Atanas Kiryakov

Atanas Kiryakov is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ontotext – a leading provider of semantic databases and content analytics in media, publishing, pharma, government and cultural heritage.

Atanas joined Sirma as a software engineer in 1993 and later on he became a partner and a member of the Management Board. In 2000, he founded Ontotext and engaged the company in research projects with a total budget of over 100M Euro. In 2008, Atanas finalized an investment deal for Ontotext for 2.5M Euro with the venture capital fund NEVEQ.

Atanas is a leading expert in semantic databases and an author of multiple publications and book chapters, including “Semantic Search” in “Information Retrieval – Searching in the 21st Century” and “Storing the Semantic Web: Repositories” in the “Handbook of Semantic Web Technologies”.

Atanas earned his Master’s Degree in Computer Science at Sofia University.