About Us
We’re here to change the trajectory of AI
The AI landscape is dominated by solutions that sacrifice integrity for power. We refuse to compromise. We’re building high performance AI you can trust.
Who We Are
Our Mission
Advance trustworthy AI as the global standard.
Our Vision
Empower researchers, academics, and Fortune 500 companies to make critical decisions with conviction using Understandable AI®.
Our Values
Howso is built on two core values:
Gracious intellectual honesty. We tell the truth to each other, to our customers, and to our community. We do so with respect and humility in service of our mission.
Trusted autonomy. We believe in each person’s capacity for impact. We provide our people with the space, tools and trust to do their best work, and then get out of the way.
These values permeate our technology, culture, and advocacy in the broader AI community.
History
Humanity is making critical decisions with technology prone to hallucinations, bias, and opacity, believing that’s the necessary price to pay for powerful AI.
That’s unacceptable. We’re doing something about it.
From Alexa to Chat-GPT, we’ve seen explosive growth of AI applications in everyday life. Unfortunately, that explosion has been built upon “black box” neural networks, which can go wrong in surprising ways and can’t be debugged.
Howso co-founder Dr. Chris Hazard spent decades focused on understanding deeply complex, interactive computing systems. His research lies at the intersection of trust and AI. Recognizing the inherent dangers in deep neural nets and black box AI, Chris set out to build AI that’s as powerful as it is understandable. His first systems were built in the defense sector, where the “why” is just as critical as the “how.”
Chris, his longtime collaborator Michael Resnick, and advisor Dr. Michael Capps founded Howso (formerly Diveplane) in 2017. Capps had retired after a decade as President of Epic Games (Fortnite, Unreal Engine) and shared Hazard’s concerns about the direction of AI development. The vision was simple: they would work towards positive social impact first, profits second. A group of like-minded angel investors and philanthropists came together for the seed round, and the company began its mission to bring Chris’ maturing research to the world.
More than sixty patent assets later, we’ve deployed our ever-evolving technology in academic institutions, non-profits, global financial enterprises, healthcare organizations, and government agencies. Our users are empowered to make decisions directly from data, rather than relying on abstract black box models. They can interrogate outcomes, correct mistakes and bias, and make critical decisions responsibly.
In September 2023, we renamed ourselves Howso and released this powerful engine with an open source license, taking a critical step on the path towards meaningful social impact.
Explainable, human-understandable AI is possible. Let us show you how.
Leadership
Gaurav Rao
CEO
Gaurav Rao
CEO
Gaurav Rao is a veteran technology executive with more than 20 years of experience in scalable data, ML, and AI solutions.
Most recently, Rao served as executive vice president and general manager of AI at AtScale, a groundbreaking business intelligence and data science company. Prior to that, Rao led product at deep learning startup Neural Magic and held multiple executive roles at IBM spanning engineering, product, and sales.
Chris Hazard
Co-Founder & CTO
Chris Hazard
Co-Founder & CTO
Dr. Chris Hazard is co-founder and CTO of Howso. Howso’s understandable and privacy enhancing AI spun out of Hazardous Software, a company Chris founded in 2007 that focuses on decision support, visualization, and simulation for hard strategy problems in large organizations, DoD, and government. Chris holds a PhD in computer science from NC State, with focus on artificial intelligence for trust and reputation. He was a software architect of CDMA infrastructure at Motorola, worked on robot coordination and logistics at Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics), is an active member of the CompTIA AI Advisory Council, and advised NATO on cyber security policies. He has led simulation, serious gaming, and software projects related to cyber security, social engineering, logistics, economics, and psychology, and is a certified hypnotist. Dr. Hazard is also known for his 2011 game Achron, which won GameSpot’s Best Original Game Mechanic award, and for his research on AI/ML, privacy, game design, and human-computer interaction, for which he has given keynote speeches at major conferences and been featured in mainstream media.
Mike Capps
Co-Founder & Chairman
Mike Capps
Co-Founder & Chairman
Dr. Capps spent most of his career building Epic Games from 20 employees to a global gaming powerhouse, leading the creation of the Unreal Engine, the Gears of War Franchise, and Fortnite. He retired as president of Epic Games in 2012 to focus on family. In 2017, Capps came out of retirement to see if he could make a dent in one of the largest problems we face today – the ethical problems of black box AI making decisions that negatively affect people’s lives and welfare. The founders of Howso agreed that the company’s top goal was the replacement of black-box AI with transparent, ethical methods – even above profits – and Howso’s investors share the goal of social impact alongside entrepreneurial return.
Capps is an industry thought leader in the development of responsible data and AI practices. In 2020, he co-founded the Data & Trust Alliance, a CEO-level non-profit focused on creating and sharing best practices for safe data and AI. Alliance members include the CEOs of Walmart, IBM, American Express, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer. Capps personally led the Algorithmic Bias Safeguards for Workforce initiative, whose work has been adopted by global enterprises as part of vendor selection.
Capps regularly advises US lawmakers on issues of national resilience, modernization, and humanity’s existential need for responsible AI and led the Competitiveness Council for the Business Executives for National Security.
Mike Resnick
Co-Founder & Technical Fellow
Mike Resnick
Co-Founder & Technical Fellow
Mike Resnick is a co-founder and Technical Fellow at Howso. He has spearheaded the engineering of the core of Howso’s AI technology beginning from its inception at Hazardous Software, a company Mike co-founded in 2007. With 20 years of experience in the software engineering, design, and architecture, Resnick’s expertise spans many different domains including machine learning (with multiple patents), video game development, cloud systems, full stack web application development, telecommunications, and network infrastructure.
Accolades
Howso Featured in insideBIGDATA Impact 50 List
June 2024 – Howso was featured in insideBIGDATA’s Impact 50, a list of the top companies making the biggest waves in big data, data science, machine learning, and AI. Other featured companies include NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google AI, Microsoft AI, Snowflake, Databricks, and Anthropic.
Howso Selected for Microsoft Pegasus Program
March 2024 – Microsoft selected Howso as it’s sole “Responsible AI” startup to join its Pegasus Program, an invitation-only go-to-market and sales acceleration program. Through the program, Microsoft co-sells technology solutions from enterprise-ready startups offering unique solutions to critical market needs. In addition to joint sales and marketing efforts, the Pegasus Program provides technical and infrastructure support to scaling startups. Howso Platform is now available through Microsoft Azure Marketplace, giving Microsoft customers easy access to evaluate and purchase Howso, shortening deal cycles and time to value.
Howso Recognized for AI Observability in FirstMark’s MAD (ML, AI, & Data) Landscape
March 2024 – Howso was recognized in Matt Turck and FirstMark’s MAD Landscape under the category of AI Observability. The MAD Landscape is considered the “state of the union” of the data, analytics, machine learning and AI ecosystem.
Gartner Features Howso in 2 Different 2024 Reports
January 2024 – Howso was featured in both the Emerging Tech Impact Radar: Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Tech Impact Radar: Edge Artificial Intelligence reports under Synthetic Data and AI TRiSM (Trust, Security, and Risk Management), respectively.
Accenture chooses Howso (formerly Diveplane) for 2023 FinTech Innovation Lab NYC.
March 2023 – Howso was one of 10 companies chosen from over 200 applicants to take part in the FinTech Innovation Lab New York, a 12-week program founded and run by Accenture that helps fintech startups accelerate growth. Howso joined peers tackling cybersecurity, risk, sustainability, and the use of AI to improve financial services, getting hands-on product and business development mentorship.
Contact Us
Request a demo, ask us a question, or just say, ‘Hi.’
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421 N Harrington St Ste 320
Raleigh, NC, 27603
United States
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