Manifold Continues Momentum with New Office, Additional Team Members in Boston MetroWest

Manifold, the AI engineering services firm, recently opened a new office in the Boston MetroWest city of Newton, Massachusetts, to accommodate rapid growth. Manifold is known in part for its Lean AI method of efficiently delivering production-ready solutions. In 2018, Manifold has expanded its board of expert advisors, tripled its team, and doubled its office footprint as well by expanding from the corporate headquarters in Oakland, California, to the East Coast.

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This growth is the result of momentum that began in November 2017, when Vinay Seth Mohta was brought on as CEO to lead Manifold’s development and to inaugurate the Boston-area office. Manifold’s trajectory speaks to a significantly increasing demand for specialty AI development services and expertise during the past year. 2018 has been an inflection point for applied AI; while a lot of the press around artificial intelligence remains speculative hype, we are also seeing capabilities that were once the purview only of the most rarefied tech giants become accessible to more and more organizations, who are now putting them to work to create tangible business value.

With a physical presence and a local team of experts in the Northeast, Manifold is even better positioned to serve such companies in a range of verticals, including those with highly regulated data such as healthcare and financial services. The Boston-area office also allows the company to maintain a local connection to institutions such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where its leadership team as well as more than half of its engineers and advisors were educated.

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“We have a high bar for adding team members, and the Boston area has a tremendous pool of world-class talent,” says Vinay Seth Mohta, CEO and head of the new office. “Our clients have pressing problems that they want to tackle with AI, so working with a team like Manifold’s that has been so painstakingly assembled is an effective way to accelerate projects and get results quickly.”

The Manifold team members now working from the East Coast include:

• Vinay Seth Mohta, CEO. Vinay is both a seasoned software architect and an experienced startup founder. He co-founded Kyruus, a venture-backed software company offering a data-driven platform to match patients and physicians. He has also been a product manager at KAYAK and an architect at Endeca Technologies. He is a co-inventor on several granted patents for search and faceted navigation.
• Wassaf Farooqi, Director of Engineering. Wassaf is an engineering leader with a proven track record of delivery for complex SaaS solutions at companies including Kyruus, HubSpot, and EMC. He excels at managing multiple product lines while maintaining a high level of quality, and take a holistic view of problems to deliver value at the level of the whole organization.
• Matyas Tamas, Director of Data Science. Matyas founded the data science group at Quora and was Head of Supply Data Science at Uber. He brings a depth of experience and knowledge about real-time analytics and natural language processing as well as an intuitive grasp of Manifold’s Lean AI process for data science and engineering.
• Julie Steele, Director of Marketing. Julie knows how to translate technical ideas for a variety of audiences in a way that builds real understanding and relationships. She has served as an Acquisitions Editor and conference chair of Strata Rx at O’Reilly Media, as well as Director of Communications & Design for the recently acquired Silicon Valley Data Science.
• Dr. Jakov Kucan, Senior Architect. Jakov is a skilled architect and engineer, able to see through the details of implementations, keep track of the dependencies within a large design, and communicate the vision and ideas to both technical and non-technical audience. Recently, he has been Chief Architect at Kyruus and Director of Product Strategy at PTC Mathcad.
• Joseph Goldbeck, Data Engineer. Joe is a backend engineer who also has extensive experience leading teams and collaborating closely with customer-facing business stakeholders. Most recently he was a Senior Software Engineer at TetraScience, a life sciences data integration and analytics platform company, where he spearheaded projects for enterprise pharmaceutical companies and served as Technical Lead for their core data integration platform.
• Martin Davy, Advisor, FinTech Executive Council. Martin understands at a deep level what it means to embark on AI projects at enterprise scale, and has a wealth of experience in managing software platforms for multi-national companies in verticals from financial services to publishing. In particular, as Global Head of Trading Engineering for Fidelity Investments, he modernized engineering practices using agile techniques and delivered four new trade order management platforms.
• Dr. Demba Ba, Advisor, Deep Learning Methods. Demba is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering at Harvard University. He specializes in deep learning methods and signal processing, and is the author of multiple publications and the holder of a patent for room modeling using sound source localization. He is spending his sabbatical semester collaborating closely with the Manifold team.

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