Our team shares one thing in common: the passion to bring mobile speech search to the mass-market. The executives bring to the table experiences in technology, marketing, sales from several blue-chip companies including Nokia, Cisco, Cingular Wireless, AT&T Wireless, STMicroElectronics to name a few. Collectively, we define a culture that rewards commitment.
Emerick Woods — Chief Executive Officer
Emerick Woods is a successful executive and entrepreneur having managed and founded several early stage high technology companies. Emerick is chief executive officer of V-Enable and responsible for leading V-ENABLE's vision, future capital expansion options, and strategic relationships. Previously, Emerick was chief executive officer at Aligo, Inc, another venture-backed company focused on the mobile space which was acquired in early 2007. Prior to that, Emerick served as president and chief executive officer of Vicinity Corporation, a publicly traded company acquired by Microsoft, where he completed its initial public offering and successfully raised over $140 million. Before Vicinity, Emerick held a variety of executive and general management positions at Coherity, CastBridge, TuneUp.com, HP, Quarterdeck, Symantec, Central Point and Microcom as well as consulting positions at McKinsey & Company and Booz Allen & Hamilton.
Emerick holds an MBA degree from Harvard Business School and a B.Sc., Computer Science degree from Yale University. Emerick is a member of the World Presidents Organization. He also serves on the board or directors of Shelter Network, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization.
Dipanshu Sharma — Founder and CTO
Mr. Sharma, after leaving Nokia, founded V-ENABLE in Jan 2001. Today V-ENABLE is The Leader in Mobile Voice Search and Mobile-Multimodal Technologies. Mr. Sharma drives V-ENABLE's technology and strategic vision. He works with wireless operators and partners to deliver best-of-breed solutions.
While at Nokia, Mr. Sharma was part of several wireless initiatives for mobile handsets that included mobile browsers, phone user interface design, developer programs and research. He has delivered mobile handsets for CDMA/GSM markets. He published several patents (6,287,200; 6,892,067; 6,766,163; 6,801,793 European Patent: WO0143433, WO0193507) related to wireless technologies.
In Nov 2003, he was awarded "Technology Leader of the year" by TeleFusion and in 2005 was nominated for Ernst and Young "Entrepreneur of the year". He sits on the boards of OneTouchStar, KaDonk and advisory board of Veracity Wireless.
Mr. Sharma holds specialized management/entrepreneurship degrees from UCSD, San Diego and HUT, Helsinki, Finland. He holds M.S in Computer Science from DAVV, India and B.S in Computer Science from Delhi University, India.
Craig Hagopian, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
Craig Hagopian is responsible for driving V-ENABLE's daily operations, including sales, marketing and support operations as well as business development, product planning, and market communications. Mr. Hagopian brings a wealth of experience to the V-ENABLE management team with more than 18 years of sales and marketing leadership across hardware and service based companies in the personal computer, wireless and broadband Internet industries.
Prior to V-ENABLE, Mr. Hagopian was the Chief Marketing Officer of Axesstel, Inc., a San Diego-based CDMA terminal manufacturing company. At Axesstel Mr. Hagopian was responsible for overall sales, marketing and new product development, improving operating 2002 EBIT by 70% over prior year's performance through new accounts with Verizon, Sony Ericsson as well as major Latin American and Asia-Pacific wireless carriers. Notably, Mr. Hagopian was instrumental in coordinating Axesstel's investor and media activities, concluding in a round B $7M funding and a successful transition from private to public reporting status (AMEX: AFT). During his watch, stock appreciation increased by 10-fold (volume & price) and the company's market capitalization rose above $40M.
Mr. Hagopian held management positions at Air2Lan, a South East regional provider of broadband Internet services, and from 1994-2001 he was GM, VP & Sr. Director of the Consumer Group for SkyTel Communications, a wireless data messaging service entity. At SkyTel, he was responsible for developing the consumer strategy and building strategic partnerships with major retailers and telecommunications partners. Mr. Hagopian was also recognized as the only manager to meet planned business goals in fiscal year 2000 by recording 435% year-over-year growth in sales and a 3x increase in distribution points while successfully building a $34 million business unit from ground zero. From 1987-1994, Mr. Hagopian was the Manager of Market Planning and Product Management for Epson America. During his tenure he researched numerous new product opportunities and authored the market entry plan for a $150M multimedia product line which EPSON today dominates #1 Worldwide and #2 in the U.S.
Craig received his BS in Business Administration from the University of Southern California and his MBA from Duke University. He and his wife Lisa enjoying raising their two children: Brittany and Cole.
Chris Stewart — Vice President of Finance
Chris Stewart is responsible for overseeing V-ENABLE’s finance department. He joined V-ENABLE from Ortiva Wireless, Inc. where he was the Controller. Mr. Stewart brings over 15 years of financial and operational management experience to the position. At Ortiva, he oversaw the finance, accounting, human resources, legal and IT functions. During his tenure, Ortiva raised $20M in venture capital and $1.2M in debt financing, introduced their first commercial product, and booked revenue of $10M.
He joined Ortiva from Leap Wireless, where he was the Senior Manager of Pricing and Investments. In this role, he had broad financial responsibilities for new products, pricing and internal investments. Prior to Leap, Mr. Stewart held various financial roles over several years at Intel Corporation.
He received his undergraduate degree in Finance from the University of Southern California and has an MBA in Finance and Strategy from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.
Venkata Ramana Rao Gadde — Vice President & Chief Scientist
Ramana is responsible for the Research and Development activities related to improving the accuracy and performance of speech recognition at V-ENABLE.
Before joining V-ENABLE, Ramana was a Senior Researcher at SRI International; a Menlo Park based Research Institute. At SRI, Ramana mainly focused his research on the development of highly accurate speech recognition systems for government and commercial clients. He led the SRI team that won the DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) sponsored evaluation on Speech in Noisy Environments (SPINE) in 2002. His research contributions include novel techniques for acoustic modeling, duration modeling, and noise robustness.
Ramana published more than 30 papers in conferences and journals and was awarded
2 US patents.
Prior to SRI, Ramana was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (IITM).
Ramana received a Ph.D and a M.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and a B.Tech in Electronics & Electrical Communications Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.
Collin Holmes — Vice President of Product Management
Collin joins V-ENABLE to oversee and manage the development of products and features required by V-ENABLE and our partners and customers. His responsibilities include developing product roadmaps, business development and managing the process of bringing applications to market.
Mr. Holmes previously worked at Cingular Wireless as a business-to-business key account manager and Akamai as a product marketing manager.
He is a graduate of the University of California, Riverside and recently graduated with an MBA from San Diego State University
Chandra Kholia — Vice President & Chief Architect
Chandra is responsible for driving all Engineering activities related to the development of the veANYWAY platform. Additionally, Chandra is responsible for developing the Developer Platform, a test bed for third party vendors to develop and build voice search applications.
Previously, Chandra was a consultant with TechSpan, working with various blue-chip companies, such as Bell Atlantic, BEA, Delta Technologies, etc. Prior to that, he was working with STMicroelectronics as a Project Lead for logistics. He was responsible for various logistics implementation for the management of microelectronic devices.
Chandra received his M.S. in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Applied Sciences, India
Sunil Kumar — Co-founder/Vice President of Technology Solutions
Sunil Kumar is currently responsible for leading the technology solutions group at V-ENABLE and managing a team of exceptional engineers across the globe. Sunil Kumar has played a key role in shaping V-ENABLE’s technology vision, building the company’s product portfolio and delivering value to its customers. As a co-founder, he has been instrumental in developing the core technology from the concept stages and writing several patents to protect the technology. Additionally, Sunil Kumar is responsible for driving the standards effort within W3C.
Prior to V-ENABLE, Sunil was a Network Architecture Consultant at Cisco, where he worked on the router products and the IOS architecture. Prior to that, Sunil Kumar worked At UNH (University of New Hampshire) in the industry-recognized, Interoperability Labs where he participated in the rise of storage over IP industry, and worked with the storage industry leaders in bringing a quality technology to the market.
Sunil Kumar got his B.S. Mathematics from the University of Delhi, M.S Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire and is currently pursuing his MBA at Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.
Jean Smith — Vice President of Sales
In her role as Vice President of Sales, Jean oversees and manages sales
for carrier partnerships in North America.
Jean Smith brings to V-ENABLE management team an extensive background
in sales and account management throughout a variety of industries including
wireless, consumer electronics, telecommunications, clinical diagnostics
and health care market segments, across Fortune 500 Companies ,
National Retailers and Network Providers with over twelve years experience
in the wireless industry alone.
Most recently at LGE MobileComm, USA, Jean served as National Sales
Manager and was responsible for developing the corporate sales initiatives and
driving market share with a national carrier partner. Prior to that she held
a variety of top level sales positions at Franklin Electronic
Publishers, Sony Wireless, SkyTel/MCI and in which she was responsible
for capture, management, growth and retention of multimillion
national accounts as well as new business development and marketing
alliances.
Jean holds a BS in Medical Technology from Hartwick College, Oneonta,
NY.