Meet the Team
Eiman Ebrahimi
Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Ebrahimi is the Chief Executive Officer of Protopia AI. Prior to Protopia AI he was a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA for 9 years. During his time at NVIDIA, he worked on a variety of problems at the intersection of systems and machine learning. While at NVIDIA research, he co-authored publications on topics ranging from Enabling Programmer-Transparent Near-Data Processing, Holistic Abstractions for Exploiting Data Locality in GPUs, to Distributed Multi-GPU Deep Learning Training techniques. More information about his past research can be found here.
Dr. Ebrahimi obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. His major contribution from his PhD on fairness substrates for multi-core memory systems won the best paper award at ASPLOS 2010 and was featured in Communications of the ACM Research Highlights that year.
Hadi Esmaeilzadeh
Chief Technology Officer
Professor Esmaeilzadeh is the Chief Technology Officer of Protopia AI. He was awarded early tenure at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he is the inaugural holder of Halicioglu Chair in Computer Architecture with the rank of associate professor in Computer Science and Engineering. Hadi is the founding director of the Alternative Computing Technologies (ACT) Lab, where his team is developing new technologies and cross-stack solutions to build the next generation computer systems. Dr. Esmaeilzadeh obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in 2013 where his Ph.D. work received the 2013 William Chan Memorial Best Dissertation Award. Prof. Esmaeilzadeh received the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA) “Young Architect” Award in 2018 and was inducted to the ISCA Hall of Fame in the same year. Additionally, he has received the:
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award (2017),
- College of Computing Outstanding Junior Faculty Research Award (2017),
- Google Research Faculty Award (2014, 2016 and 2018),
- Qualcomm Research Award (2016, 2017, and 2020),
- Microsoft Research Award (2016 and 2017), and
- Lockheed Inspirational Young Faculty Award (2016).
His research has been recognized by four Communications of the ACM Research Highlights, four IEEE Micro Top Picks, a nomination for Communications of the ACM Research Highlights, an honorable mention in IEEE Micro Top Picks, and a Distinguished Paper Award in HPCA 2016. Prof. Esmaeilzadeh’s pioneering work on dark silicon and limits of technology has also been profiled on the front page of The New York Times.
Company Advisors
Gary McGraw
Gary McGraw is a globally recognized authority, speaker and author on software security with 12 books that include the best-selling security books: Software Security (Addison-Wesley, 2006), Exploiting Software (Addison-Wesley, 2004), Building Secure Software (Addison-Wesley, 2001), Java Security (Wiley, 1996). Dr. McGraw is also CEO and co-founder of the Berryville Institute of Machine Learning and has been exploring security and privacy challenges in the ML landscape over the past few years.
James Beecham
James Beecham is a computer engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded ALTR in 2014 and leads ALTR’s technology and engineering teams. ALTR is the only automated data access control and security solution that enables users to govern and protect sensitive data in the cloud. Previously, Beecham worked at an algorithmic options trading platform leading research and development, working on ultra-low-latency approaches to in-line data security. He also worked as an embedded systems engineer at Texas Memory Systems prior to the acquisition by IBM. Beecham holds multiple software patents, and is an alumnus of the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Richard Hegberg
Richard Hegberg is Executive Chairman of Vesper Board of Directors and CEO. Hegberg’s executive career began in sales and marketing at an early-stage memory company after graduating from Marquette University with advanced studies at Wharton School of Business, MIT, and Harvard. With advancing responsibilities, he has worked at notable technology firms such as AMD, ATI, Lucent, Micron, Qualcomm, SanDisk and others. Hegberg brings experience from a career that spans roles like CEO, general management, sales and marketing, private equity funding, and venture capital. Most recently, Hegberg was the senior vice president of global pathways and alliances for NetApp, a cloud data storage and management company.
Greg Martin
Greg Martin is a cybersecurity expert and entrepreneur. He is Co-Founder and CEO of Ghost Security, the co-founder of cyber-security company Anomali and is the co-founder and CEO of cyber security company JASK. Martin is credited with inventing the first Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP),[1] and is the creator of the popular open source Honeypot project “Modern Honey Network”. He was awarded two United States patents in computer and network security. Martin is an Investor, advisor and/or a board member of 15+ early stage companies and is passionate about helping first time founders achieve success.
Roger Thornton
Roger Thornton is Co-Founder and General Partner at Ballistic Ventures, a new kind of venture capital firm, built by and for cybersecurity entrepreneurs and investors. In his General Partner role at Ballistic, Thornton taps into over 30 years of experience and counsels future generations of cybersecurity founders who are focused on building great products as a foundation for great companies. Thornton is a driving force behind hundreds of technology products and services that have formed and grown companies across a range of industries. As a founder and CTO, his visionary product and technology leadership helped create cybersecurity industry leaders Fortify Software and AlienVault. As an investor, mentor and board member he has helped multiple generations of entrepreneurs build more than 15 successful cybersecurity companies.
Kevin Senator
Kevin Senator is an experienced CXO having led Bayshore Networks as CEO to a successful acquisition by Opswat and having been part of the senior management teams at Counterpane as CRO (acquired by British Telecom), Bluecuvre Software as CRO (acquired by Redhat) and COO of Blackphone (acquired by Silent Circle). Senator’s experience includes managing worldwide GTM, Engineering and Manufacturing organizations. His 40+ years of experience in Hi Tech, with the last 20+ years in Cyber Security, provide a deep resource of knowledge in helping the Protopia Management team with their strategic efforts.