Brooke Hopkins

“My job was essentially to answer one question: How do you know this car is safe enough to put on a public road?” Brooke Hopkins said in November 2026, describing her years at Waymo. She is founder and CEO of Coval, a San Francisco, California company that tests voice and chat AI agents with simulated calls and monitors them once they go live.

The Engineering Studio in Abu Dhabi

Hopkins graduated from NYU Abu Dhabi in 2018. She credits its Engineering Studio Lab, run by senior lecturer Matt Karau, with laying the groundwork for her life as an entrepreneur, and she won an award for leading WeSTEM, a student group that supports women in science and engineering.

Millions of Simulated Miles

At Waymo she led the team that ran simulations and evaluations for self-driving cars. “You can’t drive it around the block a few times and call it good,” she wrote in 2026. “The only honest answer is infrastructure. Millions of simulated miles.” After she left, she saw voice AI reaching the same tipping point self-driving had hit years earlier, with agents taking real calls and almost no testing behind them.

Feedback Before Perfection

Hopkins founded Coval in 2024, went through Y Combinator, and raised a $28 million Series A led by Norwest in June 2026. Half of her team is women, and women hold half of its leadership roles. “You have to be genuinely okay being wrong,” she said. “Because if you’re not, you’ll unconsciously slow down to avoid it.”