Datagen’s Impressive Team Key to Leading AI Innovation

 Datagen, a Tel Aviv-based company known for its pioneering of domain-specific synthetic data for humans and objects perceptions, has announced key growth as it builds momentum to power state-of-the-art computer vision systems. Datagen is playing a big role in helping Israel take a leading position as the next major hub of data for computer vision and artificial intelligence advances.

The new announcement follows the company’s March 2021 public launch, which included funding of over $18 million from TVL Partners and Viola Ventures. The company now works with various Fortune 100 companies in fields like augmented and virtual reality, robotics, and automotive, and these companies include the majority of the top U.S. tech organizations. 

The company is consistently attracting the top computer vision, AI, and cloud innovators in Israel, which is helping it establish an impressive executive leadership team and advisory board.

The Company’s Team

Former Google AI leader Dr. Jonathan Laserson has joined Datagen as Head of AI Research, and he is responsible for the company’s research into AI generating 3D simulations by synthesizing photorealistic images and videos for AI performance.

Tal Darom joined the executive ranks as VP of R&D after leading a human-centric computer vision research group at Amazon. During his time at Amazon, Darom managed the development of machine learning training and model evaluation infrastructure, and he was responsible for bringing deep learning algorithms to production. 

Hadas Sheinfield previously worked for Google, and she now joins Datagen as VP of Product. She was responsible for infrastructure of massive scale at Google, where she helped the company serve over 100 products and the respective engineering teams. 

Karine Regev joins Datagen as VP of Marketing, where she will help the company expand to new markets while also establishing its innovation in existing ones. She has helped grow brand and market share for top companies like Alcide and Aqua Security.

“I am fascinated by the recent developments in the space between graphics and deep learning,” said Dr. Laserson. “The new methods use a radically different approach compared to classic graphics tools, and achieve new highs of photorealism. Datagen is in the business of making synthetic images capture as much of the world as possible, and look as real as possible, so naturally Datagen is well positioned to be at the forefront of this new revolution and I’d like to be part of it.”

This new executive leadership team will work with the company’s advisory board, and Datagen will collaborate with academic institutions to ensure access to innovative research. 

Datagen’s investors include Brown University Professor Michael J. Black, who is founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, as well as UC Berkeley Professor Trevor Darrell, who is founding co-director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR). 

Some of the advisors coming into Datagen include Lihi Zelnik, head of Alibaba DAMO Academy Machine Learning Israel Lab, and Gal Chechik, director of AI at Nvidia. Anthony Gouldbloom, co-founder and CEO of Kaggle, will help the company gain continued access to industry talent.

Computer Vision Innovation

Datagen is playing a key role in helping Israel be a leader in bringing computer vision innovation to the market. There has been a massive explosion of growth over the last few years among AI companies in the country, which is largely due to a high concentration of engineers and world-renowned universities. Datagen has hired over 20 employees in the last two months and will continue to bring on new members in sales and marketing, software and DevOps, and product departments. 

Ofir Chakon is co-founder and CEO of Datagen.

“As Datagen shapes this emerging field of synthetic data, I could not be more proud to have such esteemed minds join our leadership team and advisory board,” said Chakon. “Israel is a hotbed for artificial intelligence and computer vision innovation but requires diverse and comprehensive datasets to train, test and validate machine learning applications. These powerhouse executives and advisors will help accelerate Datagen’s market opportunities as synthetic data increasingly becomes the core layer in computer vision systems.”