Our Vision is An End to Knowledge Loss

Prashant is the Founder, CEO, and Chairman of Accrete, Inc., a dual use enterprise AI company launched in 2017. Accrete licenses AI knowledge engines and expert AI agents to organizations with increasingly complex information silos that stifle decision making. At Accrete, Prashant sets strategic direction and executes a product focused strategy to win share in a rapidly emerging market for AI knowledge engines and expert agents. Accrete’s knowledge engines enable AI agents, seeded with the expertise, intuition, judgement, and ethics of an organization’s best people, to reason across information silos at superhuman scale and make split second decisions beyond human capacity.

Prashant spent the decade prior to launching Accrete building high frequency trading systems where he hypothesized that there was an ocean of predictive “alpha” buried in unstructured data but required superhuman reasoning to mine it. After a series of early breakthroughs in the application of transformers to capture and scale the tacit domain knowledge of financial analysts to predict market moving M&A rumors, Prashant rolled his team and technology into a new structure and launched Accrete to build out the knowledge engine platform and commercialize the technology. Prashant and his team have spent the past 15+ years building and refining a platform that scales the production of knowledge engines to power expert AI agents. 

Today, Accrete’s AI knowledge engines and expert AI agents are in production with an expanding customer roster including the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. Army, and the U.S. Air Force as well as Fortune 500 companies in Consumer Goods, Media and Entertainment, and Finance. Prashant serves on the Atlantic Council Commission on Defense Innovation and spurred the Atlantic Council initiative, “Eye to Eye in AI: Developing Artificial Intelligence for National Security and Defense” that calls for standardization in performance, ethics, bias, and explainability to accelerate inefficient acquisition and procurement processes for critical dual use AI technologies to gain a decision advantage over adversaries. Prashant is a graduate of Hamilton College and lives in Lower Manhattan with his family. 

With almost 20 years of experience in financial analysis, investment research and portfolio management, Josh has held various senior level positions in the hedge fund industry, where he has been a portfolio manager, Director of Research and analyst. After almost 2 years at Goldman Sachs, Josh was an equity analyst and senior portfolio manager for one of the largest hedge funds in the world, London-based GLG Partners, LP. Josh was also an analyst and portfolio manager at SAC Capital. Josh is currently an investor in and advisor to a portfolio of private companies.

Peter Bierfeldt has over 30 years of experience in information technology, security, and consulting. He has built security and privacy programs for Software as a Service companies into world-class operations. He has a strong security compliance background, a DevSecOps approach to security, and a laser focus on automation and continuous improvement.

Prior to Accrete, Peter has served as the Chief Information Security Officer and Head of Compliance for Reltio Inc. He has worked in regulated industries including pharmaceuticals, public sector, financial services, and defense.

Peter has a Bachelor of Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Doganata has been conducting research, initiating, developing and delivering projects in broad research areas of computer science for more than 30 years. Prior to joining Accrete.AI, Dr. Doganata has worked as a Research scientist and as a Solutions Technical lead at IBM T. J. Watson Research and IBM Watson Health. His responsibilities included planning, architecting, delivering complex, technology-based, innovative data driven solutions and prototypes using data analytics, information management techniques, NLP, machine learning, predictive modeling and cognitive technologies. His current focus is to extract insight from structured and unstructured data using artificial intelligence to make timely and accurate decisions in financial domain.

As the Chief Technical Officer at Accrete.AI, Dr. Doganata monitors and assesses new technologies as well as existing technology choices, aligns technology-based projects with the company strategy, drives innovative solutions for future offerings, improves existing offerings. He also acts as the Chief Innovation Officer to develop and foster innovation culture, manage the innovation process, identify and protect Accrete.AI’s intellectual property.

Dr. Doganata received his Ph.D. degree from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, all in electrical/electronics engineering. He has 48 patents, more than 40 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals and conferences and a number of innovation and excellence awards. He is the recipient of IBM Eminence and Excellence Award in 2014 for his contribution to build an innovation center for a bank in Spain.

Luis Rodriguez is VP of AI Strategy and Operations at Accrete. With over 25 years of experience, Luis is a technology executive who thrives on disruption, innovation, and transformation. Luis built his experience at companies such as Siemens, Honeywell, IBM, McKinsey & Co., and Xerox PARC.

As the Vice President of AI Strategy and Operations, Luis will work with Accrete's CTO to build the research strategy. Luis will operationalize the strategy, including driving the research roadmap and building tight connections across product management, development,
and sales. Luis is well suited for this role given his long background in a variety of areas including academic and corporate research, product management, business strategy, in working as a management consultant, and in his understanding of connecting business and technology.

Luis has a Ph.D., Masters, and Bachelors in Computer Science from MIT.

Dr. Baly is a senior AI scientist at Accrete. Prior to joining Accrete, Dr. Baly worked as a postdoctoral associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Baly’s experience involves developing machine learning models for Natural Language Processing (NLP). He worked on optimizing models and meta-frameworks to perform sentiment analysis in different languages — English and Arabic — taking into account their linguistic and morphological characteristics. He also worked on developing models and systems for automated fact-checking, which involved a variety of NLP techniques, including predicting factuality of bias in news media, measuring the stance between claims and full articles, and learning embedded representations for entire documents. His research is published in top-tier journals (ACM TOIS and ACM TALLIP) and conferences (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, etc.)

In addition to completing his postdoctoral research at MIT, Dr. Baly received his M.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, his B.S. degree from Aleppo University, Syria. He also received a research scholar fellowship from Intel Corporation to spend a one-year research visit at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Aside from research, Dr. Baly is an accomplished classical violinist.

Dr. Pant is an AI Scientist at Accrete. His experience involves developing high-fidelity physics-based and data-driven models to study the complicated non-linear interaction between turbulence, chemical kinetics, acoustics and molecular diffusion which is typically observed in aircraft engines, rocket engines, and scramjets. He developed a generalized compressible turbulent combustion solver which uses a stochastic model, the transported probability density function (PDF) method, to study turbulent reacting flows ranging from low-speed subsonic flows to high-speed supersonic flow problems. He used this solver to develop a deep understanding of the effect of transient flame dynamics on thermo-acoustic instability in a rocket engine. He also worked on developing data-driven modeling approaches to study thermo-acoustic instability.

Dr. Pant received a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering from Purdue University, a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University and a Bachelor of Technology degree in Mechanical Engineering from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India.

Dr. Wang is a Senior Research Scientist. Her previous work focused on experimental and computational neuroscience. She built models to understand how the brain generates patterns and controls movements. She also designed experiments to study motor learning driven by reinforcement. Before joining Accrete, she was a researcher at the University of Missouri.

Dr. Wang received a Ph.D. in Physics at Brown University and completed postdoctoral training at MIT. She is an avid distance runner.

Dr. Sbiti is a Senior Applied Scientist at Accrete. His experience involves research in Differential Geometry, an area of mathematics which studies the geometry of high-dimensional spaces. His work centered on the Ricci Flow, a geometric evolution equation which was used to solve century-old problems in mathematics.

Prior to joining Accrete, Dr. Sbiti received a Ph.D. in Mathematics at University of Pennsylvania.

Hannah Provenza is a Senior Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Engineer at Accrete. Prior to joining Accrete, Ms. Provenza worked as a research engineer at Raytheon BBN Technologies, where she was involved with research on entity extraction and linking, multilingual automatic speech recognition, and machine translation. Ms. Provenza has a M.A. in Computational Linguistics from Brandeis University and a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago.

Aside from research, Ms. Provenza is a nationally and internationally competitive epee fencer.

Michael has global responsibility for Accrete’s legal affairs. He previously served as General Counsel and Head of Legal at Ocrolus, a New York-based fintech document automation company. Before Ocrolus, Michael was Vice President and Associate General Counsel at Visa, prior to which he had the same position at Goldman Sachs. Michael joined Goldman from Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, where he had worked as a corporate associate in its New York, Moscow, and London offices.

Michael is admitted to practice law in New York and California. He received his undergraduate degree from Yale and his law degree from Harvard, from which he also holds a master’s in public policy. He was a law clerk to U.S. District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet in the Southern District of New York.

A veteran marketing and strategy executive, Marc Johnson has had repeated success building sustainable businesses spanning online advertising, social media, search, point-of-sale, location, consumer survey, programmatic media, SaaS Analytics, digital video, consumer games, and buyer intent. He most recently built B2B data provider Bombora into an industry leadership position and is currently Advisor to Aldora, a digital intelligence firm and Composure, a well-being platform for senior living communities. 

As the Chief of Staff, Dan works closely with the CEO to spearhead the development and execution of strategic initiatives that drive the company’s mission forward. With a keen focus on optimizing operational processes, his role is pivotal in ensuring the organization operates at peak performance. His responsibilities extend to fostering a culture of teamwork and collaboration, creating organizational alignment, and facilitating seamless communication across all levels of the organization to promote efficient information flow and drive growth.

Prior to his current role, Dan was deeply involved in both commercial and federal sales within Accrete AI, where he played a crucial role in expanding the company’s footprint in the defense and intelligence sectors. Prior to joining Accrete, Dan served as the Chief Operating Financial Officer at The Family Schools, Inc., where he now continues to affect organizational growth and development as the Vice President of the Board of Directors.

With over 25 years of experience in the financial industry, Ken has held various positions within firms ranging from Goldman Sachs to several of the industry's top hedge funds. In 2017, Ken started his own early-stage investment firm called OpenDoor Venture Capital in which he makes strategic investments in tech startups. One of OpenDoor's earliest investments was in Accrete in 2017, so he has witnessed first hand the incredible accomplishments of the Company. Given his excitement in Accrete, he most recently joined the company as head of enterprise business development in an effort to accelerate the company's enterprise traction.

Deesha is a Senior Product Designer with experience working in UI/UX across product, marketing and branding.

Prior to joining Accrete, Deesha led the Design team as the Creative Director at King Children in New York and also helped lead human computer interaction at Verisk Analytics as the Senior Art Director. With experience driving UI/UX in B2B, Direct to Consumer and Data Analytics, Deesha is passionate about human-centered design and enjoys introducing new creative thinking processes to complex systems.

Deesha holds a B.F.A in Industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Prior to Accrete she worked in the B2B and Direct to Consumer Space.

Prior to joining Accrete, Danny was a senior research analyst at JP Morgan and Loop Capital Markets. There he was a frequent guest on CNBC and regularly cited in publications such as Bloomberg and Barron's. Danny started his research career as a TMT analyst at GLG Partners and Millennium. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Tufts University and earned an MBA from NYU Stern. Outside of work, he spends most of his time with his wife and two amazing boys.

As Senior Director of Commercial Revenue, Michael Werner leads Accrete’s commercial sales, business development, sales operations, and customer success divisions. He is responsible for executing the company’s commercial revenue strategy, managing & training the commercial sales organization, and identifying strategic partnerships for Nebula Social & Nebula ITSM.

Michael joins Accrete as an experienced enterprise salesperson and team leader in the fintech & real estate software sectors. Prior to his sales career, Michael earned a B.A. in Business & Spanish from Franklin & Marshall College.

Bill Wall is the head of Federal Sales, bringing commercial innovation in AI to the US Government. Bill has a unique background combining elite military service and deep experience in the sale and implementation of innovative solutions that drive business transformation.

Bill has eleven years’ experience building successful teams in the IT industry. Previously, he was the Director of Digital Transformation and Chief Information Officer for Barrick Gold in Argentina for two years. Before joining Barrick, he was a business development executive, operations and sales executive in the Washington DC area serving the US Government market. Bill has worked in both Fortune 500 and startup companies. His experience spans IT hardware, software, big data analytics services, geospatial software, and IT solutions reseller companies. Prior companies include EMC, Praescient Analytics, Boundless Geospatial and Flywheel Data.

Before entering the corporate world, Bill retired from the Army as a Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel after twenty-two years in service. He was the founder and first commander of a unique computer network operations organization in the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). He had multiple deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen working closely with the national intelligence community to transform the way JSOC developed and shared intelligence. During his career, he also deployed many times throughout Central and South America.

Bill has a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and a Master of Arts in International Relations / Latin American Studies from the University of Miami.

Mariah Smith is the Director of Government Affairs for Accrete AI Government. She brings a decade of legislative and government policy experience to the company. Mariah is responsible for building and maintaining the relationships with local, state, and federal entities in support of the programs and goals of Accrete and nested with the larger national AI development and governance strategy.

Mariah had a twenty-year career in the Army before transitioning to the private sector. Serving as a military police officer, she was also an FBI National Academy graduate of Session 256. During her time in the Army, she was deployed to Djibouti, Iraq, and three times to Afghanistan. She previously worked as a military legislative assistant for a New York member of the House of Representatives, as a liaison between the Army and the Appropriations Committees in Congress, and as a liaison between United States Central Command and the Armed Services Committees.

Mariah has a B.A. in Psychology from Vanderbilt University and a M.A. in Security Management from Webster University.

In her personal time, she is a councilwoman for her hometown of Stephens City, Virginia, and is the Vice-Chairman of the non-profit No One Left Behind, which assists Afghan and Iraqi allies who worked with the US government during the Global War on Terror.