Almog Aley-Raz is one of PerSay’s founders, and he joined the company’s speaker verification team in 1999 as a system engineer and product manager, while it was still a part of Verint Systems Inc.-formerly Comverse Infosys. Aley-Raz held an important position in the successful spin-off of the company in early 2000, raising funds of over $5 million from the Israeli VC industry. From 2000 to 2002, Aley-Raz served as PerSay’s Product Manager and VP of Professional Services-marketing, deploying and supporting PerSay’s speaker verification technology around the world. PerSay’s management board appointed him CEO in May 2002.
Prior to joining PerSay, Aley-Raz served in the technical wing of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) from 1990 to 1998, holding key field and headquarters positions, and managing various projects involving avionics, command and control, and air-defense technology. Aley-Raz holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Digital Signal Processing from Ben-Gurion University and is an MBA graduate of the Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration at Tel Aviv University.
Ariel joined PerSay in 2000, shortly after PerSay was founded. Ariel has held various positions within PerSay's sales and business development team and in 2003 was appointed as VP, Global Sales & Business Development. Throughout the many processes Ariel managed world-wide in diverse markets, Ariel has acquired extensive and in-depth experience of the voice biometrics market and has successfully led major transactions for PerSay with its key strategic customers and partners. In 2007, Ariel was appointed as Executive VP, Global Sales & Business Development, and, beyond his other responsibilities, has relocated to NY to establish PerSay's offices and operations in the US. Ariel holds a B.A. in Law and Economics and an MBA in Business Administration, both from Bar-Ilan University. Prior to joining PerSay, Ariel was an attorney in one of the leading law offices in Israel, following an internship at the Supreme Court of Israel.
Elyashiv Kellerman, VP Professional Services, formerly served as PerSay’s Project Manager, successfully deploying and integrating speaker verification systems in financial, law enforcement and intelligence agencies worldwide. Prior to joining the company, Kellerman was Project Manager at Tadiran Telecom (formerly Composit). Kellerman holds a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Mercy College in New York.
Michael Salmon, VP Product Development, joined PerSay's core product development team for the company’s biometric speaker verification platform as a software engineer in 2002. He was promoted to his current position in early 2005. During the course of his work at PerSay, Salmon has been responsible for the design and development of PerSay’s new and advanced .NET-based platform. He also was involved in integrating PerSay's product into leading IVR, CTI and CRM systems, working closely with PerSay's customers and partners to ensure deployment success.
Prior to joining PerSay, Salmon was a Computer Engineer at Ensemble Communications. He holds a B.A. in Computer Engineering and Mathematics from Bar Ilan University and is a member of the VoiceXML SIV forum, where he has contributed to the inclusion and adoption of biometric speaker verification capabilities in VoiceXML.
Michal, a QA veteran joined Verint (Comverse Infosys) in 1995 as a QA team leader. In 2000 Michal was one of the founding members of PerSay. In her capacity as the QA Manager, she established the Quality Assurance infrastructure, methodologies, testing tools, and documentation. Between 2003 and 2008 Michal joined IXI Mobile as QA Manager. Michal managed a group of over 30 QA Engineers spanning 2 continents and was responsible for the quality of IXI's products and deliveries. In 2008 Michal has returned to PerSay as the Director of Quality & Operations. She manages the quality of processes company wide, testing projects, IT and telephony infrastructures, information systems implementation and ISO certifications.
Nir Krause joined PerSay in 2004, as a senior researcher. He was promoted to be the Research Team Leader in 2008. Nir is responsible for all R&D related to core algorithmic technology, and for algorithmic customer support. Nir's work in PerSay lead to significant improvements in accuracy, and achieving outstanding results in the NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluations. Prior to joining PerSay Nir completed his M.sc. thesis on statistical machine learning at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
