Ashwin Rao (Founder, CEO) has held research positions at AT&T Bell-Labs (Murray Hill, NJ), Hunter College (New York, NY), Nuance (Dragon Systems, Newton, MA), and Conversay (Redmond, WA). He has published over 25 papers (mostly in speech and signal processing), holds several patents, is a reviewer for the IEEE and the Journal of Franklin Institute, is a member of the IEEE and the Acoustical Society of America, and has presented invited lectures at several venues including IBM Watson Research Center and The Johns Hopkins University. Currently, he oversees research and overall investment and business planning for TravellingWave. Dr. Rao received his BE-EE from the University of Bombay and his MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rhode Island jointly working with the Neuroscience Department of Brown University, Rhode Island.

Greg Aronov (Cofounder, VP Product Development) has held prior positions at Conversay (Redmond, WA), Microsoft (Redmond, WA), Spacelabs Healthcare (Issaquah, WA) in software development, specializing in speech recognition. He has a BS in Applied and Computational Mathematical Sciences and an MBA, both from the University of Washington. Greg currently oversees speech algorithm development and optimization as well as product and business development.

Marat Garafutdinov (Cofounder, VP Engineering) has held prior positions at Conversay (Redmond, WA), Microsoft (Redmond, WA), and Intrinsyc (Bellevue, WA) in software development with emphasis on speech recognition. He studied Applied and Computational Mathematical Sciences at the University of Washington. Marat currently specializes in multimodal system architecture design and development, and generally oversees all aspects of technology and engineering.

Todd Achilles (Product Advisor) has been in the Wireless industry for over 15 years. As an Executive Director for T-Mobile USA, he managed sales, engineering, and product development teams; managing a $2B annual portfolio of mobile phones. Subsequently, as the VP for HTC America, Inc, he led the sales, marketing, and product efforts for the world leader in smartphones and connected personal digital assistants. Currently, he runs HP's telco business for North America and Latin America; also managing the Palm integration.

Terry Niehaus (CFO) has over 30 years experience in finance and operations. He has held positions with Crane as company controller, Conversay (Redmond, WA) as CFO, Spencer Technologies (Seattle, WA) as CEO, and other positions including the accounting firm of Knight, Vale and Gregory; AIM Aviation; and Portac Inc (owned by Mitsui & Co). Terry is a CPA, holds a BBA from University of Cincinnati and oversees finance of TravellingWave.

Investors

Jim Judson is a senior partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP and a former longtime personal counsel to Craig McCaw. He was general counsel for Port Blakely Tree Farms, Merrill & Ring, and the Seattle Seahawks. Mr. Judson was a co-founder of Eagle River Investments, LLC, a venture capital fund that focused on communications. He is also an alternate director of China UniCom. Mr. Judson currently serves as a director of Garrett and Ring, Port Blakely Tree Farms, The Joshua Green Corporation, Sonata Capital, and Airbiquity.

Geoff Entress is a Venture Partner with Voyager and focuses broadly on information technology investments in the Pacific Northwest. Geoff is also one of the top angel investor in the region, and has invested in over 35 Pacific Northwest technology companies during the last decade. Formerly, he has held positions of partner Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle-based venture capital firm.

Bill Miller was a general partner with OVP Ventures, the most experienced venture capital firm in the northwest. Prior to that, he spent nine years at Microsoft, where he built the industry marketing team that drove the launch of early versions of Windows and the first version of Win NT, and built and led the marketing and business development efforts for the Microsoft Network (MSN).

Colin Wong is the CEO of ZoeCity, a social media company in the Christian space. He is also the founder and president of Prosperati which focuses on Pacific Northwest startup companies in the consumer internet, mobile and healthcare industries. Prior to this, Colin worked in Google engineering and managed their largest global Fortune 1000 Adwords/Adsense customers.