Meet Our Founder
Zeran Johannsen
Zeran Johannsen is the founder of Polycreek and the lead engineer behind Aletheia, Polycreek’s model for identifying grooming behavior in its earliest stages. Johannsen built Polycreek around a single conviction: that the same technology reshaping the internet can and should be used to protect the children who spend their lives on it. He started Polycreek in Arizona in 2021. Kids were coming online younger every year, and the largest social media platforms kept saying that safety was a priority while their practices told a different story. Polycreek was his answer to that gap. He later moved to Colorado so his wife could attend medical school at Rocky Vista University. In late 2025 he formed Polycreek’s board of directors, a nine-member group that is unusually large and broad for a nonprofit of its size. Since then, Polycreek has released Aletheia, which performs strongly on internal benchmarks; launched Bristle, a trust and safety platform built for smaller teams; and started research on modern grooming datasets, because most of the ones the field still relies on predate 2012.
Why he started Polycreek
Johannsen started Polycreek to fix a specific gap in how platforms keep kids safe. Most child-safety tools are built to detect evidence of harm after it has happened. But grooming doesn’t begin with evidence. It begins with conversation: slow, deliberate, and often indistinguishable from ordinary friendship until it isn’t.
By the time most systems flag a problem, the damage has often already been done. Polycreek exists to close the gap between when grooming begins and when anyone is able to intervene, giving platforms and the people who protect children a chance to act sooner.
What he works on
Johannsen leads development of Aletheia, which is designed to recognize the early patterns of grooming behavior as they emerge in conversation. His focus is on turning new advances in AI into practical tools that respect user privacy while making the reporting and investigative work of platforms, nonprofits, and public-sector partners faster, clearer, and more effective.
For Johannsen, a good child-safety tool isn’t just accurate. It has to fit into the real work of trust and safety teams, investigators, and advocates, and it has to earn the trust of the communities it serves.
Research and closing the knowledge gap
Johannsen is an active contributor to machine learning research. His paper, Implicit Regularization and Generalization in Overparameterized Neural Networks (arXiv, 2026), examines one of the field’s central puzzles: why modern neural networks with far more parameters than training examples still perform well on data they’ve never seen. Through controlled experiments on training dynamics, loss landscape geometry, and network pruning, the work explores what actually drives reliable model behavior, a question that matters deeply when models are deployed in high-stakes settings like child protection.
Beyond his technical research, Johannsen is committed to strengthening the broader body of knowledge on online grooming, child sexual abuse (CSA), and child sexual exploitation (CSE). Research in this area remains limited, fragmented, and difficult to conduct responsibly. Through Polycreek, he aims to help fill that gap by advancing rigorous, ethical, privacy-conscious work that helps the field better understand how harm unfolds online and how it can be stopped earlier.
Background
Johannsen holds a B.S. in Business Management from Arizona State University and a Master of Science in Software Engineering from Western Governors University, with an emphasis in machine learning. That combination of business and technical training shapes how he leads Polycreek: building technology that is both technically sound and practical enough to be adopted by the organizations that need it most.
Life in Colorado
Johannsen lives in Colorado with his wife, their two kids, and their French bulldog. Being a parent isn’t separate from his work; it’s at the heart of it. Every decision at Polycreek is made with the same question in mind: what would it take to make the internet a place where his own kids, and every kid, can grow up safe?
I founded Polycreek because I believe we can use AI for good, to protect the most vulnerable among us. Every child deserves to grow up safe online, and we won’t stop building until that’s a reality.