild the entire working structure, or they bury it under abstractions that leave operators unsure which tools actually save time or cut costs.
Pierlorenzo Peruzzo and Simone Zamparini have spent close to a decade on the practical side of that divide, building and shipping products real users adopt. The two Los Angeles–based software engineers, who have collaborated on multiple projects for most of their careers, now spend much of their time translating what they have learned into plain guidance for companies trying to separate useful AI from noise.
Their Early Work as Engineers and Entrepreneurs
Peruzzo and Zamparini met as students and have been working together almost ever since, although their starting points differed. Pierolorenzo Peruzzo taught himself to code at 13, writing small tools and automations long before he moved into other fields like VR. Simone Zamparini came to software, on the other hand, through commerce, running a modest online import-export operation as a teenager before studying computer science and engineering.
Both had been drawn to startups early, seeing them as the main way an idea could become a finished, successful product, and both held a simple conviction: software could let two young builders create something that could be used by people around the world, having a far greater impact than it would if only pushed locally. The combination produced a working partnership in which one instinct leaned toward the build and the other toward the sale. “We had different starting points,” Zamparini recalls, “but the same instinct: build useful things and get them into people’s hands.”
After finishing school, the two relocated to the United States and enrolled in college in California, placing themselves inside a world where launching a company was the norm. The move turned ambition into routine. Rather than reading about founders, they began studying, working, selling and shipping alongside them.
Building OpenLab VR From Scratch
The partnership’s first serious test arrived in 2020 with OpenLab VR, a virtual biology and chemistry lab platform the two co-founded while still students. The product’s aim was to provide a simulated, digital environment so that learners could work on formulas in a safe space, and it found an audience. OpenLab reached more than 50 schools and generated over $200,000 in revenue, and a peer-reviewed study from Frontiers in Education later evaluated the approach independently and reported gains in students’ comprehension skills and overall lab safety.
What the company taught its founders had as much to do with method as with product. Bootstrapped and short on resources, Peruzzo and Zamparini took care of engineering, product, sales, conference appearances, and even fundraising themselves. “Instead of raising capital immediately,” Zamparini recalls, “we found a way to work with university research groups that had grant funding, then used that funding to bring OpenLab to the education market.”
That credibility carried them to Bett London, one of the largest education technology conferences in the world, where they closed roughly $150,000 in deals. “That experience showed us we could build globally competitive products from scratch,” Peruzzo points out. The takeaway stuck: work around constraints instead of waiting for the right set of conditions or permission.
Applied AI at Scale
The pair carried this way of thinking and working into a string of products built with AI at the time when the tech was breaking away from its niche and entering the mainstream. They contributed to Holoworld AI, a character platform that surpassed 1 million signups and peaked at roughly 100,000 monthly active users. They also worked on Ava, among the earliest autonomous social-media AI agents, which generated and distributed its own video content and drew tens of millions of impressions across platforms.
Peruzzo and Zamparini’s most recent product turns that experience toward marketers. Ava Studio is a video and user-generated-content platform companies use to produce short-form ad creative for social media. It’s designed to take a user from a product brief to usable video without a full production team, helping businesses test creative ideas faster and trim the time and cost of content production.
“For us,” says Peruzzo, “Ava represents exactly the kind of product we want to build: not a flashy demo, but a practical tool that turns AI into measurable business value.” Each shift along the way, from VR to AI and from education to consumer tools to business automation, forced them to learn quickly and discard assumptions, sharpening a focus on execution over theory.
Treating AI As an Accessible Tool
Today, Peruzzo and Zamparini build automated products for businesses and have turned their attention to a gap they see widening. Companies hear constantly about what this technology’s capable of, but fewer know how to put it to work. The two want to close the distance between technical possibility and everyday implementation, with a focus on helping smaller teams reduce repetitive work and see improvements in their content quality and output.
The same aim runs through The Modern Company Podcast, the show the two host to showcase their hands-on product experience for entrepreneurs and operators. Having shipped products that real users adopted, they can speak to what works instead of what merely sounds impressive.
Their longer-term interest lies in systems that automate entire workflows, and they continue to work directly with developers through open-source work on LangChain and LangGraph.
That mission also explains why they talk publicly at all. As Peruzzo puts it, “Everyone is talking about AI, but very few people are asking the right question: what does this actually do for the business?” Zamparini follows this up by saying, “We do not think companies need more AI buzzwords. They need practical systems that save time, reduce costs, or create revenue.”
Pierlorenzo Peruzzo and Simone Zamparini have spent years turning emerging technology into products people actually use. Through their work, they’re arguing and putting to the test the belief that AI can be useful when it’s treated as something measurable, built into how the business operates day to day.
