Safi Shamsi

CEO, Graphify Labs

Please tell us about your current role and employer.

I am the Founder and CEO of Graphify Labs, a Delaware C-corp accepted into Y Combinator S26. I build AI infrastructure tools for developers, including Graphify, an open-source knowledge graph tool for AI coding assistants, and Penpax, an enterprise knowledge graph engine built in Rust with formal verification capabilities.

What does a typical day in your current role look like?

Most days involve a mix of open-source maintenance, reviewing pull requests from the 71-person contributor community, shipping releases, responding to developer feedback and enterprise work, including conversations with Fortune 500 teams on the Penpax waitlist. I also spend time on research, writing, and preparing for the YC batch. No two days are identical but the throughline is always building.

What was your journey to getting a job after graduating from Birmingham?

My path was unconventional. I joined Valent Projects as an AI Engineer, working on the Ariadne disinformation detection platform using graph neural networks and knowledge graph embeddings. In parallel I was building Graphify independently. When Graphify went viral in April 2026, reaching 70,000 GitHub stars and 2 million downloads within weeks, I made the decision to go full-time on Graphify Labs. I was subsequently accepted into Y Combinator S26. The visa process as an international founder was complex and required careful planning.

How do you feel the learning experience on your course helped to prepare you for your career?

Directly and specifically. My MSc thesis on knowledge-graph-based hybrid RAG systems was not an academic exercise, it was the technical foundation for everything I have built since. The depth of research training I received at Birmingham, including working with Professor Paolo Missier and Dr Anelia Kurteva, gave me the rigour to publish at MICAD 2025 in Springer Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, and to build systems that are now used by developers at some of the world’s largest companies.

How did the University's support services (e.g. Careers Network) help to prepare you for your career?

The academic supervision was the most formative support. The research environment pushed me to engage seriously with the literature, think clearly about novel contributions, and communicate complex ideas precisely skills, that translate directly into both technical writing and investor communication.

What are your top tips for students graduating today?

Build something real as early as possible, even if it is small. The gap between knowing a technology and deploying it in the world is where most learning actually happens. Publish your work academic papers, open-source projects, writing because a public record of your thinking compounds over time in ways you cannot predict. And do not underestimate how much a Birmingham MSc is worth internationally. The technical depth of the programme is genuinely competitive at a global level.

What were the best things about your course?

The thesis. Having the space and supervision to pursue a genuinely novel research question over an extended period, and to own the output completely, was unlike anything else in my education. The programme gave me both the freedom and the structure to do serious work.

What was your biggest achievement during your course?

My oral presentation at MICAD 2025, published in Springer Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, on multimodal knowledge-graph-augmented retrieval for medical diagnosis. It was the first time I had presented original research to an international academic audience and it confirmed that the work I was doing at Birmingham had genuine scientific merit beyond the university context.