Elnar Hajiyev

Elnar stands at the heart of Realeyes’ core technology and IT architecture, driving the company’s emotions tracking vision.

Elnar started coding at the age of 10 and built some of the first online shops in Azerbaijan. At 18, he created Azerbaijan’s first online beauty pageant, which got hundreds of thousands of hits, millions of TV viewers and extensive nationwide press coverage. He has also co-authored numerous academic publications, as well as been the recipient of several awards and prestigious scholarships. He went on to study for a fully-funded PhD in Computer Science at Oxford focused on database structures, which now form the essential foundation of our technology platform.

During his PhD Elnar co-founded Semmle – working on big data analytics technology to provide business intelligence – and managed the company during its first few years before a fateful meeting with Mihkel led him to becoming one of the co-founders of Realeyes. He has built and now leads our Research & Development offices in Eastern Europe, and has been granted a US patent, with 6 more EU patents currently pending.