Alyona Medelyan

Alyona Medelyan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Thematic, an AI-driven customer insights platform, based in Auckland, New Zealand. Before launching the Y Combinator-backed startup in 2017, she worked as a software engineer at Google and held technical leadership roles at Entopix and Pingar. She holds a PhD in Natural Language Processing from the University of Waikato, where her academic research has accumulated over 3,000 citations from other global researchers. At Thematic, Medelyan secured $1 million in funding and developed a profitable B2B SaaS product that analyzes unstructured feedback for enterprise clients including LinkedIn, DoorDash, Vodafone, and Atlassian. Additionally, her open-source algorithms have been utilized by hundreds of organizations globally, including NATO. Her current focus centers on leveraging generative AI and advanced text analytics to extract actionable business intelligence from large-scale enterprise customer data.