Juan Olloniego

I'm a software engineer, startup founder, and former college professor with a deep passion for AI and its real-world applications. With an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Southampton (Distinction) and a background in software systems engineering, I've spent the last decade working at the intersection of research and production systems.

Currently, I'm the Co-Founder & Head of Engineering at Zapia AI, where we're building a GenAI-powered personal assistant for Latin America — serving 6M+ users and backed by Prosus Ventures, Endeavor Catalyst, and Factory HQ, with $19.3M raised.

Before Zapia, I worked on core ML systems at Landing AI (Andrew Ng's company), led client projects and pre-sales efforts at Tryolabs across computer vision, NLP, and recommendation systems, and taught postgraduate courses in Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning at ORT University. I'm also an angel investor, backing startups like Lumepic and Viatik.

I thoroughly enjoy every step of the ML pipeline — from framing problems and validating ideas to shipping production systems that impact millions of users. When I'm not building, I'm probably on a tennis court, grinding ranked League of Legends, perfecting my neapolitan pizza dough, or chipping away at my ever-growing pile of research papers and non-fiction books.