The Team
Denis Ignatovich
- Title
- Cofounder & Co-CEO
- BIO
- Denis Ignatovich has over a decade of experience in trading, risk management, quantitative modeling, and complex trading system design. Prior to Imandra, he was head of the central risk trading desk at Deutsche Bank London. During his time at Deutsche Bank London, Denis realized the critical role AI can play in the financial sector and helped develop Imandra's suite of financial products. Denis' contributions to computational logic for financial trading platforms include several patents. He holds an MSc in Finance from the London School of Economics and degrees in CS and Finance from UT Austin.
Grant Passmore
- Title
- Cofounder & Co-CEO
- BIO
- Dr. Grant Passmore is cofounder of Imandra where he leads the design and development of the Imandra automated reasoning system. He is a widely published researcher in formal verification and symbolic AI whose contributions include advances in SMT solving (Z3), nonlinear proof procedures (MetiTarski and Imandra), and computational logic (Imandra). Dr. Passmore earned his PhD at the University of Edinburgh on decision procedures for nonlinear arithmetic, and is a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He is a pioneer of industrial applications of formal methods and automated reasoning, including the application of formal verification to financial markets, to the verification of deep neural networks, and to the neuro-symbolic integration of symbolic reasoning into generative AI systems.
Dave Aitken
- Title
- VP of Engineering
- BIO
- Dave is an R&D engineer with a Master of Physics degree (MPhys) from the University of Oxford. He has over a decade's experience with the full web stack, cloud infrastructure and operations.
Zehra Akbar
- Title
- Chief Operating Officer
- BIO
- Zehra Akbar is a business strategy and operations executive with over 13 years of experience and a proven track record of leading commercial operations at venture-backed startups. Zehra joins Imandra from SkyGrid, a joint venture she helped establish between The Boeing Company and SparkCognition. At SkyGrid, she served as the Chief Strategy Officer, leading multiple divisions including strategy, business development, legal and marketing. Prior to SkyGrid, Zehra was the VP of Strategic Operations at SparkCognition and has held positions at Deloitte and Accenture. Zehra has a Masters in Global Policy from The University of Texas at Austin.
Sam Branson
- Title
- Marketing Manager
- BIO
- Sam Branson has 8+ years of marketing leadership experience and specializes in building marketing departments for small to mid-size tech companies. She has a Bachelor's of Journalism and a Business Foundations Certificate from The University of Texas at Austin. Sam considers Austin home but in her free time she loves to travel nationally and internationally, mostly for the food. Feel free to ask her for restaurant recommendations if you're visiting the Austin area!
Matt Bray
- Title
- Chief Technology Officer
- BIO
- Matt is a full-stack R&D Engineer, with several years' experience in cloud infrastructure and systems design. He holds a Master of Physics degree (MPhys) from the University of Oxford, a PGCert in Intellectual Property Law, and qualified as a European Patent Attorney.
Samer Abdallah
- Title
- Research and Engineering
- BIO
- Samer is a software engineer with a background in music informatics, Bayesian modelling, machine learning and information theory. He gained his PhD from King's College London and worked as a researcher at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London. He has a long-standing interest in functional and logic programming, making several contributions to the SWI Prolog ecosystem, and likes to explore how these methods intersect both with music technology, for example, in reactive programming for interactive music systems, and with probabilistic models and machine learning, for example, in probabilistic programming languages.
Ben Bellick
- Title
- Research and Engineering
- BIO
- Ben is a functional software engineer who started his career working as a quantitative developer in the financial industry. With a background studying mathematics in undergrad, he has been driven by his passion for strongly-typed functional programming languages and their relation to mathematics. He's a contributor to the Haskell compiler. After leaving his last job, he spent nearly 6 months traveling the world. In the rest of his free time, he likes studying math and Japanese, and making music with Eurorack.
Paul Brennan
- Title
- Chief Strategy Officer
- BIO
- Paul Brennan has over 15 years' experience in product, strategy and management of complex businesses within Financial Markets. Prior to joining Imandra, Paul was the Chief Operating Officer of Goldman Sachs' regulated trading venue. He holds an MSc in Applied and Theoretical Fluid Dynamics and a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Manchester.
Simon Cruanes
- Title
- Research and Engineering
- BIO
- Simon is an R&D engineer with an engineering degree from École polytechnique in France, a masters degree from EPFL, and a PhD in automatic theorem proving. He's worked on first-order and higher-order proving and model finding, with a focus on implementation, having written several tools in various domains of formal logic. He also is an active contributor to the OCaml community.
Remi Desmartin
- Title
- Research Fellow
- BIO
- Remi is a PhD student at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, whose main research interest is the formal verification of neural networks. He previously completed an MSc in Data Science, where his dissertation focused on the application of Imandra to neural network verification. He is interested in various aspects of artificial intelligence, from the maths behind different types of AI systems to the ethical questions it poses and its exploration in works of science fiction.
Elijah Kagan
- Title
- Head of Design
- BIO
- Elijah is a designer with almost three decades of freelance and agency experience. He has worked for various businesses and institutions, including Honda, Volvo, Iron Mountain, Nokia Siemens Networks, LG, McCain, and Toptal. In addition to being also a creative developer and musician, he holds a Master's in Marketing and Computer Science from the Wroclaw University of Economics.
Kostya Kanishev
- Title
- AI Research and Engineering
- BIO
- Konstantin is a particle physicist. He did research in theoretical particle physics, cosmology, and worked as experimental physicist at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He holds a PhD in Particle Physics and BcS in Computer Science and is always interested in making practical applications out of mathematical theories.
Hongyu Lin
- Title
- Research and Engineering
- BIO
- Hongyu is a machine learning engineer with a keen interest in leveraging deep learning to unravel complex patterns in financial time series. Skilled in Python for data analysis, he is dedicated to transforming financial data into actionable insights. Hongyu earned his bachelor's degree with a focus on financial mathematics from Central University of Finance and Economics and completed a MSc in the same field at the University of Leeds.
Eric Meinhardt
- Title
- Research and Engineering
- BIO
- Eric is a software engineer enthusiastic about typed functional programming, domain specific languages, automata theory, and practical tools for reasoning about state machines. He has a PhD in Linguistics.
Nicola Mometto
- Title
- Principal R&D Engineer
- BIO
- Nicola is a software developer with interests in functional programming, languages and compiler design. He's the creator and maintainer of several clojure contrib libraries and compilers and a frequent contributor to the Clojure compiler.
Andrey Pashnin
- Title
- Research and Engineering
- BIO
- Andrey is a self-taught software engineer with a master's degree in radio engineering who, for an unknown reason, cannot stop learning new languages, both programming (from C++ and VHDL to JavaScript and OCaml) and spoken (from French to Chinese). He worked at a Samsung Electronics Research Center and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Sebastian P
- Title
- Research and Engineering
- BIO
- Sebastian is a software engineer with professional cloud development experience and an interest in typed, functional languages. He studied Computer Science and Math at Texas State University, with emphases on parallel programming, automata, and formal proofs. Sebastian takes a Lyceal approach to life and is fond of the American Southwest.
Stephanie Radics
- Title
- Operations
- BIO
- As Imandra's Operations Manager, Stephanie oversees team logistics and finances, employee relations and general operations in order to cultivate productivity and help the company to achieve their goals. She joined Imandra after obtaining a wealth of operations experience in the hospitality and property management sectors. Stephanie earned a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration from Central Michigan University.
Filippo Sestini
- Title
- Research and Engineering
- BIO
- Filippo is a Functional Software Engineer with a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Nottingham. During his PhD, he focused on dependent type theory and proof assistants. He also conducted research on linear logic, proof theory, and lambda calculus. Passionate about strongly typed functional programming and formal methods, he is interested in applying these tools to real-world industrial projects.
Brian Schwieger
- Title
- Strategic Advisor
- BIO
- Brian Schwieger is an established Chair, NED and Advisor focused on the FinTech and Financial Services sectors, with 30 years executive experience across financial and commodity markets. Other firms he has recently worked with include WealthKernel, Globacap, Nukkleus and Redburn. Brian left LSEG in 2021, where he was responsible for the stock markets in London and Milan in his role as Global Head of Equity Trading. Prior to this, Brian held senior positions with the Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, being one of the early pioneers of electronic trading in Europe. Brian holds a BSc Econ from the London School of Economics and a Masters in Finance from London Business School.
Jamie Smith
- Title
- Product Management
- BIO
- Jamie Smith has more than twenty-five years of embedded design and test & measurement experience in safety-critical industries. He spent most of his career at National Instruments (now NI). Jamie earned a Master of Science in Applied Physics from Stanford and a Bachelor's in Physics from UC Santa Barbara. He is a frequent speaker at Autonomous Vehicle and Industrial Internet of Things conferences.
Sam Tombury
- Title
- Senior Product Engineer
- BIO
- Sam is a software engineer with extensive experience developing technical products for high-growth startups in London. Having studied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, he is interested in the application of formal methods to complex systems in industry.
Emma Tye
- Title
- Research and Engineering
- BIO
- Emma Tye is a software engineer with an interest in functional programming, type systems and mathematical logic. She graduated from Imperial College London a few years ago with an MEng in Joint Maths and Computer Science.
Christoph Wintersteiger
- Title
- Senior Computer Scientist
- BIO
- Christoph is a computer scientist with many years of experience in industrial as well as academic research. His main interests lie in and around the areas of software verification, decision procedures, and automated reasoning. He holds a PhD degree from ETH Zurich (CH) and a Master's from the University of Linz (AT). On his days off, he can often be found wrenching on classic cars.
This could be you
- Title
- Research and Engineering
- BIO
- Passion and talent.
