Vlad Sejnoha

Currently Partner at Glasswing Ventures, a Boston-based venture capital firm focused on AI-enabled software, and advisor to startups: Plannuh, Verusen, and Zylotech Prior to Glasswing, served as SVP and CTO for Nuance Communications. Led 300-strong corporate AI and machine learning research group (speech and image recognition, natural language understanding, dialog, knowledge, and reasoning for virtual assistants, analytics), and worked with the company's divisions on technology, product, and M&A strategy, with a particular focus on emerging technologies. Directly managed incubator projects that included apps such as the Dragon Go! mobile semantic voice search (which made Time’s ’50 best iPhone apps’), Dragon Dictation (which was inducted into the Apple Hall of Fame), and Dragon TV (which won the 2017 Technology and Engineering Emmy award). Responsible for the company’s external research relationships including Nuance’s five-year collaboration with IBM Research, and served as the president of the Nuance Foundation which supported fundamental research. Served as the primary spokesman for Nuance’s technology vision, and presented at venues such as GigaOm Mobilize, CES, MIT Tech Mobile Summit, and SXSW. Contributions and interviews have appeared in leading media such as the MIT Technology Review, Wired, the NY Times, and NPR’s Science Friday, among others. Recipient of the 2014 CTO of the Year award from the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. Awarded 27 patents. Prior to joining Nuance, held a variety of research positions, including that of Chief Scientist at Kurzweil AI, which produced the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system. Upon the acquisition of Kurzweil AI by L&H, led the company-wide speech recognition research effort there. Hold a BEng and MEng in Electrical Engineering from McGill University.