Leadership

Atanas Kiryakov is the founder and CEO of Ontotext and a member of the board of the Linked Data Benchmarking Council – a standardization body who’s members include the major graph database vendors.

Kiryakov obtained his M.Sc. degree in AI from Sofia University, Bulgaria, in 1995. Today he is a top expert in semantic graph databases, reasoning, knowledge graphs, text mining, semantic tagging, linking and search. He’s also an author of signature academic publications with more than 2500 citations.

Atanas is a partner and a board member in Sirma Group Holding – one of the biggest Bulgarian IT businesses listed on the Sofia Stock Exchange. Atanas started in Sirma as a software engineer in 1993 and became a partner in 1997. In the 90s, he led projects in the areas of CASE, CSCW and b2b for big corporations and government organizations in the US and Canada.

In 2000 Atanas dropped off his Ph.D. to start Ontotext as an R&D lab within the Sirma Group. In 2004 Kiryakov masterminded Ontotext GraphDB (initially named OWLIM) and was its product manager until 2010. In 2008 he led the process of acquiring VC funding for Ontotext and spinning it off as a worldwide leader in semantic technology.

In 2016 Atanas was included in the ‘New Europe 100 — changemakers in central and eastern Europe’ list compiled by Res Publica, Google, Visegrad Fund and the Financial Times.

With more than 20 years of sales leadership experience across diverse industries, Deron has a strong track record of building and leading high-performance sales teams that catalyze exponential growth.

Deron is expanding Ontotext’s global business with a focus on the U.S. Operations Team for Ontotext USA, Inc. and is overseeing the company’s full customer lifecycle by leading customer success, sales, demand generation and overall growth.

Veska Davidova joined Ontotext as COO in 2014 and now takes care of sales, finance and delivery. Veska is an established business leader, a Master of Science in Engineering and Process Automation, a golf and tennis aficionado and a mother of two sons.

Before joining Ontotext, she was CEO of Atos IT Solution & Services. Under Veska’s skillful command, the company went through a complete transformation after the global M&A between Atos Origin and Siemens.

Veska has also been a management board member at Siemens Bulgaria in her role of CTO, and was in charge of the Healthcare and IT businesses within the regional Siemens company.

She has held various positions at Hewlett Packard, with core responsibilities of providing consultation in the financial services industry across the EMEA, localizing and formalizing core IT based concepts for the public sector, manufacturing and FSI.

Doug Kimball is a business and technology evangelist focusing on advancements that can be applied to e-commerce, customer centricity and insights development in the data management space.

With more than 20 years of full-cycle B2B marketing experience at data, retail and supply chain providers across various industries and regions, he has developed a passion for enabling digital business.

As Chief Marketing Officer, Doug is leading the Global Marketing team at Ontotext, responsible for driving brand awareness, product & revenue marketing on a global scale.