Reduct’s mission is to connect organizations with raw human experience by providing advanced tools for qualitative research.

Our Story

Reduct is the collision of design research and machine learning. Prabhas was immersed deeply in ethnographic interviews when he saw Robert’s machine learning interfaces. Three days later, working around the clock in a San Jose garage, the first version of Reduct was finished. A week later, we had our first customer.

The Founders

Prabhas Pokharel is a designer & researcher trained in the Stanford d.school's Design Thinking methodology. 

After studying Computer Science at Harvard University, he applied his technical knowledge to urgent world development challenges, culminating in a year working in Nepal during the earthquake. He found that raw technical skills weren't enough to address complex problems that were invariably social as well as technical. Upon his return to the US, Pokharel enrolled in Stanford's d.School, where he studied design thinking, a methodology grounded in empathy and ethnographically-inspired needfinding. Convinced by the power of stories, a desire to enable everyone to understand and work with raw human experience, and personally aware of the pain-points in existing methods, Pokharel leads Reduct’s design.

Robert Ochshorn holds a Computer Science degree from Cornell University, and after graduation worked as a research assistant at MIT and Harvard. He received prestigious European fellowships while developing networked software formats for viewing and disseminating documentary film. This work led him into foundational media-interface research, working at the Alan Kay–initiated SAP Labs Communications Design Group, Viewpoints Research Institute, and YCombinator Research Human Advancement Research Community. Adapting the techniques of modern machine learning to his passion for perceptual and expressive interface, Ochshorn developed speech recognition and language processing techniques that empower rather than automate, providing Reduct’s technical basis.

Interested in working with us?

Reduct is growing quickly and we’re looking for engineers and sales associates with humanistic tendencies.