Founder profile
Josh Shepherd
Founder & CTO
Josh Shepherd is a founder of Movemental and the person turning its thesis into working software. He is technical enough to design the platform, the agents, and the data model himself, and fluent enough in the missional and nonprofit world to know what the work is actually for. He builds for movement leaders and mission-driven organizations, and he holds the same line for both: meet AI without losing the trust the work depends on.
Josh Shepherd is a founder of Movemental, LLC (movemental.ai), alongside Alan Hirsch and Brad Brisco. Movemental was founded in 2026, out of a two-year conversation among the three of them about what AI was doing to the institutions, and the trust, they care about.
Within that trio, Josh is the technical founder. Alan is the movement thinker. Brad is the missional leader. Josh is the one who builds. He designs and writes the platform, the agents, and the system underneath, so the ideas become something an organization can actually use. He is based in Kansas City.
Josh came to this work from inside it: years as a Methodist pastor, then founding a neomonastic, communal nonprofit where he and his wife lived alongside young adults in extended residency. From direct service through neighborhood ministry and into product work, he has built AI tools for real organizations serving real families — including bilingual youth work where the stakes are children and trust, not theory.
Movemental helps churches, nonprofits, seminaries, institutions, and individual movement leaders meet AI without losing the trust their work depends on. Josh holds the whole vision, not just the engineering. The company is agent-first: the homepage is an agent, not a brochure. The path goes in order — Safety, Sandbox, Training, Tech — because building tools for people who have not decided their boundaries just automates the mess faster.
He writes plainly, refuses hype, and is unusually scrupulous about claiming only what is true. He would rather show you a thing than describe it, and he would rather be early and honest than finished and false.
Josh is Founder and CTO and architect of the platform. He handed the CEO seat to Brad on purpose: trust is the product, and Brad already carries that trust in the field.
The arc
Career timeline
- Pastoral roots
Methodist pastor — years in direct service before building for the field.
- Communal nonprofit
Founded a neomonastic residence — lived alongside young adults in extended community.
- Neighborhood ministry
Built AI tools and systems for Youthfront's work in the Argentine neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas.
- Product & platform
Full-stack builds for mission-driven organizations — from SpecChem's digital presence to the Alan Hirsch reference platform.
- 2024–2026
The conversation with Alan and Brad — AI, trust, and what mission-driven organizations need.
- 2026
Movemental — founder and CTO, architect of the platform.
Selected work
Credibility list
- Alan Hirsch platformMovemental's reference implementation — the first Voice platform built to this standard.
- Movemental architectureMulti-tenant platform, agents, corpus pipeline, and the four-stage path in working software.
- YouthfrontFirst organization partner — AI tools for real neighborhood ministry with vulnerable families.
- SpecChem buildFull digital platform for a specialty chemicals company — product system, SEO, and organic discoverability.
Formation & strengths