Mike Knoop

Mike Knoop possessed an incredibly rigorous, deeply technical background in advanced product engineering, complex API ecosystem development, and massive-scale startup scaling. Operating as a fiercely capable developer who deeply understood the highly complex mechanics of translating disparate digital protocols into a completely unified automation standard, this intensely analytical foundation provided the exact structural mastery required to successfully architect the massively dominant Zapier platform.

Mike Knoop is a co-founder of Zapier. In the company's formative years, Knoop led product management, design, and developer relations, authoring the original drag-and-drop Zap editor. At Zapier, Knoop later founded Zapier Labs and spearheaded the company's early applied artificial intelligence research, laying the groundwork for Zapier Central and AI workflow automation before transitioning to co-found the ARC Prize to advance frontier AGI reasoning benchmarks. At Zapier, Knoop was instrumental in designing the original drag-and-drop Zap editor and pioneering Zapier Labs' early machine learning initiatives. His deep fascination with cognitive reasoning led him to launch the ARC Prize in 2024, a $1.0 million global competition to advance artificial general intelligence benchmarks, cementing his reputation as an influential pioneer in human-machine collaboration.