George Sivulka

Founder & CEO Hebbia

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

George Sivulka is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hebbia, the New York company behind Matrix — a platform built for the specific problem of doing serious analytical work across document sets no human team can read. A private equity firm running diligence, a bank preparing a deal, a law firm working through discovery: each faces thousands of PDFs, spreadsheets and decks, and each has historically solved it by paying junior staff to read them. Matrix decomposes a plain-language question into parallel sub-tasks, runs them across the whole corpus, and returns answers in a grid with citations back to source. Sivulka founded the company in August 2020 while enrolled in a Stanford PhD programme, left the doctorate to build it, and has since raised more than $160 million from Peter Thiel, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures — reaching a roughly $700 million valuation in July 2024 on a business that was already profitable.

Career Highlights

• Founded Hebbia in August 2020 as sole founder and has led it as Chief Executive Officer throughout.
• Raised more than $160 million in total: an early 2020 round backed by Peter Thiel and Floodgate, a $30 million Series A in 2022 led by Index Ventures, and a $130 million Series B in July 2024 led by Andreessen Horowitz at roughly a $700 million valuation.
• Came to that Series B with $13 million in annual recurring revenue and a profitable business, after fifteen-fold revenue growth in the preceding eighteen months — an unusual position for an AI company raising at that scale.
• Built Matrix into a platform used by roughly a third of the world’s largest asset managers, with customers including BlackRock, KKR, Carlyle, Centerview Partners and Charlesbank, and law firms including Ropes & Gray and Fenwick.
• Acquired FlashDocs in June 2025, Hebbia’s first acquisition, adding generative slide-deck creation so the platform produces the final artifact rather than stopping at the analysis.
• Completed a Stanford BS in Mathematics with distinction in about two and a half years, followed by an MS in Applied Physics.
• Worked at NASA as a teenager and published computational simulation research that won recognition at an international scientific conference.

Professional Journey

Sivulka’s record is front-loaded to an unusual degree. He worked at NASA in his teens and published research on computational simulation that took a prize at an international conference before he had finished school. At Stanford he completed a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with distinction in roughly two and a half years, then a Master of Science in Applied Physics, and entered a doctoral programme working on artificial intelligence.

He did not finish it. In August 2020 he founded Hebbia and left Stanford to run it. The founding observation was narrow and correct: search, as built, matches strings. Ask a document corpus about an “IPO” and it will not surface the paragraph that says “go public”. For casual search that is an annoyance; for a diligence team reading ten thousand pages under deadline, it is the whole problem. Hebbia’s first product attacked semantic retrieval directly, and Peter Thiel and Floodgate backed it in 2020.

Index Ventures led a $30 million Series A in 2022, by which point the company had begun the shift that defines it now — from retrieval to reasoning. The product became Matrix, which takes an analyst’s question, breaks it into parallel sub-tasks run across documents of unlimited length, and writes results back into a spreadsheet-like grid with citations. The interface choice matters commercially: financial analysts already live in grids, and Matrix meets them where they work rather than asking them to adopt a chat window.

The customer base concentrated in exactly the places where document volume is highest and error is most expensive. By mid-2024 Hebbia was serving roughly a third of the largest asset managers alongside investment banks, private equity firms and law firms, with BlackRock, KKR, Carlyle, Centerview Partners, Charlesbank, Ropes & Gray and Fenwick among the names. In July 2024 Andreessen Horowitz led a $130 million Series B, with Index Ventures, Google Ventures and Thiel participating, at roughly a $700 million valuation. Sivulka disclosed $13 million in annual recurring revenue and profitability at the time — fifteen times the revenue of eighteen months earlier, and a rare thing to be able to say while raising at that multiple.

In June 2025 Hebbia made its first acquisition, buying FlashDocs, a 2024-founded startup that automated generative slide-deck creation and was producing over ten thousand slides a day for enterprise customers. The logic was to own the last mile: a diligence answer is not the deliverable, the deck is. With FlashDocs the platform runs from raw document set to finished artifact without the analyst leaving it. Sivulka has since pushed Hebbia beyond finance into law and pharmaceuticals, where the underlying problem — too many documents, too little time, too high a cost of being wrong — is identical.

Education

Stanford University

Bachelor of Science, Mathematics, completed with distinction in about two and a half years

Stanford University

Master of Science, Applied Physics

Stanford University

Doctoral study in artificial intelligence, not completed; left in 2020 to build Hebbia