He has built four companies on a single idea: that a machine can learn to decide. Now he wants one to run your business.
Walk into most boardrooms with a problem and you will be sold a slide deck and a stack of billable hours. Alex Kelleher finds this absurd. In July 2024 he launched Quantum Rise out of Chicago's West Loop with a $15 million seed from Erie Street Growth Partners and a blunt thesis: don't advise the company, automate it.
He calls the model "Consulting 2.0." The traditional firm sells time. Quantum Rise sells engineering - readiness assessments, roadmaps, and AI pilots that ship into a client's workflows rather than into a binder. The target is the mid-market: companies large enough to need transformation, too small to write a check to Deloitte without flinching.
It is a strange place for a man who once sat in Deloitte's own C-suite. Kelleher spent four years as Global Chief Marketing Officer at Deloitte Digital before walking out the front door to build the thing that competes with it. That is either nerve or pattern recognition. With his record, bet on pattern recognition.
The detail that explains him is not the funding round. It is the degree. Kelleher read Experimental Psychology at Oxford - the study of how a human mind weighs options and lands on a choice. Every company he has built since has been an attempt to hand that act of choosing to a machine. Twenty years before generative AI became a magazine cover, he was already shipping software that learned what people would click next.
The entire consulting industry is about to come crashing to the ground because it's built on people's time and lack of automation.
Alex Kelleher - TechCrunch, 2024His Oxford BA is in Experimental Psychology. The study of how people decide became the through-line of every company he built - software that mimics human judgment at scale.
Kelleher is an exhibited artist, with works shown in New York, Oxford and London. The man who automates decisions still makes things by hand.
He has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, TED Global at Oxford, the Monaco Media Forum, SAP Sapphire and London Business School.
Quantum Rise runs out of Chicago's West Loop, a deliberate distance from the coastal AI hype machine. In 2025 it landed on Built In's list of Chicago's 50 Best Startups to Work For.
One of Quantum Rise's first named partnerships was with dunnhumby, the retail-data heavyweight - a tell that Kelleher is aiming the model at real commerce, not demos.
The $15M seed came from Erie Street, co-founders of the company - a build-it-together arrangement rather than a passive check.
"We will bring heavy engineering to the space."
"Commerce is entering a new era, one that is driven by machines that can support and automate nearly every aspect of buying and selling consumer goods."
"The entire consulting industry is about to come crashing to the ground because it's built on people's time and lack of automation."
"They want somebody to come in and just automate the company and make it happen."
His Oxford degree is in Experimental Psychology - the science of how the mind makes a decision, which he has spent a career outsourcing to machines.
He is an exhibited artist with shows in New York, Oxford and London.
He left a Global CMO seat at Deloitte Digital to build a company that competes with traditional consulting firms.
He has presented from the World Economic Forum at Davos and the TED Global stage.
Across four companies, his exits include names like Adobe (via Omniture) and Magnetic.