Vlad Sejnoha

As Venture Partner at Glasswing Ventures, Vlad Sejnoha brings over 30 years of experience in AI, Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

From 2001 through 2018, Vlad Sejnoha was Nuance’s Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. In this role, Vlad led the company’s 350-strong worldwide research organization, responsible for developing conversational AI technologies, such as deep learning for the recognition of speech and images, natural language understanding, dialog, reasoning and other AI technologies, which directly supported a broad range of Nuance products.

In addition, Vlad worked with the company’s divisions on technology, product, and M&A strategy, managed the integration of acquired core technologies and teams, and directly managed select incubator projects. These initiatives included apps such as the Dragon Go! mobile semantic voice search which made Time’s ’50 best iPhone apps’ list, Dragon Dictation, which was inducted into the Apple Hall of Fame, and Dragon TV, which won the 2017 Technology and Engineering Emmy award. Vlad was also responsible for the Company’s external research relationships including a five-year collaboration with IBM Research, and served as the President of the Nuance Foundation which aims to advance the field of multimodal applications and user interface technology through research grants.

In his role as CTO, Vlad acted as a spokesman for Nuance’s technology vision, and has presented at countless conferences, such as GigaOm Mobilize, CES, MIT Tech Mobile Summit, and SXSW. His contributions and interviews have appeared in media such as the MIT Technology Review, Wired, and NY Times, among others.

Prior to Nuance, Vlad has held a variety of research positions, including that of Chief Scientist at Kurzweil AI, which produced the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system. Upon the successful acquisition of Kurzweil AI by L&H, Vlad led the company-wide speech recognition research effort for the acquirer. Vlad has been working in the field of speech recognition and natural language processing for over 30 years and has been awarded 23 patents. He is a recipient of the 2014 CTO of the Year award from the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. Vlad holds BEng and MEng degrees in Electrical Engineering from McGill University.