William Tunstall-Pedoe

William Tunstall-Pedoe was the founder of Cambridge start-up Evi (formerly True Knowledge), a company that has deep technology around understanding natural language and automatically answering questions on any topic. Following its acquisition, the technology became an integral part of Amazon’s Alexa and William held a senior role in the team that defined, built, and launched Amazon Echo working with hundreds of scientists and engineers. Evi is now the Cambridge subsidiary of Amazon, employing hundreds of scientists and engineers locally from multiple projects including Alexa and Prime Air.

William is now an active angel investor and a fellow of the Creative Destruction Lab, a Toronto-based incubator for AI start-ups where he helps many tens of early-stage machine learning businesses.

William has a first-class honors degree, studying Computer Science at Churchill College, Cambridge. Less serious projects include a commercial chess-playing program, the first and only software which can solve and explain cryptic crossword clues, and the AI anagram-generating software which was used by Dan Brown to create the anagrams that were integral to the plot of the Da Vinci Code book and movie.