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.
Dr. Ran Gazit joined Comverse in 1998 as the speaker identification research team leader. This team was later the seed for the founding of PerSay. Since then, Dr. Gazit has served as CTO and Research Team Leader at PerSay and is responsible for all R&D of the algorithmic core. Dr. Gazit is the author of several articles on voice authentication and was a key member of the organizing committee of the Odyssey 2001 international workshop on speaker recognition.
Prior to joining PerSay, Ran served a term of 8 years at RAFAEL (Israel Armament Development Authority), in the research and development of advanced signal processing, guidance and control algorithms. As a research associate at Stanford University, Ran developed algorithms for the FAA’s Wide Area DGPS project. He then switched from satellite navigation to speech processing, and went to lead the Speaker Identification team at Comverse Technology. Ran graduated with honors from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and has a Ph.D. degree in Aeronautics and Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, CA.
Ariel joined PerSay during 2000, shortly after PerSay was founded. During the first three years, Ariel has held various positions within PerSay's sales and business development team and in 2003 was appointed as VP, Global Sales & Business Development. 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.
