Meet the Team

An accomplished and successful serial entrepreneur, Itamar brings a wealth of experience in building teams, products and services that rely on novel AI foundations. He served as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Tennessee from 2003 through 2013, and held a visiting professor position at Stanford University’s AI lab from 2013 until 2015. He co-founded Binatix, one of the first companies to use deep learning for financial algorithmic trading, and Apprente, which built AI voice-based conversational agents for drive-thru restaurants (acquired by McDonald's Corporation and subsequently by IBM). Itamar has held various leadership positions, including corporate VP and head of McD Tech Labs at McDonald's Corporation, and head of conversational AI at IBM where he managed a team of 85 employees. He holds B.S., M.S., M.B.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Ben-Gurion University in Israel.

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Adam is an experienced leader in research and development of cutting-edge AI-driven products and services. He has a proven track record in product planning, engineering leadership, and recruiting top R&D talent. Adam was Senior Director of core technology at IBM after the acquisition of Apprente, where he managed a team of 30 engineers, including 10 PhDs. Adam has a PhD in computational and applied mathematics from the University of the Witwatersrand and completed the Stanford Business School executive education program.

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Ron’s experience in AI dates back more than three decades to his days as an undergraduate at Stanford University, where he was the first recipient of the Symbolic Systems degree in 1987. After working as an artificial intelligence programmer and research assistant at Stanford's Psychology Department, Stanford's Knowledge Systems Laboratory, NASA Ames, RIACS, and Xerox PARC, he conducted research in machine learning for speech recognition as a Fulbright Scholar at the Helsinki University of Technology (in Teuvo Kohonen’s laboratory), and at ATR Laboratories in Japan. In 1992 he took up a lectureship in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex, and received a DPhil (PhD) from the University of Oxford in 1997. From 2001-2003 he was a Leverhulme Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. Since 2003 he has been the director of the Centre for Cognitive Science (COGS) at the University of Sussex, where he is also on the faculty of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, and is Professor of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. From 2019-2020 he was a Visiting Scholar and Professor at the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. In 2021 he co-founded Tenyx with Itamar Arel and Adam Earle.

John (JR) leads Go-to-Market (GTM) and Customer Success at Tenyx. John has GTM experience building B2B, open source, AI, and productivity companies all built with product-led growth (PLG). Previously, John was the General Manager of R&D for Collaboration Products at VMware and the General Manager of Document Collaboration at Dropbox. Additionally, John joined Elastic to lead and build their global partnership team and was part of the leadership team that led Elastic to an IPO. Earlier in his career, John was part of the original management team at Zimbra which was acquired by both Yahoo! and VMware. John is an active LP investor (Accel, Coelius Capital, etc) and advisor to early-stage companies (Puppet Labs, Astro, etc). John holds a B.S. in Environmental Engineering and a B.A. in Political Sciences from Northwestern University. John also has an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

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Boasting over a decade of experience in building and selling SaaS products, David's tenure at Salesforce stands out, where he consistently drove revenue growth and spearheaded innovation in AI, sales, and service automation. As the Director of Product Management at Salesforce Service Cloud, under his leadership, Salesforce grew its Einstein Chatbot user base from 10 to over 2000 customers. David holds a BA in Economics from the University of Reno, Nevada. His combination of sales experience, business acumen, and creativity uniquely positions him to identify market opportunities, collaborate with early-adopting customers, and bring innovative products to market.