By Nicole O’Keefe, Product Marketing Manager at Pathr.ai
As Pathr.ai continues to grow and drive our customers forward, we are fortunate to have a highly regarded group of advisors along with us. Our advisors bring a wealth of knowledge and experience in technology, industry-specific verticals, and research.
They are our sounding boards, mentors, and key influencers to the direction and development of Pathr.ai.
They join us in our mission to become the industry’s first spatial intelligence company capable of delivering actionable insights by understanding human behavior inside physical spaces.
Let’s meet our distinguished group of advisors!
Mario Ciampi, Founder and Managing Partner at MCII Advisors LLC
Mr. Mario Ciampi has approximately 35 years of experience combined as an operator, advisor and investor in the retail, consumer and real estate spaces. His senior management experience includes; COO of The Children’s Place, where he led the growth of the business from a small regional player to the leading pure play children’s apparel player in North America; President of The Disney Stores where he returned the business to profitability; Head of Private Investments for a consumer focused hedge fund.
Mario is currently an independent advisor helping consumer and retail companies with various strategic issues. Current and past clients include: Uniqlo USA, The Estee Lauder Companies, Oakley, and Monroe Capital.
In his capacity as the Head of Private Investments, Mario led the workout and monetization of many debt and equity investments. He also led a recapitalization and eventual monetization of a portfolio of small growth oriented consumer businesses where he was a general partner and co-investor. His areas of expertise in the Consumer Retail space include finance, operations, store development and real estate.
Mario Ciampi: “I believe that the technology developed by Pathr.ai and the insights created will be a significant contributor in helping retailers build conversion, increase sales and profitability, and be an ingredient for improving the customer experience.”
Steen Graham, Founder of Scalers AI
Steen Graham is passionate about deploying technology in the physical world to transform industries and enrich lives. Over the past decade, Steen led Intel’s ecosystem efforts to accelerate adoption of IoT, Edge, & AI solutions across industries and deliver business outcomes to enterprises. He led teams building developer tools, ecosystem solutions, and industry specific products resulting in tens of thousands of enterprise deployments, >$1B in revenue & design win growth, and >100K+ developer acquisitions.
Today, Steen is the Founder of Scalers AI, currently in stealth mode. Prior to that, Steen was the Head of Intel’s Edge AI Ecosystem & Markets, including Public Safety and Security and Federal & Aerospace. In this role he led teams driving $2B+ in revenue across 1K+ partners as well as leading edge AI deep learning customer engineering & partner toolchain integrations.
Steen previously held leadership roles in sales as the head of Intel Asia Pacific Japan IoT & Embedded Sales Group, which encompassed the sales and marketing efforts in manufacturing, retail, transportation, storage, communications, networking, home, building, and emerging IoT market segments. In this role he doubled IoT revenue in 3.5 years.
Prior to his role in Asia, Steen worked as the Intel Storage Global Sales Director, driving efforts to transform storage to open and scalable solutions and leading the shift in Intel’s transformation from component memory to solid state drives.
Steen holds a bachelor of science degree from the University of Oregon.
Steen Graham: “Pathr.ai’s spatial intelligence platform solves edge compliance and deployment challenges by ensuring individual privacy and execution with installed infrastructure. This combination makes it compelling for sectors such as retail that have limited CapEx budgets and a strong desire to maintain customer privacy.”
Allan Haims, Operating Executive, Board Member, Advisor
Allan Haims is a seasoned entrepreneur, strategist, marketing and operations executive who advises early stage & growth ventures in B2C and B2B verticals. His extensive experience spans over 25 years of Senior Management roles at Fortune 500 companies including The Walt Disney Company, Victoria’s Secret, publicly traded 400-store retail chain Wet Seal, and Co-Founder and CEO for mobile retail technology innovator, StepsAway.
Allan has been a presenter at national retail and technology industry events including Bank of America Retail & Technology Conference, Telsey Consumer Conference, Mobile Payments Conference and ICR Retail & Consumer investor events. His insights on the intersection of technology and consumer behavior have been published in trade publications including Marketing Land, Chain Store Age and Retail Touch Points.
Allan currently serves as a Board Member of Industrial Metal Supply Company, the largest metal distributor in the Southwest United States. He also held Advisory Board positions with Motionbox (acquired by Hewlett Packard) and luxury leather goods retailer Ghurka.
Haims earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Boston University’s School of Management.
Allan Haims: “Pathr.ai’s spatial intelligence technology presents retailers and sectors with real-time data in a simple and effective way that drives business results that matter most to them. Being data-driven is key to unlocking new opportunities for growth and making stronger business decisions.”
Ken Jackowitz, Chief Strategy Officer and General Manager of TideSmart
Ken Jackowitz is the Chief Strategy Officer and General Manager of TideSmart. He has extensive experience in designing, building, delivering and optimizing customer experiences across retail, technology, financial, healthcare and outsourcing verticals. Prior to joining TideSmart, Ken served as the Chief Product, Marketing and Digital Officer of CompuCom, an ODP company, specializing in technology managed services. He has also held key leadership roles with other companies including IDEXX Laboratories, Bank of America, and Office Depot.
Ken earned his BS in marketing management from Bentley University, and was a visiting scientist/executive in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with student innovators on research in human computer interaction, cognitive behavior and smart cities.
Ken Jackowitz: “I had the pleasure of meeting Pathr.ai’s CEO George Shaw when I was a Visiting Scientist/Executive in Residence at the MIT Media Lab from 2008 to 2011, where George was a student there. During that time, we were able to take the research from The Human Speechome Project and pivot it to create the ability to understand customer behavior in a branch banking environment to better drive service to sales conversion. That had me hooked. There is a gap in the market for what I call ‘the last mile’ of customer behavior. What customers (and employees) are doing in a store, factory, office, smart city, etc. can best be understood by why and how they behave. Technology like Pathr.ai, is the key to unlocking these insights.”
Rony Kubat, Co-Founder and CTO of Tulip Interfaces
Rony Kubat is the Co-Founder and CTO of Tulip Interfaces. He is a PhD graduate from MIT with a research focus on applied machine learning. He was the first employee at Bluefin (acquired by Twitter). Before graduate studies, Rony was a science and technology advisor for Hollywood film productions. Rony has been described by Wired Magazine as having a “steady low voice that could pacify a riot.” He is a playwright and is a member of the Junkyard Wars team, the Geeks (3rd Place, US Season three).
Rony Kubat: “Pathr.ai’s approach to spatial analytics is exciting — privacy-preserving and actionable. I’ve known and worked with George for many years. His passion is infectious.”
Bharat Mediratta, Engineering Fellow at Coinbase
Bharat Mediratta is a proven business leader with a deep technical background in tackling humanity-sized problems with 3 decades of Silicon Valley experience. Bharat was the Distinguished Engineer at Google responsible for the infrastructure behind Google Home page and Search Results pages, the President and CTO of AltSchool, and the CTO at Dropbox. Today, Bharat is an Engineering Fellow at Coinbase focusing on creating more economic freedom in the world.
Bharat Mediratta: “Spatial intelligence represents an incredible untapped resource. The more we can translate real world occurrences into a digital environment, the more we can apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to dramatically improve the way that we interact with the world. I’m excited to be part of the Pathr.ai journey to use spatial intelligence to transform the retail space and beyond.”
Nate Ngerebara, Attorney at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP
Nate Ngerebara is a Patent Litigation associate in Weil’s Silicon Valley office. His practice covers all aspects of patent law, including cases in district courts and the ITC, and as well as proceedings before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). His experience includes formulating invalidity positions; managing discovery; preparing witnesses for depositions; and drafting pre- and post-trial motions and briefs.
Nate’s litigation experience spans a variety of technologies, including semiconductors, consumer electronics, software, medical devices and telecommunications. He focuses his pro bono work on post-conviction relief and representing low-income tenants in unlawful detainer suits. Prior to joining Weil, Nate worked as a Patent Litigation associate at another major international law firm.
Nate earned his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where he was director of the mock trial team and served as a patent strategy intern at one of the world’s largest technology companies. He also earned M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in chemical engineering from Stanford and Michigan Technological University, respectively, and has co-authored several articles on issues in intellectual property law.
Nate Ngerebara: “Pathr.ai’s stance on capturing 100% anonymous location data is a key differentiator in today’s market and allows companies to drive business results in an unbiased way.”
Birju Shah, President at Sabanto
Birju Shah is a 15+ year product veteran who launched over 10 globally scaled platforms & products that are used in 190 countries by 2 billion users with ~$3B in annual revenue. Most recently, he was the lead for Uber Health and the former product lead of Uber’s AI group. Prior to Uber, Birju was the product lead for digital yield products at Monsanto’s Climate Corp division. Birju is also a current adjunct professor at Northwestern & Kellogg, lecturing product strategy & product management to future innovators and executive CPOs.
He holds an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Business, where he was a McGovern Scholar and a Legatum Scholar and BSE in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University.
Birju Shah: “George & Pathr.ai sold me immediately on the ability for a platform with a privacy first mindset to anonymously gain inferences real-time on foot traffic. Besides the fact that the insights will allow for better experiences operationally for brick and mortar retailers, the possibilities were endless to unlock even more value, tracking social distance for the population during COVID, efficiently improving hospital operations by tracking how employees are trafficking around a hospital system during a day and even efficiently creating different worker path plans at an airport to get airplanes out the gate faster. The ability to gain insight from the platform they built is endless, and extremely powerful for any operation.”
Michelle Shevin, Senior Program Manager at the Ford Foundation
Michelle Shevin is a public interest technologist who researches dynamics at the intersection of technology and social change. She works at the Ford Foundation and teaches future thinking methodologies at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Michelle Shevin: “Even as we gain the ability to understand more about spaces through data, it is paramount to avoid implementing extensive surveillance architecture. Technology is never neutral — it amplifies power and affects sociotechnical dynamics. Pathr.ai combines market leading analytics with the strategic and ethical decision to avoid face recognition and additional surveillance layers, analyzing existing data streams. This centering of public interest values like equity and privacy will be a key competitive advantage into the future.”
Paco Underhill, Strategic Advisor of Envirosell Global LLC
Paco Underhill is an accomplished and visionary global leader. He is the Strategic Advisor to Envirosell Global LLC and is the Founder and former CEO of Envirosell Inc., a behavioral research and consulting firm specializing in studying retail and service environments. Envirosell has worked in 50 countries and with more than one-third of the Fortune 100 list. While prototype testing of stores, restaurants and bank branches is still 30% of its business, Envirosell’s largest clients in 2019 were technology companies trying to understand consumer behavior in store, in home, on the job, and on-line.
Paco is the author of popular books including Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping out in 28 languages and used in MBA programs, design schools and retailing training programs across the world. His newest book How We Eat: The Brave New World of Food and Drink will be published by Simon & Schuster in January of 2022.
As a speaker and presenter, he has worked in 50 countries talking to merchants, marketers, bankers, technologists, hospital groups, government agencies, cultural institutions, non-profits, trade institutions, and most importantly students. As the son of an American diplomat who grew up around the world, he has a global perspective on consumer trends.
Paco Underhill: “I believe in intelligent observing and for most of my working life have built tools to that end. Pathr.ai is on its way to a better mix of Art and Science — which for AI is the mother lode. We live in an analog world — and digital tools need to reflect that. My role in Pathr.ai is to keep the company focused, not on simply collecting data, but winning victories for their clients.”
To learn more about Pathr.ai and our mission to become the industry’s first spatial intelligence company, please visit https://pathr.ai/ and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
