Rao joins Howso during a period of rapid growth as customers including Mastercard and Scanbuy deploy its explainable AI platform at scale.
Raleigh, NC – January 11, 2024 – Howso, a leader in explainable AI technology, today announced the appointment of Gaurav Rao as chief executive officer. Rao, a veteran technology executive, brings more than 20 years of experience in scalable data, ML, and AI solutions to Howso as the company enters a phase of rapid growth.
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.
“I am thrilled to join Howso during the seismic AI moment we are all experiencing; as AI moves from experimental to essential, building enterprise trust in data and AI is more important than ever,” said Rao. “Howso’s revolutionary explainable and auditable AI platform, built by an incredible technical team, enables companies to deploy trustworthy AI at scale to power mission-critical, enterprise-grade workloads. I’m excited to bring the power of Howso to core enterprise data and AI services.”
Howso is experiencing surging demand for its explainable AI engine from companies in healthcare, finance, advertising, and beyond. With a pressing need for fully auditable AI that does not misinform or hallucinate, enterprises such as Mastercard, Mutua Madrileña, and Scanbuy, as well as numerous government agencies, have adopted Howso Engine to build modern AI applications and ML models they can trust, audit, and explain.
Dr. Michael Capps, Howso’s co-founder and prior CEO will remain with the company as chair of the board. Capps has been increasingly active in national and international AI policy dialogue, including participating in the recent Senate AI Insight Forum hosted by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Rao’s appointment as CEO will allow Capps to focus more fully on the advocacy side of Howso’s mission.
“We co-founded Howso in 2017 concerned about the rapid proliferation of black box AI, with conviction that we could solve the same problems using trustworthy techniques. We proved it’s possible, and we’ve made incredible progress. Now, we’re scaling into a large enterprise software company,” said Capps. “Gaurav is the ideal leader for Howso’s next chapter, with precisely the right combination of deep subject matter knowledge, experience building enterprise AI/ML solutions, and the go-to-market expertise necessary to navigate the most exciting tech landscape the world’s ever seen.”
“The Howso team has built unparalleled technology when it comes to explainability in AI,” said Raj Shah, member of Howso’s board of directors and managing partner of Shield Capital. “The board and Howso’s investors are delighted to welcome Gaurav and look forward to supporting him as he leads the team to continued growth and delivering critical capabilities to customers.”