Sighthound was formed because existing video software just isn’t smart enough. Having revolutionized voice platforms at Voxeo, acquired by Aspect Software in July 2013, founders Jonathan Taylor and Stephen Neish started looking at bringing the lessons of Voxeo – easy to use, scalable, dramatically different software – to the fields of vision and motion. Through the application of artificial intelligence and computer vision, Sighthound allows computers to see.
About Sighthound
Jonathan Taylor Chairman and CEO
Jonathan Taylor is “full stack entrepreneur” and investor who has started seven companies, run six, sold four, and acquired seventeen others. In 1999, Jonathan founded Voxeo with the mission to make phone applications easy to build and deploy. He developed the company into a world-wide, cloud-based, enterprise SaaS platform for automated customer service and sold it to Aspect Software in 2013. In 2012, Jonathan completed the spin-off of Tropo - a real-time communications platform - from Voxeo. Jonathan served as Tropo’s Chairman and sold it to Cisco in 2015.
RJ Burnham President and CTO
RJ has been working in technology the since the age of 15 when he started in the world of telecom and speech recognition. RJ was a co-founder and CTO at Voxeo Corporation and was responsible for the research, development and operations team. Voxeo was acquired in 2013 by Aspect Software and RJ served there as Cloud CTO, leading Aspect’s cloud product strategy and development. RJ has been highly involved in the industry standardization process taking leadership and editor roles within the W3C, IETF and other organizations.
Gordon Cloke Chief Product Officer
Gordon is a creative, execution-oriented leader with deep and varied experience delivering products for both enterprise and consumer customers. He combines discipline, focus, energy, humor, insight and innovation to drive products and companies forward. His previous experience includes Senior Director of Product Management at Aspect Software and Voxeo, Director of Product Managment at Yahoo!, and Software Development Manager at Xerox. At Sighthound he leads both Product Management and Corporate Operations.
Ryan Campbell Chief Culture Officer
Ryan has a uniquely diverse leadership background spanning engineering, human resources, network operations, corporate culture, and customer service. Over 14 years at Voxeo, he was Senior Vice President of Engineering, Chief Information Officer, and Chief Culture Officer. At Sighthound, Ryan is responsible for buidling and Intentional Culture of high performance and customer obsession. Ryan has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida.
Markus Hahn Chief Architect
Markus brings twenty years of software design and development expertise to Sighthound. He developed his own award-winning encryption solutions before working on development and architecture at, in turn, Voxeo, ZoneLabs, later Checkpoint, and LiveOps. Major areas of interest and specialization are security, concurrency, networking and all things media. He holds a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of Applied Sciences in Esslingen, Germany.
Zain Masood Director of Research
Zain Masood holds a PhD in Computer Science, with emphasis in the field of Computer Vision and Machine Learning, from University of Central Florida (UCF). He has expertise pertaining to action/gesture recognition, object detection, shadow detection/removal, face recognition and computational photography. He currently heads the research department at Sighthound.
Stephen Neish Co-Founder
Stephen has helped run technology companies for the last 15 years, most recently as Chief Financial Officer at Voxeo Corporation and Managing Director of Voxeo Europe. Starting his career in investment banking he spent time at the Virgin Group and Mirronex Technologies on the way to starting and acquiring more than a dozen companies in the US, Europe and China for Voxeo. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago.
Mubarak Shah Advisor
Dr. Shah joins Sighthound as an advisor. He is Trustee Chair Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida, and the founding director of the Center for Research in Computer Vision at UCF. His research interests include video surveillance, visual tracking, human activity recognition, visual analysis of crowded scenes, and video registration. Dr. Shah is a fellow of IEEE, AAAS, IAPR and SPIE. He is an editor of an international book series on Video Computing, editor in chief of Machine Vision and Applications journal, and an associate editor of ACM Computing Surveys journal.