About FiCelia Labs
Engineering systems around difficult human problems.
FiCelia Labs was founded by John Segreto, an engineer, educator, and software builder.
When answers are essentially free, how do we know learning actually happened?
Generative AI made it increasingly easy for learners to produce excellent work without providing a reliable signal of what they actually understood.
But the deeper problem wasn't AI.
The systems used for learning were already fragmented.
Instruction, practice, assistance, learner activity, and assessment often lived in different places. No single system maintained enough context to understand the learning process.
That observation became the foundation for Pestal.
Built from the classroom, not just from an AI demo.
Pestal began with a problem John encountered while teaching: students could increasingly produce polished work with AI assistance while independent assessments could tell a different story.
That exposed a larger systems problem. The tools surrounding learning knew pieces of what happened, but no single system maintained the whole learning context.
Pestal grew from trying to solve that problem.
From engineering to learning systems.
Engineering teaches us to think in terms of state, measurement, feedback, and adaptation. Teaching revealed a learning environment where many of those signals were disconnected.
Pestal brings those ideas together.
FiCelia Labs exists to build systems around problems like these.
John Segreto holds an M.S. in Computational Fluid Dynamics from Cornell University, with undergraduate work in physics, chemistry, and applied mathematics. He has taught robotics, AI, and business, and builds software and computational systems.
Pestal is developed by FiCelia Labs LLC.