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

    Ines Montani CEO, Founder

  • Matthew Honnibal

    Matthew Honnibal CTO, Founder

  • Sofie Van Landeghem

    Sofie Van Landeghem Machine Learning Engineer, spaCy Lead

  • Adriane Boyd

    Adriane Boyd Machine Learning Engineer

  • Daniël de Kok

    Daniël de Kok Machine Learning Engineer

  • Kabir Khan

    Kabir Khan Machine Learning Engineer

  • Magdalena Anioł

    Magdalena Anioł Machine Learning Engineer, Prodigy Lead

  • Madeesh Kannan

    Madeesh Kannan Machine Learning Engineer

  • Vincent D. Warmerdam

    Vincent D. Warmerdam Machine Learning Engineer

  • Raphael Mitsch

    Raphael Mitsch Machine Learning Engineer

  • Valthor Halldorsson

    Valthor Halldorsson Machine Learning Engineer

  • Ryan Wesslen

    Ryan Wesslen Machine Learning Engineer

  • Emanuel Dima

    Emanuel Dima Systems Engineer

  • Laura Summers

    Laura Summers Design Engineer, Prodigy Teams Lead

  • Jal Ridley

    Jal Ridley Front-End Engineer

  • Alexandre Betioli

    Alexandre Betioli Full-Stack Engineer

  • Fernando Martínez González

    Fernando Martínez González Full-Stack Engineer

  • Helena Steckmeister

    Helena Steckmeister Designer

  • Walter Henry

    Walter Henry Head of Operations

  • Anna Wieser

    Anna Wieser Operations

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, with warrants for a further 10% at the same valuation. Employees are given a stake in Explosion using a virtual share bonus program. In July 2022, SignalFire exercised part of their warrants by investing a further $3 million to increase their stake in the company.

Employee Pool9.8%SignalFire7.7%Matthew Honnibal49.5%Ines Montani33%

Board Members

  • Matthew Honnibal

    Matthew Honnibal CTO, Founder

  • Ines Montani

    Ines Montani CEO, Founder

  • Oana Olteanu

    Oana Olteanu SignalFire