About Brightwave
Our Team
Founder & CEO
Mike Conover
A pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, Mike established and led open-source LLM engineering at Databricks where he created Dolly, the language model that showed the world how easy it is to build LLMs that can talk and reason.
Mike has built AI systems and products for more than 15 years, including tours of duty at Workday as Director of Financials Machine Learning, SkipFlag (acquired by Workday) and LinkedIn. He has a Ph.D. in complexity science from Indiana University, and his work has been featured in Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, TechCrunch, Hacker News, Nature Communications, MIT Technology Review, and NPR.
Founder & CTO
Brandon Kotara
Prior to Brightwave, Brandon served as CTO of LedgerX — a federally regulated derivative exchange and clearinghouse that matches and clears trades for some of the largest institutional asset managers in the world.
In addition to operating mission-critical finance infrastructure, Brandon also has deep expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning. As technical lead for Workday’s machine learning for human capital management, Brandon oversaw the creation of semantic search systems operating at the scale of hundreds of millions of documents. His first deep learning patent was filed in 2018.