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Press kit: Judson Dunne

Bios at four lengths, photographs, the figures with how they were measured, and every link in one place. Anything here can be used without asking.

01Bios

One sentence

22 words

Judson Dunne is a software engineer and founder who builds and ships consumer products end to end, across mobile, web and backend.

Short, about 50 words

50 words

Judson Dunne is a software engineer and founder. He built Locava, a location-based social platform, end to end across iOS, Android and web, grew it to more than 10,000 organic users, and raised a seed round on it. He is a computer science student at Lafayette College, class of 2027.

Medium, about 100 words

115 words

Judson Dunne is a software engineer and founder who repeatedly turns his own problems into shipped software. He built Locava, a location-based social platform, end to end: the backend, both native mobile clients, the data layer and the infrastructure. It reached more than 10,000 organic users with no paid acquisition, raised a seed round, and won Lafayette College's Big Idea Pitch Competition. He has since shipped RidgeSync, an offline-first backpacking planner with an Apple Watch companion, base., a hybrid-training app for iPhone and Apple Watch, and Lewis, an AI agent that works a real-estate agent's dormant lead list over text. He founded a working blacksmith shop at fourteen and studies computer science at Lafayette College.

Long

344 words

Judson Dunne is a software engineer and founder. He works across the whole stack, with the most depth in mobile: React Native and TypeScript on the client, Node on the backend, and the geospatial and offline-first systems that sit between them.

He built Locava, a location-based social platform, end to end. That meant the Fastify backend, the React Native client, the Next.js web surface, a shared contracts package that typed every request between them, and the Google Cloud infrastructure underneath. It reached more than 10,000 organic users and 8,000 user-posted places with no paid acquisition, won Lafayette College's Big Idea Pitch Competition, and raised a seed round. He built the first version alone and later hired and led a team of eight.

Since stepping back from Locava he has shipped three more products. RidgeSync is an offline-first backpacking planner built on seven trail datasets he generated from raw OpenStreetMap data, with a web planner, an iPhone app and an Apple Watch companion sharing one platform-agnostic kernel. base. is a hybrid-training app for iPhone and Apple Watch that reads live health data and adapts a plan across strength, endurance and nutrition. Lewis is an AI agent that works a real-estate agent's dormant lead list over text, built around a policy engine that sits between the model and every irreversible action and refuses, in code, to let it send a claim nothing on record backs.

Before any of that he built a blacksmith shop. At fourteen he dry-laid its stone walls by hand from flagstone pulled out of the Ottauquechee River, apprenticed with a master smith, and ran Misty Mountain Forge as a business for three years. It is the first thing he made that strangers paid him for, and the reason he thinks about software the way he does: you cannot undo a hammer blow, so you plan the sequence before the metal is hot.

He studies computer science at Lafayette College, class of 2027. Outside work he races triathlon, climbs in the White Mountains in winter, and rides a lot of Vermont dirt roads.

02The facts

Full name
Judson Dunne
Pronouns
he/him
Title
Software engineer and founder
Education
Computer science, Lafayette College, class of 2027
Based
Easton, PA · Hartland, VT
Locava
Founder. Live on the App Store. Seed round raised.
Locava team
Peak 8: two full-time engineers and six interns
base.
On the App Store for iPhone and Apple Watch since September 18, 2026
RidgeSync
iOS, Apple Watch and web
Email
judson.dunne@gmail.com

On the naming: the app is written base. in lowercase, with the full stop. Locava is live on the App Store and still picking up users organically. Judson stepped back from full-time work on it in 2026 to build something new.

03Figures

Product figures, measured by Judson

These come from Locava’s own instrumentation. No outside party has audited them, so they are attributed to Judson rather than to any publication that has covered the product.

10,000+
organic users, zero paid acquisitionDistinct registered accounts in Firestore at the end of June 2026. No paid acquisition ran at any point. As of June 30, 2026.
8,000+
places posted by usersUser-created posts in Firestore, excluding deleted records. As of June 30, 2026.
~50%
weekly retention at peakShare of accounts active in a week who were also active the following week, measured in BigQuery over the autumn 2025 peak. Approximate, and a peak figure rather than a lifetime average. As of September 30, 2025.
30%+
of the Lafayette student body downloaded itRegistered accounts with a Lafayette email at the end of the spring 2025 semester, against the college's published enrolment. As of May 31, 2025.

Counted from the source

These are counts anybody with the repositories can reproduce with the command in each note.

742k
lines of TypeScript across the monorepoLines of .ts and .tsx across the four Locava repositories, excluding node_modules, build output and generated files. As of August 1, 2026.
777
test files across the mobile client and the backendFiles matching *.test.ts and *.test.tsx across the mobile client and backend repositories. As of August 1, 2026.
7
trail datasets built from raw OpenStreetMapDeterministic build steps producing hikes, campsites, waterfalls, viewpoints, water sources, trail segments and cell coverage from Overpass extracts.
120k
lines of TypeScriptLines of .ts and .tsx across the kernel, web planner and native client, excluding node_modules and build output. As of August 1, 2026.

Product figures as of June 2026, measured by Judson from Locava's own instrumentation.

04Photographs

Free to use in any coverage of Judson or the products. Click a photograph for the full-resolution original.

Product imagery

Photographs on the press page itself belong to the publications that ran them and are credited there. Those are not part of this kit.

05Topics

Subjects Judson can talk about at length, each with the project it comes from.

  • Shipping a consumer social app solo, and what breaks at 10,000 usersLocava
  • Offline-first mobile architecture: making a product work with no signalRidgeSync
  • Turning raw OpenStreetMap data into trail datasets people can actually useRidgeSync
  • Typed contracts between a mobile client and its backendLocava
  • Instrumenting a product before launch, so roadmap arguments have answersLocava
  • HealthKit, watchOS companions and building for athletesbase.
  • Founding a company as an undergraduate, and hiring your first teamLocava
  • Putting a deterministic policy engine between an LLM and anything irreversibleLewis
  • Why an agent lies about what it checked, and how to make that a blocked send rather than a promptLewis

06Links

07Prior coverage

All coverage, with quotes

Need something not here?

Higher-resolution photographs, a different crop, or a quote on any of it.

judson.dunne@gmail.com

Awards