HEAVY.AI Leadership Team
Management
Todd Mostak
Founder & CEO
Todd is the CEO and co-founder of HEAVY.AI. Todd originally conceived of the idea of a GPU-accelerated analytics platform while conducting graduate research at Harvard on the role of social media in the Arab Spring, after tiring of waiting hours or sometimes days for traditional CPU-based platforms to run analytic workflows over hundreds of millions of tweets. He later joined MIT’s CSAIL as a research fellow, under the supervision of Sam Madden and Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker, before founding HEAVY.AI.
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Pey Silvester
VP of Engineering
Pey is HEAVY.AI's Vice President of Engineering and leads all aspects of product development. With more than 20 years of proven engineering leadership, Pey has expertise in delivering world-class enterprise and consumer applications. She joined HEAVY.AI from Amazon where she built the first Alexa team in Vancouver and launched the Alexa Skills Kit simulators and testing platforms. Prior to that, Pey led performance, QA, and engineerings teams at NetApp launching their large scale high performance object, CIFS, and NFS storage platforms.
Bob Deppisch
VP & General Manager of Federal
Bob is the VP of Public Sector at HEAVY.AI. He has almost 20 years of experience working in the national security space both from his time in the U.S. Navy and building federal business practices for startups. Prior to HEAVY.AI, Bob served as an Intelligence Officer in the U.S. Navy where he supported numerous fleet operations and served as the J2 for a series of special operations task forces around the globe. After 10 years on active duty, Bob joined Zignal Labs, a media intelligence firm where he successfully led the effort to build their federal government portfolio from scratch. His most recent role was with Predata, an online behavioral analytics firm, as the VP of sales. Bob received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley and MBA from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.
Board of Directors
Todd Mostak
CEO & Board Member
Todd is the CEO and Founder of HEAVY.AI. Todd built the original prototype of HEAVY.AI after tiring of the inability of conventional tools to allow for interactive exploration of big datasets while conducting his Harvard graduate research on the role of Twitter in the Arab Spring. He then joined MIT as a research fellow focusing on GPU databases before turning the HEAVY.AI project into a startup.
Greg Papadopoulos
Board Member
Greg Papadopoulos, PhD is a Venture Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Prior to NEA, Greg was EVP and CTO of Sun Microsystems, where he guided the company’s $2B R&D portfolio. Before Sun, Greg was an Associate Professor of EECS at MIT, where he worked on massively parallel dataflow computing architectures. He also helped found a number of companies, from video conferencing (PictureTel) to computational fluid dynamics (NASDAQ:EXA), and was an engineer with HP and Honeywell. Greg holds an undergraduate degree from UCSD and an SM and PhD from MIT. He also a Senior Fellow of the American Leadership Forum.
Moe Kermani
Board Member
Moe Kermani, Ph.D. is Managing Partner at Vanedge Capital, focusing on investments in the areas of cloud computing, infrastructure software, security, open source businesses, and vertical market solutions. Prior to Vanedge, Moe was a Vice President of NetApp (NTAP:NASDAQ), a leading provider of enterprise data storage solutions. Prior to that Moe was President and CEO of Bycast Inc., the world leader in storage virtualization software for large scale digital archives and storage clouds.
Sam Madden
Board Member & Advisor
Samuel Madden is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research includes databases, distributed computing, and networking. Madden heads the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data, and BigData@CSAIL, an initiative to unite researchers at MIT and leaders from industry. Madden received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and is the recipient of awards including an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, best paper awards in VLDB 2004 and 2007, and a best paper award in MobiCom 2006.
Clifford Platt
Board Observer
Clifford Platt represents NVIDIA's Strategic Investments team, where he focuses on artificial intelligence, data science, autonomous machines and accelerated computing. Prior to NVIDIA, he was a member of the Venture Capital Business Development and Corporate Development teams at Amazon Web Services, following several years of experience as a Technology, Media & Telecom investment banker at Goldman Sachs and GCA Savvian. He received his B.S. in Computer Science and Business Administration from Carnegie Mellon University and MBA from Duke University (Fuqua School of Business).
George Hoyem
Board Observer
George has more than 25 years of entrepreneurial, operations, and venture capital investing experience in high technology companies. George is currently at IQT, the strategic venture capital arm of the Intelligence Community, where he heads up the Enterprise IT investment practice area. This investment area includes companies targeting solutions in Advanced Analytics, Cyber Security, Data Center Infrastructure, Cloud and Mobile focused technologies. Hoyem has led close to 20 investments at IQT across these investment areas. He has also backed, supported, and served on the boards of several dozen emerging technology companies over his career. Mr. Hoyem also serves on the Board of Directors of the National Venture Capital Association, the venture capital community’s flagship trade association where he advocates for issues relevant to corporate and strategic investors.
Advisors
Dr. Mike Flaxman, Ph.D.
Product Manager
Dr. Michael Flaxman is HEAVY.AI’s Product Lead. In addition to leading product strategy at HEAVY.AI, Dr. Flaxman focuses on the combination of geographic analysis with machine learning, or “geoML.” He has served on the faculties of MIT, Harvard and the University of Oregon. Dr. Flaxman has participated in GIS projects in 17 countries. He has been a Fulbright fellow, and served as an advisor to the Interamerican Development Bank, the World Bank and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Flaxman previously served as industry manager for Architecture, Engineering and Construction at ESRI, the world’s largest developer of GIS technology. Dr. Flaxman received his doctorate in design from Harvard University in 2001 and holds a master’s in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Oregon and a bachelor’s in biology from Reed College.
Tom Reilly
Advisor
Tom has a distinguished 30-year career in the enterprise software market. Tom is currently a board member for Jive Software, Ombud, ThreatStream, Cloudera and is now an Advisory Board member for HEAVY.AI. Previously he was CEO of Cloudera. Previous to Cloudera Tom served as vice president and general manager of enterprise security at HP. Before HP, Tom served as CEO of enterprise security company ArcSight, which HP acquired in 2010. Tom led ArcSight through its successful initial public offering and subsequent sale to HP. Tom graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s of science degree in mechanical engineering.
Jeffrey Heer
Advisor
Jeffrey Heer works on visualization, human-computer interaction and social computing. His research investigates the perceptual, cognitive and social factors involved in making sense of data, resulting in new interactive systems for visual analysis and communication. The tools developed by his lab are used by researchers, corporations and thousands of data enthusiasts around the world. In 2009 Jeff was named to MIT Technology Review's TR35; in 2012 he was named a Sloan Foundation Research Fellow. He holds BS, MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
John Owens
Advisor
John Owens is the Child Family Professor of Engineering and Entrepreneurship in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Davis. At UC Davis, John leads a research group with a primary focus on GPU computing. He is an NVIDIA CUDA Fellow, cotaught Udacity's massively open online course (MOOC) "Introduction to Parallel Programming with CUDA" in 2013, and won the 2004 Department of Energy Early Career Principal Investigator Award. John earned PhD and MS degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University and his BS in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley.
Kevin Salvadori
Advisor
Kevin is an experienced technology executive with a strong track record of innovation and delivery in companies ranging from start-ups to large multi-nationals. He is currently the President of Clearbay Technology Inc., an investment and advisory company. Previously, Kevin was the Director – Group Technology Strategy and Operations at Vodafone, where he led the development of technology strategy and R&D for both networks and IT. He also managed Vodafone’s technology security, shared services, global network, and data centres. In his prior role at Vodafone, Kevin served as the CTO of the UK and Ireland. Vodafone is one of the largest service providers in the world with over 400m customers globally. Before joining Vodafone, Kevin was Executive Vice President Business Transformation and Technology Operations at TELUS, one of Canada’s largest fixed and mobile services companies. He joined TELUS in 2000 following the acquisition of Clearnet, where he was an executive. Kevin holds a B.A.Sc. from the University of Waterloo.
