Dr. Sadegh Riazi is a technology enthusiast, currently co-founder and CEO of CipherMode Labs. He received his Ph.D. in secure computation from UC San Diego where he was awarded the best Ph.D. thesis award. Sadegh founded Project HEAX at Microsoft Research (a new computing platform for Homomorphic Encryption). Prior to that, he studied Electrical Engineering and designed a new system for Brain-Computer Interfaces. Sadegh is a fellow of the Institute for Global Entrepreneur and has received multiple prestigious awards including Richard Newton Young Fellow Award, Jacobs Graduate Student Award, and Silver Medal in International Student Olympiad.

Dr. Ilya Razenshteyn is a co-founder and CTO of CipherMode Labs. Ilya received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT with an award-winning thesis working on algorithms and theoretical computer science. Since then, he spent a few years at Microsoft Research as a Senior Researcher at the Machine Learning and Optimization group. In the previous life, Ilya was very active in the programming competitions community, winning gold medals at IOI (international olympiad for high school students) and ICPC (world championship for college students).

Fari Assaderaghi is co-founder and Chief Technical Advisor of CipherMode Labs. He’s also Executive Vice President of Engineering at SiTime, a NASDAQ-listed company. Dr. Assaderaghi recieved his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1992 and 1994, respectively. Fari has held senior leadership positions at both start-up and large technology companies, including VP of Advanced Technology at TDK-InvenSense and CTO, IoT, and Security at NXP. He is on IEEE’s North America and Europe Executive Committee, and SRC’s Executive Committee. Throughout his career, Fari’s passion has been to identify disruptive technologies and pave their way into broad market adoption. Dr. Assaderaghi has given numerous invited talks and contributed to more than 100 technical papers, including the best paper at 2016 ISSCC. He has 76 issued patents.

Entrepreneurial experience in building, scaling, and managing digital technology businesses of significant scope. Demonstrable history of consistently setting and achieving tough financial and organizational objectives in an accelerated timeframe.

Ilya has been working in software engineering for the past 11 years, 10 of them at Google. For the last 5 years he has been leading a team in Google Search ranking, giving exposure to modern Machine Learning and data science in addition to software engineering. During university life, Ilya was an active member of the competitive programming community (winning gold medal at ICPC finals, achieving high results at many of the other competitions).

Michael Darnaud is a Sales and Business Development professional, helping nonprofits and for-profit companies with strategy and revenue growth. Michael is a Mentor at Plug and Play, the largest incubator in the United States, where he advises founders of startups in FinTech and CyberSecurity in strategy, sales and business development. Michael also runs his own consulting practice, LookIt, Inc. and has performed many engagements, delivering millions in profitable revenue, selling services to Government and the Banking and FinTech sectors. Three years ago, Michael led LeMichael Darnaudnding/Relationship Management efforts for a platform company that provides loans to nonprofits. There, he built a pipeline of about $100Million and provided loans and deposits to a variety of SMBs, working closely with a couple of banks he had partnered with. Prior to this role, Michael worked as a Senior Consultant at PwC, where he managed the Strategic Alliance with Jive Software and advised Fortune 1000 companies on Social Collaboration. He has a BA in Economics from the Sorbonne, an MBA in Finance from INSEAD and an Engineering Degree in Telecommunications. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Jodi and has two grown-up children.

Abhishek Mathur is the VP Product at CipherMode, where he drives the vision, strategy, and execution of the product. He is a startup veteran, where he has helped numerous companies build their initial product, and then drove adoption for those products. Abhishek has previously led product teams in developing MLOps, Responsible AI, NLP (conversational AI), Computer Vision, and Internet of Things platforms. He enjoys teaching product management foundations to aspiring PMs, and is a web3 enthusiast.

Mengfei He heads up operations at CipherMode. Mengfei is a seasoned operator and has been instrumental in building various successful startups. Mengfei holds a BA in Economics from University of California, Berkeley, and a JD from Santa Clara University. Outside of work, Mengfei loves to enjoy California’s seasonal produce and spend time with senior rescue dogs.

Ilia is a cryptographer and a research engineer at CipherMode Labs. He has been working for 7 years on secure computation protocols including homomorphic encryption and multi-party computation. Ilia published multiple research papers presented at major cryptographic conferences such as Eurocrypt, CHES, and ACM CCS. In 2018 and 2019, Ilia was an intern at Microsoft Research working on the SEAL library. Prior to joining CipherMode Labs, he obtained his Ph.D. in 2019 under the supervision of Prof. Frederik Vercauteren and Prof. Bart Preneel and then worked 2 years as a postdoctoral researcher at imec-COSIC, KU Leuven, Belgium.

Dr. Javad Seyed Talebi is a research engineer at Ciphermode Labs. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from UC Irvine. He spent six years developing secure and trustworthy computer systems and published multiple research papers based on them in major systems and security conferences such as USENIX Security and MobiSys. Javad also worked on improving the security and privacy of voice assistants while doing an internship at Microsoft Research in 2018. Prior to that he obtained an MSc in digital system design and designed multiple high-performance computing hardware for image processing. Javad has received the UCI 5-years fellowship award, a One-time scholarship award in recognition of exceptional promise by faculty, and a Gold medal in the National Student Olympiad.

Anna Khanova is a software engineer at CipherMode Labs. She has been working at Google for more than two years on the natural language understanding projects: Google Assistant and Cloud Conversational AI. During the Bachelor degree at the Ural Federal University, Anna participated in various ICPC competitive programming competitions.

Govind received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2020 advised by Prof. Elchanan Mossel, with a thesis covering topics in theoretical computer science and mathematical models of social phenomena. Previously, he majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at UC Berkeley, where he volunteered as a tutor with Eta Kappa Nu. After his Ph.D., he spent two years working on the Runtime team at Neural Magic Inc., where he optimized sparse neural network inference on x86 CPUs. In his free time, he enjoys going on walks and trying new restaurants.

Borys Minaiev, a software engineer from the united kingdom. He has graduated from ITMO university. He has been honored as Google Hash Runnerup in Jan 2021.

Luka Kalinovcic is a software engineer at CipherMode Labs. Previously he has been at Google for twelve years, working on Core Search ranking, a Pathfinding system for driving directions in Maps, and ML for code that aims to boost developer productivity. Prior to his professional career, Luka was an active member of the competitive programming community, winning medals at IOI and ICPC, and high results at many other competitions.