A Journey from Big Tech to Small Business Empowerment
Rachel Woods began her career as a data scientist at Meta, where she worked on advanced machine learning systems for advertising optimization. In 2020, she left the corporate world to launch Vinebase, a direct-to-consumer platform helping small wineries compete online. That experience—raising nearly $4 million in venture capital, building an AI-enabled recommendation engine, and eventually exiting the company—sparked a realization: most small businesses are still locked out of the AI revolution. Rachel Woods is redefining what it means to lead in the AI era. Not by scaling a lab—but by equipping everyday people to think differently, work smarter, and build businesses with AI as a co-pilot. Through The AI Exchange, she’s proving that the future of AI doesn’t just belong to big tech—it belongs to anyone willing to learn.