The Team Building Emerald AI

Steven So is Emerald AI's Head of People & Talent. He brings over a decade of experience scaling high-growth AI and technology startups, most recently leading people operations at CentML (acquired by NVIDIA). Steven specializes in building world-class technical teams and talent strategies.

Michael Panfil serves as Head of Legal and Policy at Emerald AI. He brings deep expertise in energy policy and law, with over 15 years of experience leading legal and policy activities across the energy sector.

Jack joined Emerald after advising over $2 billion across M&A and equity markets across the country and internationally with Barclays’ Global Power, Utilities, and Infrastructure Group.

With a decade of machine learning expertise, Dr. Colangelo has a proven track record of delivering solutions across diverse hardware platforms, from data centers to client-side NPUs.

Chris brings three decades of technical expertise in deep learning, distributed systems, infrastructure automation, and DevOps/MLOps across currency trading, autonomous medical robots, and more.

Dr. Roberts is an expert in grid optimization and demand response systems, with over a decade of specialized expertise that includes leadership roles at SPAN and the Berkeley Lab.

Dr. Wilson has published groundbreaking research in software power pathfinding for HPC systems since developing performance-aware, site-wide data center power management in his PhD at Boston University.

Daniel Padilla brings deep expertise in industrial decarbonization and energy strategy. He joins Emerald from Rondo Energy where he served as Chief of Staff & Director of Commercial Strategy & Operations. Previously, Daniel spent six years at Boston Consulting Group in the climate and sustainability practice after his time at RMI.

Ethan brings experience from robotics software development startups as well as The White House where he implemented the CHIPS & Science Act. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Sarah Soares is a member of Emerald AI’s technical team, where she contributes her experience in cloud and AI infrastructure. She earned her undergraduate degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

Scott has experience at the intersection of data science, software systems and energy systems modeling and optimization, with research experience at the Pacific Northwest National Lab and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Charles brings a combination of AI research and practical energy sector experience to his work at Emerald. Prior to joining Emerald, Charles worked on load flexibility, grid modernization, and interconnection reform for the Massachusetts state energy office (DOER). He received a PhD in Autonomous Systems from MIT.

Nikhil is a full-stack engineer who builds reliable, measurable systems at scale. He joins Emerald AI after shipping production software at Amazon, Credit Karma, and Intuit (Mint).

Swasti Jain is a Policy and Operations Associate at Emerald AI. She is pursuing her Master of Public Administration in Energy and Technology Policy at Columbia SIPA and brings experience in financial services consulting from KPMG.

Ethan Levine is a member of Emerald AI’s technical team and is currently pursuing a computer engineering degree with a concentration in machine learning at Boston University, where he was an undergraduate researcher.

Puneeth brings over a decade of experience leading multi-disciplinary teams of software engineers and data scientists at leading energy companies such as Plus Power, Fluence Energy, Eolian and Stem.

Ermek leads marketing at Emerald AI. If you came to this page through some news announcement or an ad, he probably had something to do with that. He was previously the founding marketing hire at CentML, acquired by NVIDIA in 2025, and has spent over a decade marketing technical products.

Anand leads finance at Emerald AI, bringing a decade of financial strategy and investment experience across the energy sector. He was previously at Nomura and ReNew Power, where he worked at the CEO’s office. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Ollie joins Emerald from Boston Consulting Group, where he was a Principal in the firm’s energy and sustainability practices. He holds a Master of Public Policy and a Master of Science in Sustainability, Enterprise, and the Environment from the University of Oxford.

Ashish works on business development and strategy at Emerald AI. He joins from Amazon Web Services, where he was Principal for Financial Services go-to-market, and before that spent six years as a Senior Vice President at Bank of the West leading data, technology and shared services.

Ben works on grid-facing products at Emerald AI. He was previously Director of Solution Architecture for data centers at Scale Microgrids, and has held various roles in energy product development & strategy including at Rivian and SunPower.

Saumya joined Emerald after spending 8 years building software systems to enable critical physical world infrastructure.

Desheng brings over eight years of experience building large-scale production systems at the intersection of software engineering and AI. At Amazon, he served as a technical lead across Alexa AI and Amazon AGI.

Amber keeps Varun’s calendar, and by extension a good part of Emerald AI, from falling over. She is the reason he can do a hundred things in a week and turn up to all of them in the right city. If something ran smoothly, Amber arranged it.

Brian Kulis is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University, where his research spans machine learning and its application to computing systems. He was previously an Amazon Scholar with Alexa AI and an assistant professor at Ohio State University.

Evelina supports People Operations at Emerald AI, covering onboarding, payroll, HR systems, and employee experience. She works across teams to keep people connected, supported, and set up to do their best work. Previously, she worked in People Operations at CentML, acquired by NVIDIA, and graduated summa cum laude from York University.

Eric brings over a decade of experience in novel energy technology, finance, and commercial strategy — leading Strategic Finance at Rondo Energy and investing in early-stage energy technology at Breakthrough Energy as well as in private equity at Tower Arch Capital.

Sales leader with 21+ years across AI, ML, HPC, quantum, cloud, and enterprise infrastructure (Dell, Lenovo, IBM, Atos, plus Series E startups). Manages key OEM partnerships (NVIDIA, DDN, VAST, Weka, Cisco, Juniper) across corporate, government, and higher ed.