About Sighthound

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.

Sighthound's first product is intelligent video software that looks at video feeds and differentiates between people and objects.

Stephen Neish CEO

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.

Ryan Case VP Engineering

Ryan has been engineering video technologies for six years, both at Vitamin D and Sighthound. Previously he helped build the smart watch at WIMM Labs, which was acquired by Google in 2012. He began his career at Palm. When not urging the engineering team ever onward and upward, he rides motorcycles and plays guitar. He holds a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

RJ Burnham 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.

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.

Jonathan Taylor Chairman

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.

Jonathan is now a Mentor Capitalist at Entrenext Ventures and the Chairman of Sighthound, Inc.

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.