Explosion is a software company specializing in developer tools for Artificial
Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. We’re the makers of
spaCy, one of the leading open-source libraries for advanced
NLP and Prodigy, an annotation tool for radically efficient
machine teaching.
Ines Montani CEO, Founder
Ines is a co-founder of Explosion and a core developer of the spaCy NLP library and the Prodigy annotation tool. She has helped set a new standard for user experience in developer tools for AI engineers and researchers.
Berlin, Germany
Matthew Honnibal CTO, Founder
Matthew is a leading expert in AI technology. He completed his PhD in 2009, and spent a further 5 years publishing research on state-of-the-art NLP systems. He left academia in 2014 to write spaCy and found Explosion.
Berlin, Germany
Sofie Van Landeghem Lead Machine Learning Engineer, spaCy Core Developer
Sofie is a machine learning and NLP engineer who became fascinated with the domain during her master’s in 2006. Her doctoral research focused on text mining for life-sciences, followed by further work in the pharmaceuticals and food industries after her PhD.
Adriane is a computational linguist who has been engaged in research since 2005, completing her PhD in 2012. She has extensive experience in quality control for linguistic annotation, parsing, and NLP for non-standard language.
Tübingen, Germany
Paul O’Leary McCann Machine Learning Engineer, spaCy Core Developer
Paul has built a broad knowledge of data engineering, systems programming, linguistics and NLP since completing his master’s in 2011. He has a particularly deep knowledge of Japanese NLP, and has led spaCy’s Japanese support since its release.
Tokyo, Japan
Daniël de Kok Machine Learning Engineer, spaCy Core Developer
Daniël is an NLP researcher whose interests include deep grammar parsing, model distillation and implementation efficiency. After completing his PhD in 2013, he taught graduate courses on transformer models for NLP and operated an independent AI consultancy.
Groningen, Netherlands
Elia Robyn Speer Machine Learning Engineer
Elia is a researcher and open-source developer whose work has focused on knowledge graphs and common-sense reasoning. She led development of ConceptNet at the MIT Media Lab, before founding Luminoso in 2010.
Cambridge, MA, U.S.
Kabir Khan Machine Learning Engineer
Kabir is a machine learning engineer who started his career at Microsoft, where he worked on Microsoft Education products and developed models for Azure Cognitive Services using spaCy and Prodigy.
Bellevue, WA, U.S.
Edward Schmuhl Machine Learning Engineer
Edward is a machine learning developer passionate about data science, visualization and creative problem solving. He completed his bachelor’s with a thesis on spaCy pipelines for healthcare applications while working at KPMG.
Berlin, Germany
Robert Hafner Principal Engineer
Rob has built a significant career in DevOps and systems engineering, including over five years at Malwarebytes, where he was an early employee. Rob later worked with spaCy and Prodigy at Rad AI, deploying the stack scalably and securely.
Chicago, IL, U.S.
Ryn Daniels Principal Engineer
Ryn is an infrastructure and operations engineer, focusing on building empathy and systems thinking when they aren't arguing with computers. They've worked, spoken, and written extensively on devops and SRE topics over the course of their career.
Berlin, Germany
Ben Taylor Lead Full-Stack Engineer
Ben has spent his career making programs serve people better, focusing on design, usability and interfaces. He has over ten years experience in front-end and mobile development, with a particular interest in educational technology.
Melbourne, Australia
Christopher McDonald Full-Stack Engineer
Chris is a full-stack and front-end engineer with diverse experience building elegant and impactful digital products. He previously worked alongside founders to conceptualize and build products end to end, including a document processing service powered by machine learning.
Melbourne, Australia
Philip Vollet Community Success
Berlin, Germany
Walter Henry Head of Operations
Walter keeps Explosion running smoothly, leading external coordination and internal people processes. He’s also an active journalist and author, writing about society and culture in Berlin and beyond.
Berlin, Germany
Henriette Behr Machine Learning Working Student
Berlin, Germany
Damian Romero Machine Learning Intern
Damian is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Linguistics, focusing on corpus linguistics and NLP. He is working with Explosion on annotation policies and example projects while he completes his dissertation.
Artificial Intelligence is not magic. The technology is only
useful if it’s easy to understand.
The best AI products won’t be built from boxed solutions. Developers need
custom models and transparent tools, not just cloud services.
AI software needs better developer and user experience. This requires
hybrid skill sets and radical attention to detail.
If you ship it, you should own it. We believe in taking responsibility
for our software, and letting you do the same.
Technology should be accessible. We want to provide the most value with
open-source software. That’s why we’ve built spaCy
and our other tools and libraries.
We’re not your typical startup. We’re bootstrapped, independent and put
stability over moonshots.
In August 2021, we
sold 5% of Explosion to SignalFire for
$6 million. Employees are given a stake in Explosion using a
virtual share bonus program.
Board Members
Matthew Honnibal CTO, Founder
Matthew is a leading expert in AI technology. He completed his PhD in 2009, and spent a further 5 years publishing research on state-of-the-art NLP systems. He left academia in 2014 to write spaCy and found Explosion.
Berlin, Germany
Ines Montani CEO, Founder
Ines is a co-founder of Explosion and a core developer of the spaCy NLP library and the Prodigy annotation tool. She has helped set a new standard for user experience in developer tools for AI engineers and researchers.
