I am co-founder & CEO of Cerebri AI ( Austin & Toronto ), and I am also a Mentor at Capital Factory.
Cerebri AI Inc. is my fourth startup and my second data science startup, it never gets old, what a revolution. Cerebri AI is an artificial intelligence software company that has developed patented solutions providing real-time AI-enabled "Answers-as-a-Service". I am the lead inventor or co-inventor on a number of the 24 patents Cerebri has filed to date.
I started my career with PwC, working in Ottawa and Paris. After graduating from the London School of Economics, I joined Wood Gundy ( CIBC World Markets ). As VP of Investment Banking, I was the lead underwriter for 3 of the 4 largest public companies in Canada. I helped raise over US$4B in Canada, the US, and Europe. I left investment banking and started a VC fund in Montreal, investing in startup tech, three companies of which went public, one 24 years later! After 15 years in finance, I decided I wanted to build products rather than finance them.
I then helped turn a 3-man team into a premier programming tools vendor, Metrowerks CodeWarrior, which was named Software Product of the Year by MacWorld Magazine beat out over 3,500 applications at the time. CodeWarrior was used to build the vast majority of software in popular use on the Macintosh in the 1990s from Microsoft Office to the Apple operating system. MacWeek Magazine said in a lead editorial that Metrowerks saved Apple Computer! MacWorld awarded me a World Class Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Macintosh Platform along with the CTO of Apple. I was Finalist for the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year Award/Austin. Metrowerks was a publicly listed company on NASDAQ before it was acquired by Motorola. Subsequently, Motorola named me VP Biz Dev for their semiconductor business, where I invested over $450M around the world in mergers and acquisition activities in 14 months.
After Motorola, I started my third company, Reddwerks, a data science-based supply chain software company focused on selling to the world’s leading retailers and distributors. We counted four of the top ten retailers in the US as customers: Walmart, CVS, Best Buy, and Lowe’s. At Reddwerks, 20% of our staff were Masters/PhDs in operations research and other mathematical disciplines. Reddwerks was a pioneer in applying data science to the processing of retail and e-commerce orders in massive distribution centers that could reach over 1 million square feet in size. We obtained IT data from IT and data from all manner of equipment including conveyors, in effect making us a pioneer in the Internet of Things ( IoT ). Reddwerks was Austin’s fastest-growing company in 2010 according to Austin Business Journal. We sold Reddwerks to Kion Group, a German company, in 2015.
