Founder and CEO, Powerset, Inc.

Dr. Barney Pell is Founder and CEO of Powerset, a VC-funded startup company building a transformative consumer search engine based on natural language processing. For over fifteen years, Dr. Pell, (Ph.D. Computer science, Cambridge University F1993) has pursued ground breaking technical and commercial innovation in A.I. as a researcher, research manager, business strategist and entrepreneur.

He spent 2005 as Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield evaluating early to mid-stage IT and knowledge based companies. Before joining Mayfield, Dr. Pell worked for NASA Ames Research Center on two occasions: from 1993-1998 as Project Lead for the Executive component of the prize-winning Remote Agent Experiment; and from 2002-2005 as Area Manager responsible for research in intelligent agents, software architecture, human-centered computing, search, collaborative knowledge management, distributed databases, information integration, spoken dialog systems, and the semantic web.

Between 1998 and 2002, Dr. Pell worked in technical start-ups serving as Chief Strategist and Vice-President of Business Development at StockMaster.com, a provider of internet-based stock-market analysis tools, and later Vice President of Strategy for Whizbang! Labs, a provider of advanced text processing and search engine software.

Dr. Pell also serves as an advisor or board member to several startup companies and educational nonprofits.