H2O.ai Leadership

Sri Ambati is the founder and CEO of H2O.ai. A product visionary who has assembled world-class teams throughout his career, Sri founded H2O.ai in 2012 with a mission to democratize AI for anyone, anywhere, creating a movement of the world’s top data scientists, physicists, academics and technologists at more than 20,000 organizations worldwide. Sri also regularly partners with global business leaders to fund AI projects designed to solve compelling business, environmental and societal challenges. Most recently, Sri led the initiative o2forindia.org, sourcing O2 concentrators for more than 200 public health organizations in Tier 2 cities and rural communities in India during the Delta wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, helping to save thousands of lives. His strong “AI for Good” ethos for the responsible and fair use of AI to make the world a better place drives H2O.ai’s business model and corporate direction.

A sought-after speaker and thought-leader, Sri has presented at industry events including Ai4, Money2020, Red Hat Summit and more, is a frequent university guest speaker, and has been featured in publications including The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, IDG and the World Economic Forum and has been named a Datanami Person to Watch.

Before founding H2O.ai, Sri co-founded Platfora, a big data analytics company (acquired by Workday) and was director of engineering at DataStax and Azul Systems. His academic background includes sabbaticals focused on Theoretical Neuroscience at Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley, and he holds a master’s degree in Math and Computer Science from the University of Memphis.

Arno Candel is the Chief Technology Officer at H2O.ai, where he has been the main committer of the industry-leading machine learning and data science platforms H2O-3 and H2O Driverless AI since joining the company in 2014. Previously, he spent a decade in supercomputing at ETH and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and collaborated with CERN on next-generation particle accelerators.

Arno holds a PhD and Masters summa cum laude in Physics from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Arno was named "2014 Big Data All-Star" by Fortune Magazine and featured in ETH GLOBE in 2015 and WIRED in 2017. Connect with him on Twitter @ArnoCandel.

Prithvi is Chief of Technology, Applications at H2O.ai. Prithvi leads the design and development of "Q", H2O.ai's high scale exploratory data analysis and analytical application development platform. Prithvi has been with H2O.ai since its early days and has been responsible for several products including Driverless AI (our flagship automatic machine learning platform), Steam (distributed cluster management, model management and deployment for H2O), H2O.js (Javascript transpiler for H2O's distributed runtime), Play (on-demand cloud provisioning system for H2O), Flow (a hybrid GUI/REPL/Notebook for H2O) and Lightning (statistical graphics for H2O).

In the past, Prithvi was an early engineer at Platfora, where he was responsible for the high performance interactive data visualization engine. Before that, he founded Plot.io, a browser-based visual analytics environment (acquired by Platfora).

Rod Hamlin is the SVP of Global Business Development, leading the team responsible for H2O.ai’s strategic partnerships and strategy worldwide. This global partner network includes all resellers, technology partnerships, and cloud providers.

Rod is an open-source veteran having spent many years running global business development teams at Redis and Couchbase. He also served as SVP of Global Sales at Nuance, and SVP of Sales and Marketing at Opera Software. Rod has been part of several IPOs as well as two company acquisitions by Google. Along with many years in Silicon Valley, he’s also lived and worked in several countries in Europe and Asia. Rod is a first generation American from Scandinavian parents, and lives with his wife, kids, and goldendoodle in Bellevue WA. 

Daniel has more than 20 years in developing business in Latin America most of them helping customers to find innovative solutions regarding data. Daniel holds and MBA in Northwestern University and several extension courses regarding strategy and businesses development. Father of twins, Daniel is an avid cyclist and always looking for a perfect mountain to climb with his bike.

Oliver ("Olie") Fleming is the Senior Vice President of Strategic Transformation at H2O.ai, renowned for his expertise and thought leadership in guiding customers on their AI transformation journeys, driving from their data.

Before joining H2O.ai, Olie held several leadership positions including Analytics Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company and Chief Operating Officer at QuantumBlack. He also was a Manager at Baringa Partners and led the Ultra High Net Worth Client Management and Strategy for Barclays Wealth and Investment Management Group.

Olie received a PhD in Chemical Engineering and an MSc in Advanced Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London.

Prior to working at H2O, she worked as a Data Scientist building products driven by machine learning for B2B customers.

She has experience working with customers across multiple industries, identifying common problems, and designing robust and automated solutions.

Megan is based in New York City and holds a degree in Applied Mathematics. In her free time, she enjoys hiking and yoga.

Prashant Natarajan is VP and General Manager at H2O.ai with executive responsibilities for global healthcare and life sciences, reporting to SriSatish Ambati, CEO. He is passionate about bringing value to the humans of healthcare by leveraging H2O.ai’s deep data science expertise, world-class products, and large user community. He works closely with provider/pharma/payer/government executives and clinicians to bring new solutions and AI transformation to life.

Prashant is a best-selling author and a popular keynote speaker on health AI, data, innovation and precision medicine. He is also invited co-faculty at Stanford School of Medicine, member of the AI-ML Board of Advisors at Pistoia Alliance, and is frequently consulted as expert advisor on health data and AI by the US Congress, US Federal Government, and international agencies.

Venkatesh is the VP of Engineering at H2O.ai. He is a software engineering leader with a focus on building great teams that deliver products and functionality to solve customer use cases.

Venkatesh has worked at Adobe Systems, where he held a number of positions in the software engineering and leadership space including his latest role as Sr. Manager with a primary focus on master data management and data science. Prior to Adobe Systems Venkatesh has worked in various engineering roles in companies like Philips, HP and IBM. Venkatesh holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Mumbai University India.

Kerry O'Shea is the VP, Strategic Customer Transformation. She has over 20 years of experience and success in sales, sales management, and client relationship management. Prior to H2O, Kerry held key roles at Equifax, SAS, and Experian, where she supported major initiatives in predictive analytics.

Kerry holds a BA in Political Science and a Master's Degree in International Relations, both, from St. John's University in New York City. She is also an H2O Fellow.

Bernard Mendoza is the VP of Finance & Strategy for H2O.ai. He carries with him 15 years of experience leading financial planning and analysis, and revenue operations teams at high-growth SaaS companies, including Informatica, Conga, Upwork, and Marketo.

In addition to his professional achievements, Bernard is a lifelong learner and a strong advocate for diversity in the workplace.

Bernard holds a Bachelor of Science degree in International Business from San Francisco State University and a Professional Certificate in Strategic Decision and Risk Management at Wharton Executive Education. He currently lives in San Jose, CA with his wife and son. In his free time, he enjoys traveling and spending time with his family at vacations and family gatherings.

Meet Kathy Lee, the Vice President of Sales Operations at H2O.ai. With over 30 years of experience as a proven leader in sales and revenue operations, Kathy brings invaluable insights and a calm approach to streamlining even the most complex workflows and processes.

Before joining H2O.ai, Kathy held several leadership positions at notable companies including Juniper Networks, Meru Networks, and Global Cloud Xchange (formerly Reliance Globalcom / Yipes). As the Director of World Wide Sales Operations at Juniper Networks, Kathy was responsible for leading global sales and revenue operations for the company’s industry practices. Additionally, she served as the Director of Marketing Communications at Global Cloud Xchange and Meru Networks. At Meru, she worked closely with the executive team in taking the company public.

Kathy holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing from San Francisco State University, Lam Family College of Business.

Michal Malahlava has been the vice president of engineering at H2O.ai since 2013. He has also worked as chief architect of platforms at H2O.ai since 2017.

Michal holds a PhD from Charles University in Prague and a postdoctoral degree from Purdue University. During his studies he was interested in the construction of various software systems using model-driven methods and domain-specific languages. He participated in the design and development of various systems including SOFA and Fractal component systems or jPapabench control systems.

Tom is VP of Customer and Pre-Sales Engineering at H2O & key to the magic of engineering & customer happiness. A quintessential team member – Tom is an extraordinary blend of technical genius, customer focus and management by example.

Before joining H2O, Tom was Co-founder & CTO at Luminix, where he and the team developed a cutting-edge offline mobile application for Salesforce users. This involved a healthy blend of focusing on the user-experience along with a deep-dive in various technologies. Prior to Luminix, Tom was a Principal Engineer at Azul Systems, where he worked in both the JVM and System Software teams.

Tom served as the technical leader for the distributed management application team, appliance security and tools for distributed debugging. Tom’s experience at systems and chip startup companies involved straddling the hardware-software boundary.

Tom led pre-silicon verification infrastructure development for a terabit networking switch fabric chipset at Abrizio (acquired by PMC-Sierra). He also developed architectural CPU simulators, debuggers and toolchains at Chromatic Research (acquired by ATI). Tom got his start in technology at Intel, spending internships and co-ops in both the Portland (MD6) and Santa Clara (MD7) microprocessor design groups.

A lesser-known fact about Tom: Finding the now-famous Pentium floating-point divide (FDIV) bug while at Intel using the testing harness and methodology he developed (several months before it was independently discovered outside Intel, and subsequently gained worldwide attention).

Tom has an MS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois (at Urbana-Champaign), and a BSE degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan (at Ann Arbor).

Olivier Grellier is Vice President of Data Science at H2O.ai and is a double Kaggle Grandmaster.
He joined H2O as a Senior Data Scientist in 2019 and is leading the largest Grandmaster team in the world since 2020, an incredible privilege!

The Data Science team covers the latest skills and techniques in Tabular, Time Series, Natural Language Processing and computer Vision. Our team members love making their best practices, latest skills and innovations available to our Customers.

Olivier holds a Ph.D. in Signal Processing and graduated from Centrale/Supelec, France.
Before H2O.ai, he engaged in software development, data science, project management and team leading at Amadeus London and Capgemini Paris.

Parul works at the intersection of Machine Learning and Developer Advocacy. Her focus is to contribute to the products as well as make the community aware of the recent developments in the H2O.ai ecosystem. In her current role she works as a Principal Data Scientist at H2O.ai.

She is also a Kaggle Grandmaster in the notebooks category and was one of LinkedIn's Top Voice in the Software Development category in 2019.

Apart from this, Parul is also co-authoring a book on 'Machine Learning for High Risk Applications and written multiple articles focused on Data Science and Software development for various publications. She regularly mentors, speaks, and delivers workshops on topics related to Responsible AI.

As the Head of Product at H2O.ai, Michelle Tanco’s primary focus lies in delivering a seamless user experience across machine learning applications. With a strong dedication to math and computer science, she is enthusiastic about leveraging these disciplines to address real-world challenges. Before joining H2O, she served as a Senior Data Science Consultant at Teradata, working on high-impact analytics projects to tackle business issues across various industries.

Michelle holds a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ursinus College. In her downtime, she enjoys spending quality time with her family and expressing her creativity by playing the bass and ukulele.