Shanea Leven: Rejected By Google Four Times To Building The Future of AI

Shanea Leven grew up in inner city Baltimore as the oldest of six children. Her mother was only nineteen when she was born, working tirelessly to keep the family afloat. When Shanea was seven, her biological father left the family, and she was raised by a stepfather who later adopted her at thirteen. Resources were limited, but ambition was not. From a young age, she understood responsibility, grit, and what it meant to carve out a future when nothing is guaranteed.

Years later, that foundation would help her become one of the most influential leaders in AI, a founder solving the production reliability crisis that is stopping 95 percent of AI features from ever reaching the real world.

Meet Shanea Leven, co-founder and CEO of Empromptu AI.

Before she became a leader in AI, Shanea was a student at the University of Maryland College Park, determined to rewrite the trajectory she had been born into. She pushed herself through an unusually demanding path, earning dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science and Business while running a web development and social media agency she launched at nineteen. It was her first glimpse of building opportunity in spite of limited resources.

College was also the period when she faced one of the most frightening moments of her life. In her early twenties, police officers pulled a gun on her during a stop. Instead of derailing her, the encounter hardened her resolve. It became one more reminder that she would have to fight for every step forward.

That fight became the theme of her early career. Shanea applied to Google four times and was rejected four times. But she refused to accept the door closing. On her fifth attempt, she was hired. The same persistence that carried her through Baltimore, through college, and through fear became the force that propelled her into tech’s biggest stages.

At Google, Shanea worked on developer tools for Google Assistant, diving deep into AI at scale. From there, she went on to eBay, where she led machine learning and personalization initiatives for massive user bases. Each role sharpened both her technical depth and her understanding of how AI succeeds only when it solves real business problems.

She later took on leadership roles at Cloudflare, Docker, and Lob, managing complex developer platforms and guiding teams through major organizational change. Her leadership style became known for its clarity, thoughtfulness, and humanity. She brought together strategic rigor with an instinctive understanding of people and how they navigate technological transformation.

Years before she became a prominent CEO, Shanea had already spent more than a decade building the infrastructure of modern software.

In 2020, Shanea co-founded CodeSee with her husband, Josh Leven. Together, they built a visual code understanding platform that helped developers navigate complex and constantly changing codebases. They raised funding from top developer tool investors, were featured in major publications, and in 2024, CodeSee was acquired by GitKraken. The acquisition integrated CodeSee’s visualizations, automations, and AI into GitKraken’s platform for thirty million developers worldwide.

But the most meaningful takeaway for Shanea was not the exit itself. It was the realization that many AI tools create impressive demos but fall apart in production. The gap between hype and reliability became the problem she felt uniquely equipped to solve.

In 2024, Shanea partnered with her co-founder, Dr. Sean Robinson, to build Empromptu AI, the first platform designed to create production-ready AI applications from day one. The mission was as personal as it was technical. For years, she had watched a handful of insiders dominate the narrative around artificial intelligence, leaving most people feeling intimidated or shut out.

Shanea saw it differently. She knew AI could be learned, used, and built by anyone, but only if the tools were built with real people in mind.

It is this belief in empowerment, not exclusivity, that shapes Empromptu’s vision for the future.

By late 2025, Empromptu had raised an oversubscribed $2 million dollar pre-seed round led by Precursor Ventures and was powering AI for more than two thousand businesses. Investors described the technology as a real step toward AGI. Customers ranged from large SaaS companies to first-time founders, including two moms building a clinician-backed period tracker for teens and a mother-daughter team creating AI financial wellness tools for women.

Shanea’s mission is simple: make AI accurate, accessible, and reliable for everyone.

Shanea Leven’s journey is one of the most powerful examples of modern innovation rooted in grit. She grew up in an environment that rarely produces tech CEOs, taught herself to navigate every barrier in her way, and built a career that reshaped entire categories of software. From Baltimore to Big Tech to building the future of AI, she has become one of the most consequential voices in a field dominated by a small group of insiders.

Her story is proof that you do not need a straight path, perfect timing, or early access. You need resilience, ambition, and the courage to build what the world actually needs.

So the question becomes: what would you pursue if you refused to accept the first four no’s?