About us

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.

• Ghent, Belgium

Adriane Boyd Machine Learning Engineer, spaCy Core Developer

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

Richard Hudson Machine Learning Engineer, spaCy Core Developer

Richard focusses on machine learning and software development, but has built over 20 years of eclectic experience, including linguistics, software architecture and security. Previously at msg systems he authored the Holmes and Coreferee libraries for spaCy.

• Munich, Germany

Peter Baumgartner Machine Learning Engineer, spaCy Core Developer

• Durham, NC, U.S.

Lj Miranda Machine Learning Engineer

Lj has been working on applied NLP since completing his master’s at Waseda University in 2016, including experience at Preferred Networks and Thinking Machines, where he developed production-grade NLP models for a major investment firm.

• Manila, Philippines

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

Magdalena Anioł Machine Learning Engineer

• Seville, Spain

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

Laura Summers Design Engineer

Laura is a multi-disciplinary designer whose skillsets extend across user experience research, UI design and front-end development. In addition to her work with Explosion, Laura operates an AI ethics consultancy, Debias AI, and co-hosts the Byte into It program on Melbourne’s RRR radio.

• Melbourne, Australia

Schäran Byaniy Back-End Engineer

• Berlin, Germany

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 Engineer (Working Student)

• Berlin, Germany

Damian Romero Machine Learning Engineer (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.

• Tucson, AZ, U.S.

We believe…

1. Artificial Intelligence is not magic. The technology is only useful if it’s easy to understand.
2. The best AI products won’t be built from boxed solutions. Developers need custom models and transparent tools, not just cloud services.
3. AI software needs better developer and user experience. This requires hybrid skill sets and radical attention to detail.
4. If you ship it, you should own it. We believe in taking responsibility for our software, and letting you do the same.
5. 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.
6. We’re not your typical startup. We’re boot­strapped, independent and put stability over moonshots.

Who owns Explosion

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.

• Berlin, Germany

Oana Olteanu SignalFire

• San Francisco, CA, U.S.