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About Us

Artificial Intelligence Expertise + Mission Critical Facility Experience

Phaidra’s team composition is built on the premise that to deploy advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence into production, you must have deep domain expertise. Our team includes experts in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, cybersecurity, mission critical cooling systems, data centers, and industrial controls. Our team knows what customers need to meet 21st century expectations of continued growth with reduced resource consumption.

Introduction to Phaidra

Our Backstory

Jim Gao designed the large cooling systems that remove heat from the servers in Google’s data centers. He conducted analysis to improve Google’s Power Usage Efficiency (PUE), a metric that tracks data center energy efficiency. In order to continually improve efficiency and reduce risk, Jim was always seeking new ways to optimize control.

At Google DeepMind, Veda Panneershelvam was one of the key engineers who designed and built the AlphaGo agent. The team later published their work in a front-page Nature paper that became one of the most cited AI papers of all time.

Katie Hoffman, an industrial controls veteran, recognized the potential impact of applying AI to industrial systems for dynamic control. She had worked on the design and implementation of hundreds of industrial control projects and understood the major importance of domain expertise to successfully apply AI in production.

Noting the success of AlphaGo in defeating the world’s Go Grandmaster, Jim connected with Veda to develop an AI to control Google’s data center infrastructure. Jim founded DeepMind Energy and the system deployed at one of Google’s data centers was able to drive 40% energy efficiency within an already optimized plant facility.

While working on a project together, Jim and Veda met Katie. They realized that general purpose reinforcement learning could achieve breakthrough performance in wildly different application domains. The true challenge and innovation was to figure out how to ingest domain knowledge in a scalable manner - together they left their respective roles and founded Phaidra in 2019.

The co-founders created Phaidra to build an AI control platform leveraging general intelligence. We know this technology — self-learning, autonomous control systems underpinned by general intelligence — represents the future of industrial automation.

Phaidra Leadership

Jim Gao

Co-Founder

Chief Executive Officer

Jim serves as Chief Executive Officer. He sets the strategic direction of Phaidra and leads the company in operational excellence. Jim leads the teams responsible for Sales, Business Development, and Marketing, in addition to providing oversight and management for the company as a whole. Prior to Phaidra, Jim was at DeepMind as the DeepMind Energy Team Lead. Prior to DeepMind, he spent a decade working as a Technical Lead for Google’s Data Centers.

Education

Bachelor of Science degrees in Mechanical Engineering & Environmental Science from University of California, Berkeley

Veda Panneershelvam

Co-Founder

Chief Technology Officer

Veda serves as the Chief Technology Officer. He sets the technical and research direction for Phaidra, providing leadership on the AI-related tactical execution of customer deployments. He also leads teams responsible for Software Engineering and Research. Prior to Phaidra, Veda was at DeepMind working on a number of significant projects, most notably: Autonomous Self Driving technology, AlphaGo, Bootstrapping AlphaFold efforts and Google's Data Center Cooling Optimization. Prior to DeepMind, he worked as a Software Engineer specializing in distributed computing at Keane, Sentenial and Imtech.

Education

Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology from Anna University.

Katie Hoffman

Co-Founder, President

Chief Operating Officer

Katie serves as the President and Chief Operating Officer. She sets the corporate governance and operations direction for Phaidra. She provides strategic and customer-centric product guidance. She leads the teams responsible for Operations, Customer Success, People Operations, Product Management & Design, and Security. Prior to Phaidra, Katie worked for Ingersoll Rand & Trane in various capacities including Innovation Senior Manager, Engineering Team Leader, and Building Automation System Project Engineer. Prior to Ingersoll Rand & Trane, She worked in the defense industry as a Systems Engineer at Raytheon, Integrated Defense Systems.

Education

Master of Science degree in Systems Engineering from Old Dominion University. Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Geoffrey Moore

Board Member

Geoffrey Moore is an author, speaker, and advisor who splits his consulting time between start-up companies in the Mohr Davidow and Wildcat Venture Partners portfolio and established high-tech enterprises, most recently including Salesforce, Microsoft, Autodesk, F5Networks, Gainsight, Google, and Splunk.

Moore’s life’s work has focused on the market dynamics surrounding disruptive innovations. His first book, Crossing the Chasm, focuses on the challenges start-up companies face transitioning from early adopting to mainstream customers.

Moore has a bachelors in American literature from Stanford University and a PhD in English literature from the University of Washington.

Sophie Bakalar

Board Member

Sophie Bakalar is a partner at Collaborative Fund, a leading source of capital for entrepreneurs pushing the world forward since 2010. Collab's mission is to support companies that live at the intersection of for-profit & for-good and was an early backer of companies like Lyft, Kickstarter, Upstart, and Sweetgreen.

Martin Mignot

Board Member

Martin established Index’s New York office in 2022, moving from London to help European founders and companies launch in the US, as well as guide those expanding from America to Europe. He is deeply passionate about early-stage companies, and since joining Index in 2010, has helped the likes of Deliveroo, Captain Train/Trainline and Drivy/Getaround on their journey from seed to IPO, as well as other European breakout successes like Personio, Revolut or Swile from their early days.

In his personal life, Martin loves cities and urban design and is an active anti-car campaigner through his Happy Streets foundation.

Prior to joining Index, Martin was part of the TMT team at UBS Investment Bank and co-founded the beauty subscription business Boudoir Prive (acquired by Joliebox/Birchbox) with his wife.

Phaidra’s Mission

To make the industrial sector radically more resource-efficient. We are creating a future where human prosperity is fundamentally less dependent on the consumption of the planet’s finite resources.

The industrial sector accounts for the vast majority of the world’s resource consumption. Every aspect of modern life depends on complex industrial processes (e.g. factories, power plants, data centers) that convert large quantities of raw materials and/or energy into finished goods and services.

Phaidra will achieve this mission via self-learning control systems. Our service is a closed-loop (i.e. autonomous) AI control system, trained on historical data that learns and improves over time at managing the industrial facility.

See our Applications page to learn more

This approach is fundamentally different from how the industrial sector operates today. Massive facilities operate the same way year after year as they rely upon hard-coded controls logic - i.e. explicitly programmed systems that do the same thing over and over again.

Phaidra envisions a future of truly intelligent infrastructure. A future where physical infrastructure does not continuously degrade — but rather self improves — every single day. A future where human prosperity does not mean environmental degradation. This is our contribution towards that future.

Phaidra’s Name & Brand Meaning

Phaidra is pronounced like /ˈfɛdrə/ (or Feydra)

The original term, Phaedra, is of Greek origin and means "bright" or "to shine". It comes from the Greek word phanein, which also means "to show forth". We changed the spelling to include ai, as we are trying to shine a light on the path forward of the use of AI in the industrial sector.

Our logomark is based on industrial controls, as it uses buttons and sliders to create the mark. While it may relate to old school technology, it’s a symbol of innovation in mission critical facilities today.

The pattern “DOT, DASH, DOT, DOT”, is Morse code for “AI”. As morse code is translated by humans, so is our AI. Our team has mastered the complex understanding of industrial cooling systems and are able to translate through a technology we can use to improve plant stability, energy efficiency and sustainability.