QA testing firm Imandra said today it has recruited an AI startup executive as its next chief operating officer.
Zehra Akbar, who has spent years scaling startups, will join the US company from SkyGrid, a joint venture she helped to set up as part of the founding team, between the Boeing Company and SparkCognition.
At SkyGrid, she served as the firm’s chief strategy officer, leading multiple divisions including strategy, business development, and marketing.
Prior to that, Akbar was the VP of strategic operations at SparkCognition, an AI company based in Austin, which grew from Series B to a $1.4 billion unicorn during her time there.
Before entering the startup scene, she held previous positions at Deloitte and Accenture following a Masters in Global Policy at The University of Texas at Austin.
“Our footprint is aggressively expanding in the financial sector and across safety critical
industries,” explained Denis Ignatovich, Co-CEO of Imandra, which specialises in applications of automated testing of financial and safety-critical software systems.
“We’re excited to have Zehra join us at this stage as we innovate, scale and expand our business,” he shared.
European finserv space
Akbar’s appointment follows a period of accelerated growth as Imandra is increasingly gaining traction across the European financial services space in recent months.
The AI startup has seen an uptake in its client base across Europe, particularly among exchanges and trading venues.
In fact, Imandra Markets’ exchange software testing technology is now used in around 25% of all European equities trading, claims Paul Brennan, since May 2022 the company’s chief strategy officer.
The firm’s flagship product, Imandra Markets, provides exchanges and trading venues with AI-powered services for designing, testing and auditing complex financial systems, primarily to improve business intelligence and system resiliency.
Brennan explained that Imandra Markets digitises venue design, creating “digital twins” powered by automated reasoning AI to ensure compliance and correct implementation.
“This helps exchanges and trading venues test and improve their system operational resiliency and meet their regulatory obligations to maintain the orderly function of the markets,” he said.
Moreover, “this allows users to pinpoint defects and inefficiencies early, before systems process any data or trades. This is a much more efficient and cost-effective way of eradicating problems than addressing them in the later phases,” Brennan argued.
Outages more common
When the performance of financial systems is called into question due to outages or failed technology upgrades, the impact is wide-reaching, with regulatory and commercial consequences, as well as reputational damage.
The financial services space in Europe and the rest of the world has experienced multiple major outages this year, which led to disruption and financial losses.
Moreover, market outages have led to a recent IOSCO Consultation Report looking to identify lessons learnt and develop good practices for trading venues to improve market-wide resilience.
The ‘Consultation Report Market Outages’ document, published by IOSCO in December 2023, shows that software-related issues caused the vast majority of market outages, including failed software releases and invalid instructions.
Partly because of these outages, Brennan said a host of European exchanges have turned to ‘digital twins’ to ensure their venue design and technology operate as intended in the real world, significantly enhancing system accuracy and operational resilience.
In other words, “we empower financial services firms to make changes to their financial infrastructure that comes from predictability, whilst unlocking innovation and enhancing revenues,” he said.
Brennan concluded by claiming that “areas of operations that Imandra has verified enjoy a leap forward in governance.”
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