We have done this together before.
One venture studio is where most of us met: the one Mach49 built to incubate companies for NEOM. Atif ran it. Collin, Halli and Jamie worked in it. David and Yosha founded one of the startups it funded. Some of us have built the machine that stands new companies up, and some of us have been the company it stood up.
The pairs go back further. Redda is the sixth company David and Yosha have worked on together, starting at Microsoft, with Aggregate Knowledge, Ureeka, ScaleX and Union.ai in between. Atif and Halli go back to Nokia and the startups after it.
Redda is the first company all six of us have built together. The team that turns up at your company is one that has shipped together, not one assembled for your account.
Atif Hussein
Atif has run product and engineering through three platform shifts: enterprise software, mobile, and now AI. He was Vice President of Products at Nokia, SVP of Products and Engineering at SEVEN Networks, and Director of IoT Strategy and Technology at Intel, and he founded a venture-backed mobile commerce company of his own. Most recently he ran NEOM's venture studio as Managing Director, launching companies from medical nanobots to satellite technology over a three-year build, operate and transfer.
Collin Hartigan
Collin has spent a decade building companies for other people. At Mach49 he built new ventures for Global 1000 enterprises and took one of them over as interim CEO. At NEOM's venture studio he was Global Lead and Head of Product and Technology, running a portfolio above $100 million with startups on five continents. He has launched more than ten AI-first products.
David Jakubowski
David has built and sold three companies and run large businesses inside Meta, Microsoft and Neustar. Most recently he was President of Union.ai, the company behind Flyte, where production AI infrastructure was the product. For the past several years he has worked as an AI operating partner to private equity, inside the portfolios Redda now builds in.
Halli Thorkelsson
Halli has been inventing and shipping software for thirty years, and has taken three companies from an idea to an acquisition: OZ Communications to Nokia, Modio3D to Autodesk, and a robotics company sold in 2022. His first was a virtual-world startup in Silicon Valley in 1996, backed by Intel and Microsoft. He holds multiple international software patents.
Jamie Sowder
Jamie has spent twenty years building software where money and trust meet. At PayPal he built the automated test framework the company's quality organization adopted, and his work there is patented across payer authorization, spending capability and contingent payments. He has engineered for eBay, Dell and regulated fintech. As a founding engineer he builds a product from nothing and then trains the team to replace him, which is how Redda hands a BRAIN over.
Yosha Ulrich-Sturmat
Yosha builds the commercial side of technology companies: go-to-market, sales operations, pricing. At Union.ai he built the commercial organization from nothing and tripled annual recurring revenue and the customer base. Before that he was Chief Product Officer at Ureeka, taking it from launch to a $6 million run rate, and at Neustar he ran product marketing for a $500 million business, then served as Chief of Staff to the CEO through a $2.9 billion acquisition.