The team at Sprout.ai continues to grow. It only seems like yesterday that we were welcoming several new faces last summer. Since then, however, the team has grown still further and was joined by seven more new members in the fourth quarter of 2020. Now 2021 is well and truly underway, we thought it was high time we caught up with some of them to find out how they have settled in over their opening weeks and what they have planned for the months ahead.
Tom Batstone – Talent Acquisition Manager
Tom joined us in December, and has been the driving force behind our growth plans for 2021. With experience building high-calibre Tech and Product teams across a number of startups and scale-ups, Tom is perfectly placed to help lead our headcount expansion for the future.
There were a number of things that compelled me to join Sprout.ai at the start of such an exciting journey. Firstly, the mission: the idea of building software that has a meaningful impact on people’s lives, helping individuals when they’re at their most vulnerable, really resonated with me. Second was the ambition: Niels and Raphael have such passion for the product and what it could evolve into in years to come. That enthusiasm is incredibly infectious, and makes it easy to realise you’re building something truly game-changing. Finally, the people: there is such a welcoming, open culture here that everyone works hard to protect and champion; from my first company-wide huddle, to the fortnightly team events, I’ve felt like part of the team from day one.
What excites me most about Sprout.ai is the growth trajectory. We’ve set ourselves ambitious goals, but so far, I have every reason to believe we will surpass them. With the growth plans we have this year, the company will soon look very different to the one I joined, but that brings new learning opportunities, new teammates, and even more scope to build something truly impactful. The future is very bright indeed.
Eduardo Rocha de Andrade – Senior Data Scientist
Eduardo spent three years working with R&D in the fields of optics and photonics for a telecommunication company before he decided to make the switch to data science. He first joined a startup and then one of Brazil’s top AI and software development companies, where he was able to work with applied AI to computer vision and video analytics.
It is very rewarding to be able to work with something that has the potential to change our society for the better whilst being intellectually motivating. In particular, I find it fascinating to work with data of multiple domains, for example as images and natural language. I’m very excited about being able to deploy our AI technology into production, which could positively impact the lives of thousands of people.
Dr Ivan Sorokin – Senior Data Scientist
Before joining Sprout.ai, Ivan had more than three years’ experience in building production-level deep learning models in the speech recognition area.
For me, working in Sprout.ai provides a huge opportunity to explore new AI technologies. In order to make a working solution for the insurance industry, you need to be able to work with different types of data: images, text, tabular data, and even audio or video. Having now been here for several months, I can say that all my expectations have been exceeded. In this short period of time our team has already successfully applied several OCR and NLP models of varying complexity.
This is just the beginning. There are still a lot of interesting problems to be solved. For example, how to effectively integrate different modalities, how to move from simple tasks to high-level claim scenario comprehension and action reasoning. I’m looking forward to meeting these challenges and more in the months ahead.
We look forward to catching up Tom, Eduardo and Ivan again in the months ahead, as well as introducing you to more new members of Sprout.ai’s growing team.
