Tomi Poutanen

Tomi is a founder of Radical Ventures, and a founder and co-CEO of Layer 6 AI prior to its acquisition in 2018 by TD Bank Group where he is now Chief AI Officer and SVP.

Tomi is also a founder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a concept he devised and initiated with Layer 6 co-founder Jordan Jacobs and Professor Geoffrey Hinton. Tomi is a Founding Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Rotman Business School’s Creative Destruction Lab, the world’s largest AI accelerator. Tomi and Jordan have invested in technology startups for over a decade, and now do so together through Radical Ventures.

Tomi previously co-founded Milq and is a serial tech entrepreneur with exits to Microsoft and Yahoo! The technology acquired by Microsoft (while Tomi was a student at University of Waterloo) is used over 20 years later for Azure’s cloud storage, while the technology acquired by Yahoo’s was deployed in the search ranking algorithm of Bing and Yahoo Web Search, becoming the world’s largest machine learning stack when launched in 2011. While at Yahoo, Tomi led Search internationally, built a novel $200M search advertising program called Paid Inclusion, and launched Yahoo! Answers.

Tomi holds a BSc in Computer Engineering from University of Waterloo, and both an MSc in Computer Engineering and an MBA from University of Toronto.