UPDATED 13:05 EDT / OCTOBER 06 2021

AI

Former IBM Senior Vice President Robert Picciano joins CognitiveScale as CEO

Venture-backed artificial intelligence startup CognitiveScale Inc. today announced that Robert Picciano, a former IBM Corp. senior vice president, is joining as chief executive officer.

Picciano headed IBM’s Cognitive Systems business unit until his departure from the company in 2020. The Cognitive Systems unit is responsible for, among other product lines, the Power Systems family of data center servers. The servers are based on IBM-designed central processing units, which include optimizations for running AI models.

Picciano is credited with leading the Cognitive Systems unit to eight quarters of growth during his time at the helm. The executive also played a key role in the delivery of the Summit and Sierra supercomputers that IBM had developed for the U.S. Department of Energy. The two systems, which are both based on the company’s Power Systems servers, rank among the world’s fastest supercomputers.

CognitiveScale said its announcement today that co-founder and current CEO Akshay Sabhikhi will take on the role of chief operating officer.

The startup also announced a number of other changes to its leadership team. Mike McQuaid is joining as chief revenue officer after serving as senior vice president of global sales at Hitachi Vantara Corp., a major provider of data center storage equipment and enterprise software. McQuaid will be responsible for leading CognitiveScale’s sales and go-to-market activities.

In conjunction, CognitiveScale has named Vice President of Engineering Gopal Krishnan as its new senior vice president of engineering and delivery. Additionally, Bart Peluso is joining as vice president of product marketing. Peluso previously led product marketing at Blue Prism Ltd., a publicly traded provider of robotic process automation software. 

“The addition of such well respected, successful and innovative leaders is tremendous for the entire CognitiveScale community,” CognitiveScale Executive Chairman Manoj Saxena said in a statement. 

CognitiveScale provides a software platform, Cortex, that makes it easier for enterprises to build and deploy AI models. The first component of the platform is a tool called Cortex Fabric that the startup says makes it possible to develop AI software at an up to 70% lower cost than alternative technologies. The tool is complemented by Cortex Certifai, an AI explainability product that promises to provide organizations with insight into how their neural networks generate decisions.

CognitiveScale also offers a line of pre-packaged machine learning applications aimed at vertical markets. They’re designed for companies in sectors such as healthcare, banking, insurance and retail. CognitiveScale’s customers include Dell Technologies Inc., Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo & Co. and other major enterprises. 

Since launch, CognitiveScale has raised $40 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. The startup’s backers include, among other big names, Intel Capital, IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp.’s M12 venture capital arm. 

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