What if you had a coach sitting beside you during every important conversation? In this episode of the Leading Visionaries, host Anjel B. Hartwell sits down with Makaeel Sheikh, Founder & CEO of NūrAI, an innovative communication intelligence platform designed to help people communicate more effectively in real time. Drawing from his background as a scientist at Genentech and his passion for solving human-centered challenges, Makaeel shares how his journey from biotechnology to entrepreneurship led him to create AI-powered tools that illuminate hidden communication patterns.

Get ready to explore the future of communication, the role of AI in enhancing human connection, the realities of startup funding, and the leadership mindset required to bring a bold vision to life.

What You Will Learn

How a scientific approach can be applied to solving communication challenges.

Why communication is one of the most important leadership skills in today's world.

How real-time AI coaching can improve conversations, presentations, and meetings.

The inspiration behind creating NurAI and its mission to enhance human communication.

What communication signals influence how others perceive us.

How AI can be used to support personal growth rather than replace human interaction.

Why privacy and data security must be built into AI products from the beginning.

How founders can bootstrap and build lean while validating a new product.

The importance of leadership through humility, collaboration, and curiosity.

Why vision often starts with identifying a problem in your own life.

FAQ:

How can AI help improve communication skills?

AI can analyze communication patterns such as tone, pacing, clarity, interruptions, and engagement levels. By providing real-time feedback and insights, AI tools can help individuals become more effective communicators during meetings, presentations, interviews, and other important conversations.

What is communication intelligence?

Communication intelligence refers to the ability to analyze and understand verbal and nonverbal communication signals to improve interactions. It combines data, behavioral science, and technology to provide insights that help people communicate more effectively.

Can AI provide feedback during live conversations?

Yes. Some communication intelligence platforms are designed to provide real-time guidance during virtual meetings. These tools can offer suggestions related to pacing, clarity, engagement, and conversational dynamics while the conversation is happening.

Resources:

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Now, here's your host, Angel B. Hartwell

Anjel: Welcome to another episode of the Leading Visionaries podcast, where we celebrate the ingenious, insightful, innovative, and inspired leading visionaries of our time, and provide our listeners with world-class examples of the kind of courage, clarity, and confidence it takes to bring visions into reality.

Before launching NurAI, he worked as a scientist at Genentech, gaining deep experience in data-driven research, biological systems, and advanced innovation pipelines. His scientific background allows him to bridge human communication and machine intelligence with precision and clarity. A graduate of University of Pennsylvania with a focus on biology, Mikhail brings a rare combination of scientific ri- rigor and entrepreneurial vision.

His mission is to empower people through accessible AI, enabling clearer speech, smarter communication, and meaningful human machine interaction for everyone. Welcome to the show, Mikhail.

Anjel: I'm really excited to have you today. So, uh, I wanna start our conversation, Mikhail, by asking, were you always visionary?

Did you have visions when you were a little kid? And has your visionary journey been something that's been, you know, lifelong? Or did you start becoming visionary in terms of being able to think up new ideas and innovations as a result of something that happened along the timeline, or as a result of being exposed to visionary people in your career track?

Um, with their joints and things like that. So, and even, you know, like, you know, diabetes and, a- and so th- that was, like, my first job, right? I was 14. Mm. I got my f- my, you know, the blue papers they give you at school, you sign up for that special certificate that allows you to work, like, under 18 or whatever that is.

And I was like, "Okay, you know, I'm, I'm gonna start working." And I, I always had this dream of going to a really big school and having a really great higher education as well. So I worked really hard in high school and was really grateful to go to the University of Pennsylvania, where I studied medicine.

and what I was gonna do for the world and what I was gonna do for my family, right? Which is my world at the end of the day. Um- Mm-hmm ... and so that's, that's been the driving factor behind a lot of the success that I've seen, I'm really grateful to see, and the experiences that I've had from being, you know, born here in New York arguably the best city in the world, to moving to Philadelphia for college, then moving to San Francisco, working in biotechnology, having this vision for being a scientist and then getting that job of being a scientist, working in R&D, working across antib- anib- antibody therapeutics and drug development.

So really end-to-end project management. And, you know, being that, being my first job out of college, like, full-time role, right, as a scientist and PM, it was definitely... It required a lot of vision to be like, "Okay, well, I'm gonna move, you know, from, like, my cushy home on Long Island and just move to San Francisco and go, uh, you know, work 12 hours a day and- And, and, and, you know, have, like, these huge responsibilities.

And now it carries over into, you know, what I'm doing now- Yeah. Well- ... with Nour. Yeah, great And having a really... Yeah, you know, a huge

People are listening to us. You seem not, like you haven't got too many trips around the sun. And you had this big job at Genentech. What would have inspired you to leave, unless you're still there. I don't know. Is this a side thing that you're CEO and founder of? No, I'm,

Makaeel: I'm full-time at Nour. I, I've resigned-

from my role there a year, almost a year ago now. Yeah.

Anjel: Okay. So tell us a little bit about that, because our listeners are also innovative, creative. They're thinking about starting their own thing, or maybe they have already started their own thing. And you know, that can be a difficult shift, to leave from full-time employment and start something up.

Makaeel: Definitely. And that's part of the journey behind Nour, right? And, and I mean, the start of that journey was leaving Genentech. And I was essentially at a really pivotal moment in my career as well at Genentech.

I had been there for a few years now as, as a scientist and PM managing over 40-plus, I believe, therapeutic programs in my, my time there. And you know, I mean, this is... I mean, from, I mean, end to end, right? I mean, from actually understanding the indication and the drug candidate, and then developing these assays, and then automating them, and then transferring them to CROs, which are like these contract research organizations, and then having those validated for ex vivo study.

And so, you know, that was my niche, which I saw as one of my strengths. And so I wanted to go more into a strategy role. So I was actually applying to consulting roles in life science consulting as one would. In... So as you can imagine, the, the Bains and the BCGs and the McKinseys of the world, and doing all of these networking chats and- Case interviews and coffee chats, right?

And he's doing his PhD at Penn as well, so he had to one-up me there. But, uh, he's working in, in neuroscience, and he understood this problem as well as he was presenting his, his thesis and a- applying to roles and applying to internships. This was a problem for him as well in academia, so we decided to take a scientific approach into solving this problem, and that's what became Nour.

Anjel: All right. Beautiful. Well, you know, for many of our listeners, communication is a key piece of being able to get funding, being able to enroll people in the marketplace, being able to, you know, work with their teams and so forth. So tell us a little bit about what your intention is for Nour and how it can serve our listeners.

All these things, right, there's decades of research that support, uh, they influence the way you're coming across to another person. So what Nour does is, is unify these principles into our intelligence layer, which is a real-time engine for your virtual meetings, which is what we're focusing on right now.

So things like this become one of those key strengths of Noor in, in providing the insights that it does for its users, and understanding your communication the same way that you would understand things that we already commonly track, right? Like physiological patterns- Mm-hmm ... such as heart rate or, or weight or sleep, if you have an Oura Ring, for example.

Mm-hmm. Or if you have a Whoop or an Apple Health tracking these kind of more physiological metrics. So we're applying those principles to communication, because everyone's communication is so unique.

Anjel: Wow, that's pretty amazing. It sounds to me like it's an in-the-moment, like performance-enhancing kind of assistant coach.

Like-

Anjel: Okay, great. Well, we're gonna take a quick break but when we come back, we're gonna let people know where they can find out more about Noor. And right now, listeners, are you a leading visionary or in the role of leading other visionaries?

If you're interested in finding out more about how you can receive support for getting your vision out of the air and onto the ground in a way that's both impact and income producing, the best support is found in collaboration with other leading visionaries, which is why we've created the Creative Age Leader Lab.

Discover more about this opportunity at leadingvisionariespodcast.com/creativeageleaderlab. Consider joining our community and sharing your feedback and takeaways from each episode. Be sure to share this show in your own spirals of influence with the people who you think might benefit from our content.

Makaeel: Hell yeah.

Anjel: We... And we will be right back with Machiel.

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Makaeel: Yeah. Well, right now you'll notice that we are currently in development and wrapping up development right now. It's been about 11 months on this journey, um, it's been, and things have moved actually quite fast from having initial prototypes out, testing those, and iterating them so quickly, and now coming out with this public beta that we're so excited for.

Uh, we're, we're really excited to have people joining up our wait list as we're gearing up for that, and you'll find that on our site. You'll be able to explore some of the platform and understand functionalities, and really see how it can fit into your own workflows and integrate seamlessly for your communication needs.

Makaeel: Yes, absolutely. So right now we're actually founder-funded from personal savings and family, and so that's been uh, you know, what's gotten us started up, definitely, and it's, it's gone a long way. I think we've definitely been really lean in our approach in, in a lot of, uh, ways, my brother and I being, uh, of course, Gen Z, uh, kind of savvy at trying to find ways, you know, to, to get things done, but, you know, at, at a very affordable cost.

Anjel: Beautiful. All right. Well, you know, it's really fascinating that you did so much work in, like, drug development, and now you're, y- you know, you've switched into working with AI and communication. So can you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to dive into the AI realm, uh, first? And secondly, you know, there are many people who have concerns about AI.

So I am curious, and I'm sure our listeners are, about your thinking about AI in general, not just minor AI.

Which are, which are completely different from the fields that I actually studied in school and then studied after the fact. But something that really sparked my interest in AI was working at Genentech, actually, and understanding how to utilize AI for workflows for bench scientists. So that was, like, one of my earlier introductions.

So these are the questions I was just asking ChatGPT kind of, right? And I was screenshotting these people's LinkedIn profiles and, like, feeding, you know, my ChatGPT with that and getting a sense of, well, you know, how am I gonna take this call? So that was definitely one of those earlier use cases where I was like, "You know, I wish there was something that just did this," right?

And, and that's kind of the point of no return where we were like, "Okay, I guess it's our, it's our responsibility to create something like that."

Anjel: Beautiful. Well, you know, I'm kind of curious because you talked about using it in real time, like being in a virtual meeting and having it be, like, on your shoulder saying, "Hey, you know, you're doing a great job," or, "Hey, you might wanna change your tone," or, hey I'm curious if it can also pick up the communication from the other people that you're on the virtual meetings with and say, "Hey, that person is signaling XYZ."

Makaeel: Yeah, so, so we, we do look at kind of speaker turn-taking patterns. We look at things like are we talking over people, for example, right? And- You know, I mean, are, are questions being raised, you know, kind of like more frequently than, than you would expect, for example?

So you would get those indicators actually, and you would, you would actually have that. And live within the call, you know, this context is constantly updated while you're in the call. So if you're kind of stuck, or you don't really understand what I should say next, or, you know, something that's like just a question like in the middle of a conversation that you could kind of have, right, that could pop up, you kind of wish you knew the answer to, you could really just type it right in on your screen and have like the response for you.

We're not being prescriptive at all. Mm-hmm. So it's, it's really about presenting to you and cap- capturing a full picture or map of your communication habits.

Anjel: Yeah, beautiful. So tell us a little bit about privacy because I'm sure that that's an issue that comes up as well. I mean, I know when AI first came out, as a podcaster, I was approached by a lot of people who said, "Oh, let us put your voice into..."

Makaeel: Definitely. Definitely. And it's something that was never an afterthought for us. It was from the get-go while we started building this, we said, "Privacy by design, period," right? And that's how we've developed the platform, utilizing industry-standard servers, for example, AWS, right? Everything is baked into that with industry-standard encryption and, and data processing.

We also don't store any audio data, and most of the processing is done on device. So- The data is in the user's hands, right? And we follow or, like all international standards for SOC 2 compliance, for GDPR compliance. So data retention policies, giving you full access to everything, if you wanna delete it.

Anjel: Beautiful. And who do you most want to get this in the hands of?

Makaeel: Yeah. Our ICP, uh, especially at launch, is mostly founders, executives, consultants that are in these high stakes conversations. So that is our kind of initial bucket. Okay ... but we do see a lot of interest from creators, podcasters, and of course, I mean, going into sales and HR, I mean, there's definitely a lot of use cases there.

In hiring, we've done pilot testing as well. But our m- main ICP right now will be founders and consultants, management consultants and executives largely. And speakers, right? I mean, speakers that speak often and, I, I mean, their job is based off of how they can communicate.

Makaeel: Yeah. Free. We have, so we have three tiers. I mean, free will give you access right off the bat. And of course, we, we do have two other tiers. Uh, we operate under a very s- you know, simple standard kind of, you know, B2C sauce model with, uh, like a monthly and annual subscription basis. And our cheapest option's like 20 bucks a month.

And I mean, if you go for the annual plan, that's even less. Um, but I mean, I definitely, you know, consider sign up, right? And, and, and get a sense of the platform and, and make decisions, you know, based off of that. But, uh, yeah, I mean, right now our main purpose is just, you know, testing it out in the market and, uh, making sure that w- we're actually providing the insights and the use case that, that I'm envisioning here.

Anjel: Beautiful. And what, what are you looking to raise?

Makaeel: We're,

Anjel: um- How much are you looking to raise right now?

Anjel: Yeah. Beautiful. So we started our conversation around vision. The next little piece I wanna talk about is about leadership, and I'd love to hear maybe one or two comments from you about how you see yourself as a leader, as somebody who's bringing something brand new and innovative into the market

Makaeel: Yeah, I, you know, I mean, I think leadership is something that you don't really plan for often.

And then being really on top of my game, right? And I think something that's always been important for me is leading by example. I'm definitely someone who is very hands-on and, you know, wants to understand, wants to be there, you know, with my team as they're working day to day to understand, you know, what's going on.

Um, getting their feedback, getting their ideas. What are they seeing on the internet that's really something we can you know, also utilize? For example, you know, what kinds of cavalier things can we do? Like, what are cool things that we can do? So I love to bring other people's perspective in, on, onto the table.

Anjel: Beautiful. Well done. Well, it was my pleasure having you today, Mikhail. And listeners, we do love feedback. Please let us know what you thought of today's episode by joining our community, sharing your takeaways, asking questions, or submitting guest suggestions. You can weave your visionary thread into our fabric by opting in on our website at leadingvisionariespodcast.com or by interacting with us on social.

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