Cortico was founded to strengthen public dialogue by bringing more voices—and especially underheard ones—into the conversation. The idea grew out of a project during the 2016 presidential election, when Cortico co-founder Deb Roy led a research initiative at the MIT Media Lab called the Electome. This project used AI to map the national conversation across news and social media, showing which issues were getting attention and how they were being discussed.
While the Electome revealed important insights, it also exposed a deeper problem: the growing fragmentation of public discourse. The media landscape was amplifying the loudest voices and pushing people into isolated political and social bubbles. After the election, Deb and two colleagues from the project, Russell Stevens and Eugene Yi, saw the need for a different kind of listening—one that prioritized real conversations over algorithms and soundbites.
They founded Cortico to address this challenge: to build better civic spaces for listening, and to create tools that support more meaningful, inclusive, and direct dialogue. Their belief was simple but powerful: to understand people—what they care about, why they feel what they feel—you have to talk with them, not about or at them.
That vision still drives Cortico today. Our platform helps communities and organizations engage in real conversations that surface personal stories, uncover shared experiences, and inform more connected, human-centered decisions.