Arjun, Yinyin, Scott and Sarah founded the company in 2019. Since then, we’ve raised $3.25M from a world-class team of investors. We’ve expanded from our San Diego office to welcome team members across the USA. And we’re excited to be launching our first product, Una, in the travel space.
Scott is a co-founder of XOKind and leads the engineering team.
Sarah is a co-founder of XOKind and leads the product team.
Vasanth is a product-focused engineering leader responsible for backend engineering at XOKind.
Shaowei works on Machine Learning problems in XOKind.
The story of XOKind begins on the European side of the Bosporus, in Istanbul’s neighborhood of Beyoğlu. There, two of the company’s future cofounders, Arjun and Sarah, met at the wedding of a mutual friend and swapped travel stories over a traditional Turkish feast. The next day, Sarah – a PhD student completing her doctorate in Turkey – led the group on an evocative journey through the old city.
With the sounds of Istanbul’s streets still ringing in his ears, Arjun returned to the USA and soon moved from the East Coast to California, where he encountered Yinyin at Qualcomm. Yinyin had started her journey with artificial intelligence through transforming machine learning technologies from lab to market for mobile computing. The pair worked closely on the same team, building neuromorphic chips.
Recognizing the potential of artificial intelligence to transform software, Arjun left Qualcomm to co-found Nervana, a soon-to-be famous AI startup based in San Diego. Yinyin joined Arjun at Nervana.
Also on the Nervana team was future XOKind co-founder Scott. Born in Scotland and raised in Canada, Scott had been inspired by AI and ML since his college days. After moving to San Diego to work at FICO (the credit score company), Scott saw a job posting for Nervana and was struck by the combination of “deep learning” and “san diego” in the same sentence. He joined as Nervana’s Principal Data Scientist.
Before long, Nervana transformed into a full-stack AI technology provider and was acquired by Intel.
Yinyin and Scott continued to collaborate with Arjun to build new products, often traveling the world together to evangelize AI and machine learning. Through these journeys, they came to realize that these still nascent technologies had tremendous potential to unlock possibilities for people around the world.
Meanwhile, Sarah had left the world of academia and joined Apple, where she built out such flagship products as Siri and Apple TV. Her user-first mindset gave her a deep understanding of how technology companies can facilitate rich, immersive, real-world experiences by acting as a bridge between consumers and the endless array of options they’re faced with on a daily basis.
Without knowing it, Arjun, Yinyin, Scott, and Sarah had coalesced around a unique world view: that consumers were being drastically underserved by all the current offerings in artificial intelligence and machine learning. At a social gathering, they discovered their common frustration with the gap between the potential of these technologies on the one hand, and the mediocre, ad-driven product offerings on the other.
This frustration – combined with their belief in the power of human-centered design – led to the idea of XOKind: a ground-up reenvisioning of the relationship between consumers’ intelligence and artificial intelligence.
We hope to create a kinder, more human world – and our name reflects that. XOKind is an AI company, but it has kindness firmly at its heart. While we’re proud of getting the Xs and Os right (forgive the sports analogy), we love the “hugs and kisses” connotation.
And finally, we strive to build an extraordinary kind of product – XOKind!