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Meet the Team

Meet the Team

ENGINEERING   |   SCIENCE   |   BUSINESS   |   FORMER INTERNS   |   BOARD OF DIRECTORS   |   INVESTORS

Jean

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Jean Paoli
CO-FOUNDER

Jean Paoli, a pioneer in the field of document engineering, is one of the inventors of XML and, during his time at Microsoft, started 4 >$1B businesses for the company: the XML effort, Microsoft InfoPath, the modern Microsoft Office file formats, and Microsoft's open-source subsidiary that enabled today's massive open source usage in Azure. In addition, he has created two startups with the renowned Inria. 

Ecole Des Ponts | Inria Startups | Microsoft

Engineering

 

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER

Andrew Begun
CO-FOUNDER

Andrew was an Engineering Manager at Microsoft who co-created Microsoft InfoPath and was responsible for shipping critical parts of Windows.

 

Carnegie-Mellon | Microsoft

TECHNOLOGY

Mike Palmer
CO-FOUNDER

Mike was an Engineering Manager at Microsoft and co-created Microsoft InfoPath. Mike also co-created the AI Scheduling Assistant currently piloted in Microsoft Outlook.

 

University of Washington | Microsoft

PRODUCT

Taqi Jaffri
CO-FOUNDER

Taqi was a Principal Product Manager at Microsoft responsible for shipping critical parts of Windows. Taqi also co-created the AI technology driving Microsoft presence in physical stores.

 

Stanford | Microsoft

PRODUCT

Zubin Rustom Wadia

Zubin is an engineer, product creator, and startup entrepreneur. He has built over 100 technology products for government, public safety, healthcare, banking, and insurance sectors. He holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

 

MIT Sloan | Imagework

PRODUCT

David Watson

David is a product and brand designer focused on integrating the two into a seamless experience and has worked with numerous startups as well as Microsoft, building health apps and customer/business management platforms.

 

Microsoft | Animas Creative

PRODUCT

Alexandra Durbin

Alexandra brings 4+ years of product and CX design experience. She was previously a product strategist at Coursera. She holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Washington, where she double-majored in physics and astronomy.

 

Coursera | Udacity | University of Washington

PRODUCT

Nikko Ong

Nikko brings exceptional business growth and engineering skills to our product management team. He built and patented products as an engineer and growth product manager at Haply Robotics. He received his Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering degree from McGill University.

 

Haply Robotics | Pratt & Whitney | McGill

PRODUCT

Claudio Caldato

Claudio is a senior technical product leader who has led teams at Meta, Oracle and Microsoft. He earned his Masters in Information Technology from CEFRIEL – Politecnico di Milano, and his MBA from The Open University.

 

Meta | Oracle | Microsoft

SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Elena Pricoiu

Elena brings 9.5 years of software engineering experience, at Microsoft working on enterprise products and at Facebook working on key video and ads payment technologies. She received her Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto.

 

University of Toronto | Microsoft | Facebook 

SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Manar Shehadeh

Manar is an innovative C/C++ software engineer with 4+ years of software design experience as a technical lead for a startup company. She also worked at Microsoft on developer tools and Azure-related projects.

 

Technion | Microsoft | Optima Design Automation

SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Michael Taron

Michael was a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, working on natural language processing on the OneNote team. He previously worked on the Microsoft Whiteboard app and XAML tools in Visual Studio.

 

WWU | Boeing | Microsoft

SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Eric White

Eric brings 35 years of experience in systems analysis and software development. He specializes in document formats, and has architected, designed and coded extensive enterprise-class applications and systems, including critical systems for multinational organizations.

 

Author | Microsoft | OECD

SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Rishi Rajaram Geetha

Rishi started as an intern at Docugami and has now joined us full-time as a software engineer. She brings great relevant experience, including UX design and work on intake and document conversion of large data files and records. Rishi graduated the University of Washington with a degree in computer science and a minor in linguistics.

 

University of Washington

SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Anurag Saykar

Anurag is a backend developer with significant experience designing and deploying complex reinforcement learning projects. He received his Masters in Computer Science from the University of Buffalo, and previously spent two years building end-to-end machine learning pipelines with a focus on natural language processing.

 

University of Buffalo | Trendzlink

SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Tim Schutz

Tim brings deep experience across a wide range of programming languages, mobile, and mixed/augmented reality. He spent 7+ years at Microsoft, most recently as senior engineering lead for the Gameplay systems team in Mojang Studios. He received his Bachelor of Science in computer science from Vanderbilt University.

 

Vanderbilt University | Microsoft

SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Stephen Erstad

Stephen brings deep technical expertise across a variety of industries. Most recently, he served as a lead engineer at Target, spearheading key initiatives from consumer-facing UX/UI projects to internal business processes. He received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota.

 

Target | University of Minnesota

ML ENGINEER

David Chang

David recently completed his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, with a minor in Mathematics, from the University of Washington. David has served as a research assistant in deep learning for vision and language and has also been a teaching assistant for data programming.

 

University of Washington

SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Kenzie Mihardja

Kenzie is a student at the University of Washington, on track to graduate in December 2022 with a bachelor of science degree in computer science focused on data and machine learning. In addition to his coursework, he serves as a teaching assistant. Previously, he helped lead online marketing and fulfillment for an online retailer.

 

Target | University of Washington

INTERN, MS CS STUDENT

Katherine Murphy

Katherine is an undergraduate computer science student at the University of Washington. In addition to her coursework, Katherine serves as a teaching assistant in software design and implementation, contributing to course development and managing course infrastructure.

 

University of Washington

TECHNICAL ADVISOR

Martin Sawicki

Martin was an Engineering Manager at Microsoft where he co-created the Microsoft Office APIs, played a leadership role in Word and led the Java support effort in Azure. Martin spent 2 years leading Docugami's architecture. At Princeton, he studied CS, with a concentration in AI and cognitive studies.

 

Princeton | Microsoft

TECHNICAL ADVISOR

Jim Allchin

Jim held leadership positions at Microsoft from 1990 to 2007, including co-president of the Platform Products and Services Group, with responsibility for Windows for consumers and business users, Windows Server product line, and developer tools. Previously, he served as chief technical officer at Banyan.

 

Banyan | Microsoft

Science

 

CHIEF SCIENCE OFFICER

Luis Marti

Luis is a world-renowned AI-Scientist in machine learning and evolutionary computation who has more than 70 peer-reviewed AI publications and 30 R&D collaborations over 20 years in the AI & ML industry.

 

Carlos III de Madrid | Federal Fluminense | Inria

AI SCIENTIST

Gregory Senay

Gregory served as Chief Science Officer at xBrain and as Senior Scientist at Panasonic, working in Natural Language Processing. Gregory is also an AI mentor at Frontier Development Lab/NASA. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Avignon.

 

University of Avignon | xBrain | Panasonic

AI SCIENTIST

Louise Naud

Louise is a senior AI scientist with 15+ years in machine learning and computer vision, including a number of startups. She received her MSc in machine learning and mathematics from Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan, and served as a research analyst at the California Institute of Technology.

 

Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan | Cal Tech

HEAD OF APPLIED MACHINE LEARNING

Gregory Renard

Greg brings 20+ years of Applied AI expertise, specializing in NLP, Knowledge Discovery, Conversational AI, and Foundation Models. He has led transformative AI strategies for various organizations, including pioneering work in document management at AAICO, knowledge extraction at NASA, and speech dialog systems at xBrain. Greg is a respected speaker and advisor, contributing significantly to industry, academia, and the community.

 

Stanford-CPD | FDL-SETI-NASA | AI4Humanity

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Steve DeRose

Steve, PhD Linguistics, with over 50 publications and former Brown University researcher, is a distinguished scientist noted for his contributions to NLP, Computational Linguistics and to key standards related to document processing.

 

Brown University | National Library of Medicine

AI SCIENCE INTERN

Thomas Bedart

Thomas will complete his Master of Engineering degree, specializing in Data Science, from CentraleSupélec in 2025. He has contributed as a Data Scientist and Generative AI engineer for multiple companies as part of Paris Digital Lab.

 

CentraleSupélec | Paris Digital Lab

AI SCIENCE INTERN

Vishnou Vinayagame

Vishnou is completing a double degree program in which he will earn a Master of Science in Applied Computing from the University of Toronto and a Master of Science in General Engineering from CentraleSupélec. He served as a Data Science intern at Ekimetrics, and previously worked at a variety of companies as part of Paris Digital Lab.

 

University of Toronto | CentraleSupélec | Paris Digital Lab

INTERN, AI PHD STUDENT

Yue Zhang

Yue is an PhD student in AI and CS at the University of Washington. Yue's research is in computational biology and machine learning. Yue has completed internships at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Google.

 

Brown University | University of Washington

SCIENCE ADVISOR

Una-May O'Reilly

Una-May is the leader of the ALFA Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, focusing on scalable machine learning, evolutionary algorithms, large-scale knowledge mining, prediction and analytics.

 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

SCIENCE ADVISOR

Hannaneh Hajishirzi

Hannaneh is an AI/NLP researcher at the University of Washington and leverages two complementary developments in the field of AI - symbolic representation and end-to-end deep learning neural models.

 

University of Washington

SCIENCE ADVISOR

Kalyanmoy Deb

Deb holds the Herman E. & Ruth J. Koenig Endowed Chair at Michigan State University and has contributed fundamental advances to the evolutionary computation AI field, with 100,000+ Google Scholar citations.

 

Michigan State University

SCIENCE ADVISOR

Marc Schoenauer

Marc is the leader at Inria of the TAU AI team that aims to tackle the vagueness of the Big Data purposes. Marc is helping to define an AI strategy for France as one of the few French mathematicians recognized in this field.

 

Inria

SCIENCE ADVISOR

Vincent Quint

Vincent is a luminary of the Document Engineering field. Vincent led fundamental research in semi-structured documents at Inria and headed the W3C Document Formats Domain.

 

Inria | W3C

Business

 

CHIEF BUSINESS OFFICER

Alan Yates

Alan jumpstarted and drove Sales & Marketing in 4 successful startups. He also created the Microsoft Worldwide Partner program, led the Microsoft Office Business Strategy and Worldwide Education Sales & Marketing.

 

Harvard | Stanford | Microsoft

HEAD OF SALES

Dan Blanchard

Dan brings 10+ years of leading sales teams, growing revenue, and building partnerships across the technology sector. Most recently, he held key regional and partner sales roles at Snowflake. Previously, he worked at Sigma Computing, Okta, SAP Concur, and Amazon. He holds a BA in Media Arts and Communications from Eastern Oregon University.

 

Snowflake | Sigma | Okta | SAP Concur | Amazon

SALES

Dane Renkert

Dane brings 10 years of sales experience, most recently with Komiko, Seattle-area startup that improves CRM with data and machine learning. Previously, he helped bring real estate technology startup Brivity to market and started his sales career at Zillow.

 

WSU | Zillow | Brivity | Komiko

SALES

Kyler Hamari

Kyler is a senior sales executive with experience leading sales teams and nurturing long-term customer satisfaction. He was an early sales leader at Brivity, helping it grow during its early startup days. He studied materials and metallurgical engineering before discovering his passion for sales.

 

Brivity | Colorado School of Mines

OPERATIONS

Hartley Riedner

Hartley served as vice president for operations and innovation for Kernel Labs, a Seattle-based startup studio, and CEO of Asidero Software. She received her MBA from the UW Foster School of Business.

 

UW Foster School of Business | Kernel Labs

OPERATIONS

Sandy Moritz

Sandy brings 34 years of experience in budget planning, payroll and financial statement, and all accounting functions. She has worked for a wide range of businesses and non-profit organizations, and her expertise will ensure smooth planning and operation as we grow.

 

Shoreline Community College | Edmonds College

COMMUNICATIONS

Mark Murray

Mark served as GM, Corporate Communications, at Microsoft and VP of Global Engagement & Communications at global health innovator PATH, driving strategic communications with worldwide impact.

 

Stanford | Microsoft | PATH

BUSINESS ADVISOR

Kevin Riegelsberger

Kevin was President of Avalara, Inc., raising over $200M and helping its recent IPO. He founded Epicor, one of the industry’s largest financial ERP providers and managed the ‘turn around’ of CapitalStream from struggling start-up to industry leader.

 

Epicor | CapitalStream | Avalara

BUSINESS ADVISOR

Charles Fitzgerald

Charles drove the platform strategy for VMWare Cloud Foundry and Microsoft .NET. Charles is a well-known Seattle-area angel investor and a highly regarded strategist for building and nurturing worldwide-level platform ecosystems.

 

Microsoft | VMWare | Platformonomics

BUSINESS ADVISOR

Jean-Francois Abramatic

Jeff co-led, with Tim-Berners Lee, the W3C as its Chairman, drove ILOG's acquisition by IBM and fostered Inria's all-up relationship with startups & the industry at large. Jeff is on the European Open Science Cloud Executive Board.

 

Ilog | W3C | Inria

BUSINESS ADVISOR

Bob Muglia

Bob served as CEO of Snowflake Computing from 2014-2019. taking it from a tiny startup into a multi-billion-dollar powerhouse. He previously led the Office, Azure, and Server and Tools businesses at Microsoft.

 

Microsoft | Snowflake

Former Interns

 

INTERN, PHD STUDENT

Kaitlyn Zhou

Kaitlyn is starting a PhD in AI and HCI at Stanford after a Masters in CS & AI at UW; At Docugami, she focuses on User Experience, NLP & AI. She completed internships at Bloomberg & Twitter.

 

University of Washington | Stanford

INTERN, PHD STUDENT

Kevin Liu

Kevin is an AI PhD student and a research assistant at the University of Washington. Kevin's research is in computational statistics, applying Bayesian AI to extract better insights. Kevin also completed an internship at Alibaba.

 

University of Washington

INTERN, PHD STUDENT

Joshua Fan

Kevin is an AI PhD student and a research assistant at the University of Washington. Kevin's research is in computational statistics, applying Bayesian AI to extract better insights. Kevin also completed an internship at Alibaba.

 

University of Washington | Cornell

AI SCIENCE INTERN

Tom Labiausse

Tom will complete his Master of Engineering degree, specialized in Computer Science, from CentraleSupélec in 2024. He has contributed to machine learning and IT initiatives for multiple companies as part of Paris Digital Lab.

 

CentraleSupélec | Paris Digital Lab

AI SCIENCE INTERN

Paul Tabbara

Paul is a student at CentraleSupélec, France. He will receive his Master of Science in Engineering in 2025. Paul has developed his Deep Learning skills by working on real business problems at companies through Paris Digital Lab.

 

CentraleSupélec | Paris Digital Lab

INTERN, MS AI STUDENT

Zhaofeng Wu

Zhaofeng is an AI MS student at UW with a double degree in Linguistics (B.A) and Computer Science (B.S). His research is in NLP/ML under the direct supervision of Professor Fei Xia. He has completed an internship at Axon with an upcoming one at Facebook.

 

University of Washington

INTERN, BS AI STUDENT

Andrew Hoang

Andrew is an AI BS student and a research assistant at the University of Washington. Andrew focuses on computer vision using machine learning . Andrew also completed internships at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2).

 

University of Washington

INTERN, BS CS STUDENT

Kusha Gupta

Kush is a CS undergrad student and a research assistant at the UW. Kush focuses on Distributed Systems, Databases, Programming Languages and Compilers. Kush also completed an internship at Google.

 

University of Washington

INTERN, BS CS STUDENT

Jerome Paliakkra

Jerome is a Computer Science undergrad student focusing on Data Science at the University of Washington. He has been a research assistant at the University and has also completed an internship at GE.

 

University of Washington

INTERN, PRODUCT

Maya Gupta

Maya is a fourth year Management Engineering student at the University of Waterloo. She has strong experience spanning hardware, software, and data product management, and has worked in the robotics, public safety, and fintech industries.

 

University of Waterloo

INTERN, BS CS STUDENT

Jonathan Chen

Jonathan is a senior at the University of Washington, and will graduate in June 2021 with a major in computer science and minors in statistics and Chinese. He brings a string of technical skills to Docugami and has served as a lead TA for multiple offerings of an upper-level CSE course.

 

University of Washington

INTERN, BS CS STUDENT

Jack Zhou

Jack completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Washington in June 2022, receiving a bachelor of science degree in computer science and a bachelor of science degree in biochemistry. In addition to his coursework, he served as a teaching assistant. He plans to pursue a career in machine learning/natural language processing.

 

University of Washington

Board of Directors

 

BOARD MEMBER

Jean Paoli

Jean Paoli, a pioneer in the field of document engineering, is one the inventors of XML and, during his time at Microsoft, started 4 >$1B businesses for the company: the XML effort, Microsoft InfoPath, the modern Microsoft Office file formats and Microsoft’s open-source subsidiary that enabled today's massive open source usage in Azure. In addition he has created two startups with the renowned Inria.

 

Ecole Des Ponts | Inria Startups | Microsoft

BOARD MEMBER

Ilya Kirnos

Ilya is a co-founder and CTO at SignalFire. Previously, he was a software engineer at Google from 2004-2012, serving as technical lead for Gmail Ads, Adwords Performance and Scalability, and Google Prediction Markets. After Google, he led platform development at CardSpring, a payment platform company that was acquired by Twitter.

 

Google | SignalFire

BOARD MEMBER

Bob Muglia

Bob served as CEO of Snowflake Computing from 2014-2019. taking it from a tiny startup into a multi-billion-dollar powerhouse. He previously led the Office, Azure, and Server and Tools businesses at Microsoft.

 

Microsoft | Snowflake
INVESTORS


SignalFire

SignalFire is the first venture capital firm structured like a technology company. We take a hybrid human + technology approach to investing and are composed of a team of world-class investors and engineers building tools and infrastructure to help with the most common founder pain points – recruiting, business development, and customer acquisition. In addition, our distributed network of 75+ advisors gives founders access to some of the world’s best entrepreneurs, product minds, and engineering leaders in virtually every key discipline and industry.

NextWorld Capital

NextWorld Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in enterprise technology startups and helps them grow into global leaders. We help entrepreneurs build and optimize the right go-to-market model and then accelerate growth with our Global Enterprise Platform, designed to bring together the best enterprise startups and 100+ of the largest global corporates as customers and partners. NextWorld’s investments include Zuora (ZUO), Gong.io and HeadSpin. NextWorld is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in London and Paris.

Cutting-Edge Document Technologists and Document Users

1.    Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake Computing and former head of Microsoft’s Office and Azure businesses.
2.    Grammarly | https://app.grammarly.com/
3.    Greg Badros, former head of Google Apps; Founder and CEO of Prepared Mind Innovations.
4.    Shishir Mehrotra, Co-founder and CEO, Coda, the online documents and spreadsheets company.
5.    Kevin Reigelsberger, former president, Avalara.
6.    Fenwick & West Investments. 
7.    Barry Abbott, partner, Lane Powell & Associates.
8.    Alan Smith, partner, Fenwick & West.


Silicon Valley, Paris, and Seattle-Area Angel Investors

1.    Thomas Reardon, co-founder of CTRL-Labs, which is developing technologies to translate neural and muscular impulses to control devices, and was recently acquired by Facebook.
2.    Ellen Levy, former head of corporate and business development at LinkedIn, Ellen Levy SPT.
3.    Sarah Imbach, former senior executive at PayPal, LinkedIn, and 23andMe, SIAN Ventures LLC.
4.    Sunil Chhaya, Silicon Valley angel investor.
5.    Marc Jalabert, former executive at Microsoft Western Europe, Acequia Capital, LLC.
6.    Hank Vigil, former senior vice president for strategy and partnerships at Microsoft, Acequia Capital, LLC.