Our Team
Purujit Goyal
Software Engineer
Purujit joined us in Seattle from the other side of the country, having spent the past several years in grad school and then working at UMass-Amherst. He’s a die-hard Madridsta who enjoys playing and watching that other kind of football.
Sumant Kawale
Cofounder and COO
Sumant is an engineer by training who has built and deployed AI products for more than 20 large enterprises. He holds down our Austin office, is known to smoke a mean BBQ, and lives dangerously in Texas as an open Eagles fan.
Yinhan Liu
Advisor
Yinhan co-founded BirchAI with Kevin and Sumant after publishing the RoBERTa, BART, and mBART papers. She also co-authored several other notable papers that have helped define Transformer-based NLP. She’s a big supporter of women in AI, and knows way more than you might think about crabbing in Puget Sound!
Blake Parsons
Director of Product Management
Blake brings a foundation in engineering and over 10 years experience in product and operations to the team at Birch, where he leads product management. He’s a former Canadian national team rower who is on a mission to discover the best chocolate chip cookie in every city he visits.
Gaurav Shegokar
Founding Engineer
Gaurav was our first hire and came to us via CMU with more than five years of startup experience. He’s new to the Seattle area, and is an aficionado of American muscle cars. Maybe less of a fan of the attention such cars garner from the radar guns ;-)
Kevin Terrell
Cofounder and CEO
Kevin has over 20 years of go-to-market and strategy experience, with most of that spent in healthcare. Along the way he became a 6 Sigma black belt and gained a deep understanding of process improvement. He also co-founded Start Reading Now, a non-profit that supports thousands of kids each year.
Chief Scientist
Ziyuan comes to Birch with five years of experience in machine translation after completing his MS at Johns Hopkins. Ziyuan also used to be a fan of American muscle cars, and is a budding NFL fan of “America’s Team”. But for the most part he now spends his free time with his wife and kids while also working to perfect his digital piano skills.