Hi! I’m Michelle Lu.
I co-founded Viralspace, an AI for Ad Creative company that scaled to 7-figure ARR and an 8-figure exit. Before that, I studied Product Design at Stanford.
Viralspace grew up alongside Creative AI. In 2019, that meant creative insights: tagging ad creative with computer vision + human labeling, and building brand-specific performance prediction and recommendation models.
In 2023, that meant shaping generative AI into controllable, enterprise-ready features. Within our acquirer, Smartly, we worked with 200+ of the most iconic brands in the world, and powered 25B+ creative variants per month.
In 2025, I’ve built a range of independent projects in consumer AI, from a reflection tool that reached 14K users, to tools that help people explore and define their taste.
I love to play with design, code, and frontier models to imagine the future of consumer experiences, and enjoy pushing myself in technical rigor, problem solving, and craft. I love the arts, especially ballet (which I studied growing up), and more recently fine art + music. Most of all, I love learning about people: my work across design, marketing, AI, and earlier neurobiology research are all grounded in a passion for understanding how people think, and building tools to help them flourish at scale.