Cognomotiv Team
Founded on July 4th 2016, the Cognomotiv team is working with leading automotive and transportation companies around the globe to validate our data-driven approach to ensure the safety and security of the next wave of new transportation services, from connected cars to fully autonomous vehicles.
Leadership Team
Hadi Nahari
CEO & Co-founder
Hadi is passionate about security, mobile, automotive, AI & Machine Learning, and massively scalable systems. Just before founding Cognomotiv Hadi was VP Security CTO at Brocade and prior to that the Chief Security Architect at three different technology powerhouses: NVIDIA, PayPal/ebay and MontaVista Software. Prior to these roles he served in senior leadership positions on security teams at Motorola, Netscape and conducted security operations at several government agencies. Hadi is the author of "Web Commerce Security" book published by John Wiley and Sons and 47 patents, 16 of which have been granted.
Hadi holds SB degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering from IUST, a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from Stuttgart University and is a Guest Lecturer in EE 46 in Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University.
Christian Kurzke
CTO & Co-founder
In addition to building his own cars from scratch, Christian is recognized as one of the top embedded architects in the world with a proven record of building high-performance embedded systems. Prior to co-founding Cognomotiv with Hadi, Christian was the Technical Program Manager for Android Auto and before that he was a Chief Architect and Tech Evangelist for Motorola. He proved his development expertise early in his career by writing the Web server for the embedded OS VxWorks, paving the way for today's IoT. He also had a lead developer position in SUN's embedded JAVA team and has made substantial contributions to the Eclipse codebase and the OSGi standard. Christian holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Sciences from University of Erlangen in Germany and a MBA from Santa Clara University.
Art Landro
COO
Art has extensive hands-on leadership experience in building and directing customer-facing global marketing, sales, and services delivery teams. Prior to joining Cognomotiv he was CEO of Sencha and prior to that CEO of Cordys. Art was President of MontaVista Software where he was key to the automotive industry adopting embedded Linux systems. Prior to MontaVista Art had regional leadership roles in the Asia-Pacific-Japan territory for Documentum, Cadence and General DataComm. Art spent 5 years on Active Duty with the USAF and 22 years in the Air Force Reserves, retiring as a Lt Col. Art holds a SB in Business Administration from the University of Connecticut and is a Distinguished Graduate of the USAF’s Squadron Officer School.
Board of Advisors
Amr Awadallah, Phd
Founder, Chief Technology Officer, Cloudera
Before co-founding Cloudera in 2008, Amr (@awadallah) was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Accel Partners. Prior to joining Accel he served as VP Product Intelligence Engineering at Yahoo and ran one of the very first organizations to use Hadoop for data analysis and business intelligence. Amr joined Yahoo after they acquired his first startup, VivaSmart, in July 2000. Amr holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from Cairo University, Egypt, and a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Lee Kaplan
Senior Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer, Enterprise Holdings - Retired
Kaplan began his career with Enterprise Rent-A-Car in 1985 as Assistant Controller in Southern California. As Controller and later VP of Finance in Southern California, he helped develop Enterprise’s regionalized structure, as the company’s Southern California operation and its largest worldwide operation. Kaplan was named Vice President of Corporate Risk Management in 1997 and promoted to the role of Senior Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer in 2003. Kaplan oversaw Legal, Risk, Mergers and Acquisitions, Corporate Venture and Strategic Planning. Prior to joining Enterprise, Kaplan earned a CPA degree while working at Ernst & Whinney. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Accounting from the University of California-Santa Barbara.
Lou R. Hughes
Chairman & Founder InZero Systems
Lou has a wealth of experience in strategic and innovative leadership. Hughes was previously President and COO of Lockheed Martin. Prior to Lockheed Martin, he was EVP at General Motors, where he held progressively more responsible positions for over 25 years, including President of GM International Operations, President of GM Europe, Chairman of Adam Opel AG, and Chairman of Saab Automobile. In 2004 and 2005, Hughes also served as a US diplomat in Kabul, Afghanistan as Chief of Staff of the Afghanistan Reconstruction Group and senior advisor to the Karzai cabinet. He has previously served on many other leading boards, including ABB (Switzerland); Akzo Nobel (Netherlands); Alcatel-Lucent (France); British Telecom (United Kingdom); Deutsche Bank (Germany); and Electrolux (Sweden). Hughes received a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Kettering University in 1971 and a MBA from Harvard University in 1973.
ROBIN CAMPBELL
PARTNER, SQUIRE PATTON BOGGS
Robin serves as the Global Co-chair of the Data Privacy & Cybersecurity practice group at the top 10 global law firm, Squire Patton Boggs, where she specializes in complex/cutting edge legal advice, including expertise in autonomous vehicle technology, connected-cars, IoT, data monetization, and online tracking technologies. She maintains an active practice in proactive data management. Robin co-founded Click 4 Compliance online compliance training, a 2-time recipient of the Inc. 500/5000 Fastest Growing Companies. Robin was part of the team that founded the Privacy & Cybersecurity practice at Crowell & Moring LLP in Washington, DC. Prior to that she led Hewlett-Packard Europe’s compliance efforts when the Data Protection Directive in Europe was first passed. She was named National Law Journal “Cybersecurity Trailblazer” for 2016 and selected by the Department of Commerce and EU Commission as one of sixteen arbitrators for the US EU Privacy Shield arbitration panel.
SASHA OSTOJIC
ADVISOR & ANGEL INVESTOR
Sasha is a technology industry expert, advisor and investor. As Senior Vice President Engineering at Cruise Automation, an autonomous vehicle technology company owned by General Motors, Sasha guided the Software and Hardware teams in achieving an industry leadership position. As Vice President Software at Nvidia, Sasha was in charge of some of the most strategic and mission critical initiatives that contributed to Nvidia becoming the undisputed leader in visual computing and AI technologies. And before all that, Sasha was an early pioneer in developing and deploying speech recognition and text to speech synthesis solutions at scale.