Miju Labs

← All people · Contra Labs (Contra.Work Inc.)

Co-founder and CEO of Contra, the commission-free freelance marketplace (about $45M raised; Unusual, NEA, Cowboy). In March 2026 he repointed Contra's creative supply into Contra Labs, the most direct incumbent in creative human data. A creative himself (audio engineer, music composer), he pitches Contra Labs as 'the eval layer for creative AI'.

high confidenceSan FranciscoAt Contra Labs (Contra.Work Inc.) since 2019Updated 2026-09-19

Background

Grew up in Lexington, South Carolina, in a family that ran a small business with remote staff in the 1990s. He taught himself PCs, video editing and graphic design. Before startups he produced radio music for Sony UK and did freelance web development.

He founded Ripe, a healthy-food delivery business in New York, which he says reached $1M in first-year sales and a $6M run rate by 2019 before being sold to Hungry in 2020. He co-founded Contra with Gajus Kuizinas, whom he met through On Deck. Contra raised a $14.5M Series A led by Unusual Ventures and a $30M Series B led by NEA in 2021.

What they run now

Personally driving the Contra Labs bet. Contra's job posts show the CEO interviewing Strategic Project Lead candidates, and he is a member of the contralabs Hugging Face org. He is repositioning Contra from a freelance marketplace to 'the network for creative intelligence', selling creative preference data, benchmarks and trajectories while keeping the marketplace's earnings pitch to creatives.

Career

  1. 2019 – presentCo-founder & CEO, Contra (Contra.Work Inc.) — Contra Labs launched Mar 2026
  2. 2013 – 2020Co-founder & CEO, Ripe — sold to Hungry
  3. —Radio music production / audio engineering, Sony UK

On the record

Contra Labs positioning · 2026-04

Describes Contra Labs as the first frontier data and evaluation lab for creative AI: the eval layer that teaches AI tools quality the way creative experts see it. source

AI and creatives · 2026-04

With AI changing everything, Contra's job is to keep its users relevant and ahead of where work is going; AI tools multiply leverage rather than replace creativity. source

Creator earnings · 2026-04

Wants people using Contra to make as much money as possible; commission-free for freelancers. source

Skills over resumes · 2026-04

Work is shifting from resume-first to skill-first, and remote independent work is permanent. source

Recent posts

1 posts archived

Ben Huffman
Co-Founder CEO at Contra.com
•
What is the best video editing agent for short form social? Does it actually work? We watched professional video editors, step by step, as they built short-form social reels in Adobe Premiere Pro. Today we're open-sourcing this preview dataset on Hugging Face, to make AI agents better at editing videos. The data set is 234 annotated steps across 4 computer-use trajectories. Editors narrated their reasoning aloud as they worked, so every step pairs a screenshot with the expert's own thought, a structured action, and executable grounding: 1. a Premiere MCP tool call, keyboard shortcut, menu path, or coordinate click. 2. The format follows the AgentNet trajectory schema, extended with a Premiere action taxonomy and multi-path execution. ***That makes it directly usable for computer-use agent SFT, reasoning mid-training, tool-use and function calling, and benchmarking agents against a human expert baseline. Enjoy! Links in comments.
817 comments • 4 reposts
All 1 in the feed →

Interviews & talks

Connections

  • Gajus Kuizinas — co-founder & CTO
  • Sarah Leary — investor / director (Unusual Ventures)
  • Ted Wang — investor / director (Cowboy Ventures)
  • Alexandria Minetti — Contra Labs researcher
  • Aspen Hopkins — lead author of Contra Labs' HCB paper
  • Purvanshi Mehta — former research partner (Lica World, now Gamma)

Investments and boards

  • Kled AI (seed, Mar 2026, per Crunchbase)
  • FLORA (seed, May 2025, per Crunchbase)

Who they amplify

Accounts whose posts Ben has reposted recently: Lovable, Daniel Bright, Albert Chun.

Why it matters here

He controls the incumbent's biggest asset: a large pool of creatives who already trust Contra to pay them. He is turning that pool into a creative-data business aimed at the same labs and tools Julian would target. His angel bets (Kled AI, a data marketplace, and FLORA, a creative AI canvas) show where he thinks creative data is heading. The loss of Lica to Gamma leaves a hole in his modelling capability.

How to reach

Speculative: no Contra Labs podcast or long-form interview found; he is on X (@_benhq) and as a creative on contra.com. Warm paths are Contra's board investors (Unusual's Sarah Leary, Cowboy's Ted Wang). The credible opening is supply or partnership, for example a European creative cohort or a niche medium Contra lacks, not competition. The Calendly partnership link on contralabs.com is the official inbound.

What we could not establish
  • Whether Contra Labs has any named frontier-lab customer
  • Who is 'Head of Contra Labs', 'Head of Research', 'Data Lead' and 'VP of Product' named in interview loops
  • How Contra replaces Lica's modelling after the Gamma acquisition
  • Education (not found)

Sources

  1. Everywhere Ventures: Founders Everywhere — Ben Huffman (Apr 2026)
  2. Everywhere Ventures on Medium: Founders Everywhere — Ben Huffman
  3. Startup Fundraising (Alejandro Cremades): Ben Huffman profile (May 2025)
  4. Crunchbase: Ben Huffman
  5. Unusual Ventures: Contra's unusual journey (Jun 2021)
  6. Contra blog: Introducing Contra Labs (31 Mar 2026)
  7. Contra Ashby job board (posting API)
  8. Hugging Face: contralabs org members
  9. TheOrg: Contra org chart
Also at Contra Labs (Contra.Work Inc.)
medium confidence

Gajus Kuizinas

Co-founder & CTO, Contra

medium confidence

Aspen Hopkins

Lead author, Human Creativity Benchmark (affiliated Contra and MIT)

low confidence

Alexandria Minetti

Researcher, Contra.Work Inc. (Contra Labs)