How Syntasa Came To Be

Syntasa’s story began on September 11, 2001, when I was working in New York as an executive at American Express. I was only a block away from the World Trade Center when the towers came crashing down. I had witnessed the tragedy of that fateful day unfold in front of my own eyes and it shook me deeply. At the same time, it also motivated me to work in the defense sector in order to help improve the country’s defenses and prevent anything like this from ever happening again.

In 2003, I moved from New York to Washington D.C. to found ABSc, a company that would focus on providing security services to the government. I landed a project with a federal agency to help their cyber infrastructure. I started out recruiting a couple of smart, patriotic minds who had already built a name for themselves within the federal government for their work with advanced analytics. We soon grew to a staff of several hundred people. Due to budget cuts and drawing down from the war starting in 2009, our company saw ups and downs due to a decline in demand. But still, our management team was strong enough to quickly build the company back up again.

Some of our staff has been around since the company was run out of a small closet of an office. Now, we are a well-known partner of the federal agencies.

Still, my entrepreneurial bug was not going away. So, I started Syntasa in 2014, with the hopes of building a product for large commercial enterprises to deliver intelligent experiences with AI and machine learning. This kind of product provides enterprises with insights into their customers’ behaviors, and help improve business outcomes. With behaviors analyzed in real-time, websites can be dynamic in nature so as to change content according to how the customer is interacting with a website, thereby improving the customer experience.

Syntasa’s platform is at the forefront of the technological and data revolution, adapting the very latest in machine learning technology to help enterprises identify actions and outcomes. In some cases the product can be used to identify bad guys who could potentially harm our nation. There are plenty of things in the world that I’d like to work hard to solve for, in order to make the world a better place. I also realize that there are intelligent minds already at work solving these things. I just feel fortunate that I was given an opportunity to serve our nation in a small way.