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 Machine Learning Engineer, spaCy Lead

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

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

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

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

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, Consulting Services Lead

Peter is a data scientist and machine learning engineer whose previous work has included interdisciplinary projects for commercial, civic, and non-profit clients at RTI International and Deloitte. He has been active in the spaCy community for several years.

• 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

Henriette Behr Machine Learning Engineer

• Berlin, Germany

Magdalena Anioł Machine Learning Engineer

• Seville, Spain

Ákos Kádár Machine Learning Engineer

• Rotterdam, Netherlands

Madeesh Kannan Machine Learning Engineer

• Germany

Vincent D. Warmerdam Machine Learning Engineer

Vincent worked as an engineer, consultant, researcher, team lead, and educator in the past. In addition to his work at Explosion, he also maintains many scikit-learn related plugins as well as a free learning resource over at calmcode.io.

• Haarlem, Netherlands

Raphael Mitsch Machine Learning Engineer

• Vienna, Austria

Valthor Halldorsson Machine Learning Engineer

• Lund, Sweden

Nipun Sadvilkar Machine Learning Engineer

• Mumbai, India

Ryan Wesslen Machine Learning Engineer

• Charlotte, NC, 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.

• Helsinki, Finland

Nathaniel J. Smith Principal Engineer

• CA, U.S.

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

Jal Ridley Front-End Engineer

• Berlin, Germany

Marcus Blättermann Front-End Engineer

• Berlin, Germany

Alexandre Betioli Full-Stack Engineer

• Maringa, Brazil

Fernando Martínez González Full-Stack Engineer

• Berlin, Germany

Schäran Byaniy Back-End Engineer

• Berlin, Germany

Philip Vollet Head of Developer Relations

• Berlin, Germany

Helena Steckmeister Technical Writer

• Berlin, Germany

Chung-Fan Tsai Developer Advocate

• Berlin, Germany

Victoria Slocum Developer Advocate

• Austin, TX, U.S.

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

Anna Wieser Operations

• 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.

• Charlotte, NC, 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, 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.

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.