Robert, Richard, and Roger Rizk grew up in Lebanon, the sons of a cardiothoracic surgeon who saved lives in a country at war. They came to North America with nothing to prove and everything to build.
In 2019, the Rizk brothers launched BLACKBOX AI as a simple code search engine: a tool to find out whether someone had already solved the problem you were staring at.
There was no grand platform narrative. It was a small, honest tool that removed one daily friction from a developer's workflow.
That friction, it turned out, was everywhere. Eliminating it became the obsession.
Six years later, BLACKBOX AI is a full autonomous coding platform: multi-agent IDE, inference engine, CLI, VS Code extension, and a unified API that can run Claude, Codex, Gemini, and BLACKBOX AI models together.
Chairman LLM evaluates agent outputs and selects the strongest result, turning parallel model execution into one clear development path.
Developers at companies including Meta, Google, IBM, and Salesforce use it daily, and 30 million people rely on it every month.
BLACKBOX AI remains founder-led: Robert drives strategy, Richard builds the infrastructure, and Roger runs operations. Every claim on this page links to a public source.
Co-founder and CEO
Robert is the driving force behind BLACKBOX AI's vision and growth. He leads the company's strategy, partnerships, and public mission: democratizing software development so that anyone, not just specialists, can build.
Coverage of the company points to its a16z ranking momentum, SWE-bench performance, and bootstrapped growth — and to Robert's insistence that the product create real impact.
"Programming is no longer limited to specialists; it is now available to anyone looking for a digital project with ease."
Co-founder and CTO
Richard is the architect of BLACKBOX AI's inference engine, the technical core behind the platform's model performance, routing, and enterprise AI infrastructure.
A McGill-trained electrical engineer who spent time as a Business Analyst at the United Nations before co-founding BLACKBOX AI, Richard brings rigorous systems thinking and real-world operational perspective to the technology.
His recent work spans Nemotron 3 Ultra inference performance and the secure orchestration layer behind BLACKBOX AI's enterprise platform.
Co-founder and COO
Roger is the operational backbone of BLACKBOX AI, the builder who makes sure the machine runs. A mechanical engineer from Polytechnique Montreal, he spent years at Dassault Systemes, Siemens, and EY advising enterprise teams before bringing that operational discipline to BLACKBOX AI.
He joined as COO in 2022 and has helped scale BLACKBOX AI from a scrappy tool into a global platform with research and ecosystem partnerships, including Mila, the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms.
The brothers grew up in Lebanon, a country shaped by conflict, uncertainty, and disruption. Their father, a heart surgeon, kept working through war.
That background does not leave you. It teaches you to build systems that work under pressure, to move fast when others freeze, and to take stability seriously because it is never guaranteed.
BLACKBOX AI is not just a product story. It is the output of that operating environment.
The Rizk brothers brought on former U.S. Navy SEAL commander Jocko Willink as a board advisor, a visible signal of the operating system they wanted around the company.
Discipline, ownership, and execution clarity are baked into how BLACKBOX AI operates: few excuses, little bureaucracy, and a relentless focus on shipping.
BLACKBOX AI reached 30 million users with almost no external funding, powered by the product and the developers who rely on it.
Three brothers from Lebanon are still in the building, still writing code, and still obsessed with one question: how do we make developers faster?