When Erin Meryl McGurk was growing up in South Manchester she could not have imagined where she is today.
The pupil at Altrincham Grammar School for Girls is now building an AI startup in Silicon Valley after securing backing from the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator.
“Growing up in South Manchester and going to AGGS, I did not see many people, especially women, taking the route I’m taking now – building a technology company, raising from Y Combinator, and moving to Silicon Valley,” she says.
“I’d love to make that path feel more visible and possible for girls who are where I was a few years ago.”
McGurk is the creator behind @erinmerylstudy, which has made her one of the UK’s largest and most recognisable educational content creators.
Reading Land Economy at St John’s College at the University of Cambridge, she is also now co-founder and CEO of Egoist Machines, which is building AI Passport.
This allows people to establish connections to preferred AI assistants and other apps that rely on personal data, including email, calendar, work productivity apps and wearable devices.
When a connected app receives or creates new information, such as details for a trip or a new writing preference, that information can appear in the user’s AI Passport inbox. The user can decide whether it can be shared with other apps, kept only in the original app, or deleted entirely.
She met her co-founder and CTO Dr David Khachaturov (below) while Caledonian dancing – a form of Scottish country dancing – at Cambridge.
Khachaturov completed a BA in Computer Science at the university in 2021, an MSc in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Oxford in 2022, and returned to Cambridge for a PhD in Computer Science.
The pair started Egoist Machines after discovering a shared concern about how black-box AI assistants collect, store and share user data.
“Data is the new oil, except this time every individual is swimming in it, they’re just not getting paid for it, nor do they even realise how valuable it is; frontier AI labs pay upwards of $150/hr for people to write down their knowledge for feeding into LLMs, and most people on the internet do it for free,” he says.
“Privacy is a fundamental right and it’s genuinely surprising that everyone is happy giving away conversations you have with LLMs to the labs running them – you wouldn’t expect your WhatsApp conversations to be visible to Meta.
“We’ll all look back in five years’ time and wonder why something like our AI passport wasn’t done sooner.”
As for McGurk, she says she hopes to inspire others to take her path.
“I’d love other ambitious young people in the UK to see this and think, ‘why not me?’,” she says.
“You do not have to grow up next to Silicon Valley to build something important. You can come from Manchester, go through the British education system, and still end up working on a global technology problem.
“Silicon Valley is exciting because people move very quickly here. We came because that density of ambition and technical talent is still hard to find anywhere else. But I don’t think that means the UK lacks the raw talent.
“I think places like Manchester and the North of England are massively underused, and I’d love Egoist Machines to be part of proving that when we build more of the company back home.”