Hi! OpenAI's first hire for the London office, now founding something new for AI comms 👋

Hi Product Hunt!

I’m Doug, co-founder and CEO at Lightfern. We’re based in London and currently in stealth, building something that focuses on delivering human authenticity in communication, whilst still enhancing it with AI.

I was previously at OpenAI as their first hire for the London office, and worked at Facebook for over a decade. I led researchers that trained GPT-4o and built many of Facebook’s core privacy and messaging features.

AI driven communication isn’t authentic. Every LinkedIn post sounds like ChatGPT, and there’s so much slop. We didn’t set out to enable this when I worked at OpenAI, but that’s how the world uses these tools today because it’s easy. I’m tired of seeing em dashes everywhere, “here’s the lowdown”, and “It’s not X, it’s Y” constructions… There’s gotta be a better way, so we’re trying to build something better.

Our launch is early next month, so prep is underway. We’re really keen to push out the best product possible and keep our users at the heart of what we’re doing. With that said, if you’d like to test it out, we’d love to hear what you think.

You can use this link for early access to the product: https://lightfern.com/sign-up/?code=sparkle2026, code SPARKLE2026.

Hoping it’ll be particularly helpful to those of you with high email volumes, whether due to working in the B2B space or going back and forth with VCs during a raise. It’s currently only available as an extension to Chrome on desktop with Gmail, but we’re working on wider rollouts.

Looking forward to meeting other builders on here! Open to any questions you might have.