You don’t have to speak the same language to be on the same page

Vasco Pedro is a co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Unbabel. He founded Unbabel and its new category creation, LangOps, in 2013, alongside João Graça, Sofia Pessanha, Bruno Silva, Hugo Silva during a surfing trip in Arrifana, Portugal. Under this leadership, Unbabel has since raised $91M in funding and has over 260 employees across its Lisbon headquarters and offices in San Francisco, New York, and Pittsburgh. Leading brands like Facebook, Microsoft, Booking.com, and easyJet use Unbabel to make their customers happier and their support operations vastly more efficient. Vasco developed his love of both languages and technology during his time at Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned both his Master’s and doctorate in Language Technologies. Vasco then worked at both Siemens and Google, where he helped develop technologies to further understand data computation and language.

Ana Becker-Weinberg is the Vice President of Strategy & Operations at Unbabel, where she leads cross-functional business operations by overseeing key management functions, including strategy, excellence, compliance, M&A and business integration. Ana has over a decade of experience working across several continents and industries. Currently based in Lisbon, she speaks four languages, and spends her time between the Unbabel hubs, working with investors and executive teams on business transformation, scaling, and professionalization. Prior to joining Unbabel in 2019, Ana led strategic business-building and M&A activities at Maya Partners, leading the company’s investment and growth in Latin America. Additionally, at Brunswick Group, she served as advisor to the Chairman and Founder, and developed and implemented strategic projects and business development initiatives.

João Graça is a co-founder, Chief Technology Officer, and computational genius behind Unbabel. Portuguese born, João studied computer science at doctorate level at one of Lisbon’s most well-respected technical universities, Instituto Superior Técnico de Lisboa. During his studies, he published a number of well-received papers on machine learning, computational research, and computational linguistics — all of which form the bedrock of Unbabel’s machine translation engine. After graduation, João worked with INESC-ID, developing research in natural language processing (NLP) and went on to do his postdoc in NLP at the University of Pennsylvania. João was awarded a Marie Curie, Welcome II Scholarship (2011), which he declined in favor of entrepreneurship. He worked with now Unbabel CEO, Vasco Pedro, together on the development of language learning algorithms and machine learning tools, plus held various research scientist roles before co-founding Unbabel in 2013.

Sophie Vu is the Chief Marketing Officer for Unbabel, where she partners with more than 150 customer-centric brands to power their multilingual customer service and experience. Sophie boasts more than 20 years of experience in guiding start-up companies to market leadership through integrated marketing strategies and business development. Prior to joining Unbabel in 2019, she served as Chief Marketing Officer for mobile engagement platform, Vibes, where she partnered with top brands to enable marketers to unlock new revenue with mobile marketing success. Additionally, she held a wide range of global marketing & communication roles, from growth advisory and consulting through to brand experience. She has a graduate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles Anderson School of Management.

Leah Bucellato is the Vice President of People for Unbabel, where she oversees the on-boarding, engagement and development of people across the global organization. She is a commercial HR professional with 14+ years of proven experience working for some of the most recognised and awarded creative, media, and tech companies. Prior to Unbabel, Leah helped Media Art Lab (MAL), the creative advertising agency for Apple, grow their London office from 20 to 200 people, and managed the Italy, Spain, and France offices. She led the implementation of the HR function, and set up processes for recruitment, induction, retention, benefits, and employee relations at App Business, a specialist app software company. Additionally, she led the HR team and created the global HR strategy for BBH, the global advertising agency that produced campaigns for top brands, including Audi, Axe, Google, and Virgin.

James Palmer is the Chief Financial Officer of Unbabel. He boasts more than 30 years of experience advising and leading global companies in a variety of technology-based services sectors with a speciality on leading business through complex sales and integration processes. He has recently overseen as successful refinancing of the supplier risk management service provider, Achilles, and was instrumental in the sale of UK-based email security business, MessageLabs, to Symantec for $700m. Prior to that, James had been President and Chief Executive of the state-owned telecommunications operator in Panama, Head of Marketing and Product Management for Cable & Wireless Global Businesses and Chief Operating Officer of their Regional Businesses organization. He is a past board member of the incumbent telecommunications businesses in the Maldives, Yemen and St Kitts & Nevis. He earned his M.A. in Mathematics and a diploma in Statistics from Cambridge University.

Jonathan Sowler is the Vice President of Engineering, Customer Apps at Unbabel. Jonathan leads Unbabel’s R&D teams, with a sharpened focus on delivering the translation service into a broad range of use cases, from document translation to the translation of customer service conversations. Prior to Unbabel, Jonathan was a founder Chief Technology Officer at JCP, an internet security pioneer that was acquired by Sun Microsystems. Since then, Jonathan has built a strong track record as an engineering and product lead, delivering compelling products and providing engineering and delivery for companies at different stages of development, from startups to enterprise technology companies including Microsoft. Jonathan joined Unbabel in 2019 after working with machine learning and alternative data teams at a London hedge fund.

Jason Richardson is the Vice President of Customer Operations at Unbabel. He leads and manages Unbabel’s customer operations team and works closely with customers to maintain strong relationships and ensure success. With more than two decades of experience in the technology industry, Jason has developed outstanding leadership skills in seeding and growing organizations to scale and deliver and providing vision and direction to services and implementation organizations. Prior to joining Unbabel in 2020, he worked as Senior Director, Global Customer Success for Qlkik – a leading provider of business intelligence software. As a customer first leader he ensures customers consistently receive the expected value and are delighted by the experience.

Alex Cobb is the Chief Product Officer of Unbabel. An accomplished technical leader, designer, developer, and entrepreneur, he boasts 20+ years of experience leading globally-distributed, enterprise-scale, agile software development organizations, with a sharpened focus on product innovation and experience design of SaaS platforms. . Alex has a track record of successful startup exits, including Commercial Corp (acquired by Microsoft), Kony, Inc. (acquired by Temenos), and K2 Software, Inc. (acquired by Nintex). Prior to joining Unbabel, Alex co-founded Tachyon Solutions to provide advisory services to help startups and their VC / Private Equity firms achieve Product/Market Fit to accelerate customer adoption and revenue growth. Before Tachyon Solutions, Alex worked as VP of Product Management at K2 Software, Inc., where he led product strategy, design, and development for K2’s portfolio of cloud and on-prem products acquired by Nintex.

Kerry Scobie is the Vice President of Community at Unbabel. She is responsible for leading the functions related to our global community of freelance translators and linguists, overseeing the performance, development, and operation of our translation services. Kerry has an extensive background in management and leadership in commercial operations at scale. Kerry was the Global Delivery Director at Lingo24, before the company was acquired by Unbabel, in which capacity, she led the Service Delivery and Vendor Management teams across Lingo24’s international hubs, driving operational delivery and developing business growth.Prior to that, she spent more than 15 years with the IKEA Group in various management positions in Sales, Operations and Customer relations. She has a passion for business through people, and has a strong belief in situational and collaborative leadership.