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AI: Enhancing AI for Natural Language Understanding
Talks about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Natural Language
MH
Michael Harries
Mentor/Associate at Creative Destruction Lab
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Michael Harries is a Partner at The Robotics Hub VC, with over 25 years of experience in pioneering technologies and market innovation, particularly in artificial intelligence and machine learning. He has held key roles such as CTO at Kyndi and Chief Technologist at Citrix, and has invested in numerous successful companies in the seed stage, including Black Brane Systems, Kyndi, and Wise.io.
Harries' career highlights include serving as a mentor/associate at Creative Destruction Lab and founding ImpSys, showcasing his expertise in technical leadership and strategic investments in startups within the cloud infrastructure and enterprise sectors in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Work Experience
Partner
2017 - Current
The increased collaboration between human and machine (“Augmented Intelligence”) will be the centerpiece of our economy and daily lives, and is arguably required for our economy to keep functioning. Robotics Hub is the first VC aimed at actively creating companies of consequence out of emerging augmented intelligence and robotics breakthroughs, with more than seven years of demonstrated success getting extremely ambitious products funded, launched, and scaled. This Pittsburgh-headquartered, globally reaching organization is positioned to use our global network’s unique and differentiated resources to develop and foster the kind of organizations that will one day redefine way we live, work and define our economy. Our approach is designed to rapidly identify the most viable ideas and strategies, concentrate resources around them, and shows a repeated track record taking the strongest ideas from pre-product to revenue in less than a year and from revenue to growth stage in less than five. Core to this success is structuring our relationships with our companies much closer to that of co-founder than a typical venture investor. Began as an in-house, cross-campus Robotics Ventures Initiative at Carnegie Mellon. Spun out as an independent for-profit entity serving the broader regional and national robotics community in late 2015.
Mentor/Associate
2017
World leading deep tech accelerator. Mentor for companies in Quantum, AI and Prime streams.
CTO
2016 - 2017
Joined company as CTO after investing in them at Citrix Startup Accelerator. Stayed until A round raised. Customer development; development cadence/product management; messaging for highly technical product; positioning for investors. Still an advisor. Kyndi's AI helps business with unstructured data, especially enterprise search with large quantities of text documents.
Kyndi's Natural Language Search solution helps organizations find answers in unstructured, text-based data at unmatched speed and precision.
Raised $47,400,772.00 from 7BC Venture Capital.
Chief Technologist, Citrix Startup Accelerator
2010 - 2016
Established the Citrix Startup Accelerator as a new approach to corporate applied research and open innovation. Identified & funded all 31 startups in the program. Sourced and recruited new companies, closed investments, worked directly with every company, built connections with Citrix executive and technology teams, sat as board observer for every company, acted as executive coach, provided market and product strategy advice, and provided introductions to relevant customers, advisors, investors. Apart from strategic insights and driving innovation culture, Citrix Startup Accelerator has had more than 6 exits to date and many still active companies including highlights: TidalScale, UpGuard, Kyndi and Graymatics. Michael remained a senior member of Citrix Labs and Citrix CTO Office.
Senior Director Strategy and Communications, Citrix Labs and CTO Office
2002 - 2011
Technology strategy, technology trends and market, product ideas process, new product champion, futures, innovation coach, speaker, product management, scenario analysis, CTO Office strategy. Global technology strategy team. Citrix Labs had an outsized impact on Citrix. This was a global organization headquartered in Sydney, Australia, taking a whole-of-company view of innovation in and around Citrix, and pioneered many Citrix innovations and new products. Also drove the Citrix CTO Office.
Citrix offers a unified platform to secure, manage, and monitor diverse technologies in complex cloud environments.
Raised $20,000,000.00 from Mayfield Fund and Kleiner Perkins.
Product Manager/Scientist/etc
1999 - 2002
Customer implementation and training; established product management; established support team; core research on technology extensions; development specs; first company patent. Pacific Knowledge Systems was an early stage startup, commercializing specialized Machine Learning technology to provide smart assistants for pathologists.
Researcher/Lecturer
1995 - 1999
Researcher with machine learning pioneers Ross Quinlan and Claude Sammut. Taught both Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence courses.
Founder/CEO
1994 - 1999
Founded company, built team, created and sold software for scientific evaluation of machine trading systems. Based on PhD thesis into machine learning for domains with context drift applied to live market trading. Sold software to traders globally via internet distribution.