RAW LABS - Key Persons


Alex Zerntev

Job Titles:
  • Officer
  • Software Engineer
Alex is a former military officer trained as a computer programmer, who then continued his academic studies in Computer Science. He has worked in many software applications including Document Management Systems used extensively by the Greek government, Healthcare System Managements (Finance, Vaccinations, Pandemic Prevention and Patient History Management) and Command and Control applications. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science (specializing in Software, Data & Knowledge Management) and a Master's degree in Data Science & Information Technology (specializing in Big Data & Artificial Intelligence) from National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

Alexandros Lymperopoulos

Job Titles:
  • Frontend Developer
Alexandros is a frontend developer with experience in developing hybrid mobile & cross-platform progressive web applications. Previously, he was involved in the Education and Customer Loyalty industries. His expertise is focused on developing and launching highly responsive applications using Angular, Ionic & Node.JS. He holds a B.Sc. in Information Technology from the Department of Informatics & Telematics at Harokopeio University of Athens.

Angeliki Kalamari

Job Titles:
  • DevOps Engineer
Angeliki is a DevOps Engineer, obtaining her B.Sc. degree from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has previously worked at CERN on orchestration, containerization and monitoring, in addition to Linux service administration and management. She has additional interests in Cloud Administration, CI/CD and automation processes.

Ariel Lüdi

Job Titles:
  • Member of the Board
Ariel is a serial entrepreneur and founding investor in RAW Labs. He was a major shareholder and CEO of Hybris software for eleven years, helping to develop the company and position it as a global commerce leader. Ariel‘s role was also instrumental in driving the successful acquisition of the company by SAP in August 2013 for more than 1B USD. Prior to joining Hybris, Ariel held various senior positions at Salesforce, Oracle and IBM. Ariel entered the realm of e-commerce in 1996 at BroadVision. Ariel studied Physics at ETH in Zurich​.

Benjamin Gaidioz

Job Titles:
  • Senior Software Engineer
As a Senior Software Engineer, Ben is responsible for core engine design and development, including the language and compiler. Prior to joining RAW Labs in 2017, he worked with Miguel and Anastasia at EPFL's Data Intensive Application Systems research lab, on the Vida and HBP projects. Earlier roles include at Cisco Systems, implementing embedded OS features on Cisco's most high-end routers, and at CERN on the Large Hadron Collider physics experiment, where he developed high-performance network software running as part of the real-time distributed data acquisition system. He holds a Computing and Mathematics degree from Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 and a PhD in Computing in the field of IP QoS, from ENS-Lyon.

Cesar Matos

Job Titles:
  • Software Engineer
Before joining RAW Labs in 2017 as a Software Engineer, Cesar worked with Miguel and Anastasia at EPFL in the Data-intensive applications and systems laboratory (DIAS) research lab. Prior to this he spent 6 years at CERN working as a Control Systems Engineer in the ALICE experiment in the Large Hadron Collider developing real-time control software for some of its detectors; also at EBG MedAustron for a medical accelerator for cancer treatment. Since 2014 he switched from control systems for high energy physics to databases. Cesar has a degree from Universidade do Minho in Industrial Electronics Engineering.

Danai Vergeti

Job Titles:
  • Project Manager
Project manager at RAW Labs Greece. Danai has over 15 years experience in technical coordination, technical consulting, systems integration, requirements analysis and software development. She coordinates our multidisciplinary technical teams to deliver high-quality technical solutions to feature requests. Danai holds an MSc in Computer Science and Engineering in semantic web technologies and a Diploma of Computer Engineering and Informatics from University of Patras in Greece.

Dimitrios Mylonas

Job Titles:
  • Engineer
Dimitris has extensive experience in state-of-the-art DevOps methodologies including Cloud Administration, Containerization, Microservices and Continuous Integration/Delivery. Prior to RAW Labs, Dimitris worked at Atos in public safety, automating their deployment platform on Kubernetes and Google Cloud via Infrastructure-as-code tools such as: Terraform, Ansible and Juju. He enjoys automating processes, container orchestration and making life more easy for developers. He holds a B.Sc. in Information Technology from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

George Kiomourtzis

Job Titles:
  • Senior Software Engineer
George have over 10 years' working experience in a variety of setups, possessing strong Java skills and deep knowledge of Relational and NoSQL databases, and ORM frameworks, as well as industry experience within scientific publishing, mobile advertising and financial crime compliance. He enjoys working with JVM languages, applying clean code practices, and tackling a variety of issues. George holds an M.Sc. in Information Technology from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

Jeremy Posner

Job Titles:
  • VP Product and Solutions
Covering product management and solutions consulting, Jeremy is a generalist-specialist in data management and architecture, having originally developed software, database business applications, and analytical solutions in financial services over a 25 year career which has included leading data consulting practices. Jeremy works closely with our clients, our own R&D team, sales & marketing to ensure that RAW Labs' offerings are providing maximum value to our clients.

Michael J. Franklin

Job Titles:
  • Advisor
  • Software Entrepreneur and Computer Scientist
Michael J. Franklin is an American software entrepreneur and computer scientist specializing in distributed and streaming database technology. He is Liew Family Chair of Computer Science and Chairman for the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago.​ Prior to Chicago, he was Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Computer Science Division at University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley he was Director of the Algorithms, Machines, and People Laboratory (AMPLab) a collaboration of computing systems, data management, machine learning researchers focused on large-scale data analytics. Under his direction, AMPLab projects such as Spark and Mesos had wide industrial and academic impact. Professor Franklin is an ACM Fellow as well as SIGMOD Test of Time Award recipient. Professor Franklin is in the 2009 inaugural group of UMass' Alumni receiving achievement award from the CS Department at University of Massachusetts Amherst for Outstanding Achievement in Research. He was also a cofounder as well as CTO of Truviso, a company specializing in streaming databases which was acquired by Cisco in May 2012. He is also an advisor to Databricks, a big data company commercializing the Spark research project.​ Professor Franklin received a bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1983 and a master's degree from the Wang Institute of Graduate Studies in 1986. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1993 with his thesis Caching and memory management in client-server database systems.​

Miguel Branco - CEO, Founder

Job Titles:
  • CEO
  • Co - Founder
  • Member of the Board
Interim CEO and CTO of RAW Labs leading RAW's technical team and product. Between 2003-2009, Miguel was at CERN where he developed the distributed data management system of the ATLAS Experiment of the Large Hadron Collider, a massive multi-PB data management infrastructure across 100+ computing centres. After CERN, and frustrated by the apparent limitations of existing database systems, Miguel was briefly converted into an academic database researcher working with Anastasia on in-situ query processing as the future of data management. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southampton in 2009. Miguel and Anastasia have been working together in the past 5+ years at EPFL before co-founding RAW Labs.​

Pavlos Polydoras

Job Titles:
  • VP Engineering and GM RAW Labs Greece
VP of Engineering and General Manager of RAW Labs Greece. In the working field, he enjoys creating successful teams that deliver beautiful software. His working experience begun with European research projects mainly revolving around Information Retrieval. In this context, he became familiar with a wide range of computer science areas, from Web Services, Service Composition to Query Processing/Optimization and Artificial. He has extensive experience in designing and leading the implementation of secure, large-scale, distributed systems in various domains in both public (European institutions, government projects) and private sector (Greek, European and US-based companies and freelancing). Pavlos holds an M.Sc. in Information and Data Management from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University Athens.

Prof. Alon Halevy

Job Titles:
  • Advisor
  • Computer Scientist
Alon is an Israeli-American computer scientist and a leading researcher in the area of data integration. He was a research scientist at Google from 2005 to 2015, when he left to become head of Recruit Institute of Technology. He left Recruit in 2018 and joined Facebook AI in 2019. Until 2006, he was a professor of computer science at the University of Washington. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1993.​ He is a fellow of the ACM and a winner of the 2006 VLDB 10-year best paper award. He was a Sloan Fellow, and received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2000. He is the founder of two technology companies, Nimble Technology (now Actuate Corporation) and Transformic Inc.​ At Google he was involved in Google Fusion Tables.​

Prof. Anastasia Ailamaki - Chairman

Job Titles:
  • Chairman
  • Chief Scientific Officer ​ & Co - Founder
Professor of Computer and Communication Sciences at the EPFL in Switzerland. She has a 20-year-long career on data-intensive systems and applications, with technological inventions on data layouts for emerging micro-architectures, data management on solid-state storage, and computational databases for data-intensive medical and other scientific applications. Her algorithms are in popular database products by Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. She has several academic awards from ERC, ESF, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and eight best-paper awards for systems work at top database, storage, and computer architecture forums. She has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2000. She is an ACM fellow and the vice chair of the ACM SIGMOD, a senior member of the IEEE, and serves at the Global Agenda Council for Data, Society and Development of the World Economic Forum. She was awarded the prestigious ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovation Award in 2019.

Prof. Martin Odersky

Job Titles:
  • Advisor
Martin Odersky heads the programming research group at EPFL. His research interests cover fundamental as well as applied aspects of programming languages. They include semantics, type systems, programming language design, and compiler construction. The main focus of his work lies in the integration of object-oriented and functional programming. His research thesis is that the two paradigms are just two sides of the same coin and should be unified as much as possible. To prove this he has experimented a number of language designs, from Pizza to GJ to Functional Nets. He has also influenced the development of Java as a co-designer of Java generics and as the original author of the current javac reference compiler. His current work concentrates on the Scala programming language, which unifies FP and OOP, while staying completely interoperable with Java and .NET.​

Thanasis Stouraitis

Job Titles:
  • Software Engineer
Thanasis is a software engineer focussing on RAW server-side software components, and has previous full stack experience using Java and .Net. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the School of Science and Technology of the Hellenic Open University.

Thomas M. Siebel

Job Titles:
  • Chairman of the Computer Science Division at University of California
  • Professor of Computer Science

Yann Bouzonie

Job Titles:
  • Engineer
  • DevOps Engineer
As a DevOps Engineer, Yann manages and scales our internal infrastructure, the build system, the internal and customer-facing CI/CD systems, packaging and coordinating the quality assurance processes required for a successful release. Prior to RAW Labs, Yann worked as a DevOps team member the Banque Cantonale Vaudoise where he built a Kubernetes-like platform based on Hashicorp Vault, Consul and Nomad. Before BCV he was the operational security lead for Ville de Lausanne where he amongst other things lead incident response and recovery from EMOTET malware breach. Yann holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc) in Mathématiques et informatique from ENSEEIHT in Toulouse.