# Alyona Medelyan

> Alyona Medelyan is the co-founder and CEO of Thematic, a customer feedback analysis company that grew from her natural language processing consultancy. Raised in Kerch, Ukraine, she studied at the University of Freiburg, completed a PhD at the University of Waikato, interned at Google and created the open-source topic indexing tool Maui. Based in Auckland, she also speaks about AI and teaches women business owners how to use it.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at Thematic
- **Organizations:** Thematic, Entopix, Pingar, Google (former intern), NLP in NZ meetup
- **Nationality:** New Zealander (self-described); originally from Ukraine
- **Education:** Master’s degree; studies included natural language processing, University of Freiburg, PhD in Computer Science; thesis: Human-competitive automatic topic indexing, University of Waikato
- **Known for:** Created Maui, an open-source keyphrase extraction and topic indexing tool extending KEA., Completed a Google-sponsored PhD in Computer Science at the University of Waikato in 2009., Co-authored Mining Meaning from Wikipedia, published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies in 2009.

## Career timeline

- **2007** — Chaired the New Zealand Computer Science Research Student Conference.
- **2008** — Interned on Google’s sentiment analysis team in New York; finalist for the Google Australia and New Zealand Anita Borg Scholarship.
- **2009** — Completed her PhD at the University of Waikato and released Maui as open-source software.
- **2010** — Listed as a software engineer in R&D at Pingar; subsequently served as its Chief Research Officer.
- **2013** — Founded the NLP consultancy Entopix.
- **2015** — Co-founded Thematic with Nathan Holmberg after three companies requested help analyzing customer feedback.
- **2016** — Early Thematic product was in use; published an NPS coding accuracy study.
- **2017** — Thematic participated in Y Combinator’s Summer 2017 batch and raised US$1.2 million in seed funding led by AirTree Ventures.
- **2018** — Moved to the United States as Thematic expanded; described a team of 12 across two countries and customers on four continents.
- **2024** — Announced Thematic’s first $1 million contract in a public LinkedIn post.
- **2026** — Based in Auckland; teaching practical AI skills to women business owners and speaking at customer experience and founder events.

## Achievements

- Created Maui, an open-source keyphrase extraction and topic indexing tool extending KEA.
- Completed a Google-sponsored PhD in Computer Science at the University of Waikato in 2009.
- Co-authored Mining Meaning from Wikipedia, published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies in 2009.
- Co-authored Human-competitive tagging using automatic keyphrase extraction at EMNLP 2009.
- Finalist for the Google Australia and New Zealand Anita Borg Scholarship in 2008.
- Led Thematic through Y Combinator’s Summer 2017 program.
- Announced Thematic’s first $1 million contract in 2024; this is a company contract value, not personal wealth.

## Latest updates

- **2026-03** — Published a Scoring Agent article describing synthetic scores inferred from customer feedback and a human validation workflow.
- **2026-06** — Her speaking page lists Electrify Aotearoa in Auckland on June 9-10 and CX Asia Week in Singapore on June 18.
- **2026-10** — Her current speaking page lists an upcoming Women in CX UnConference appearance in Dallas on October 20-21.
- **2026-11** — Her teaching page advertises a forthcoming hands-on AI session for women business owners at The Node in Devonport, Auckland, on November 5, 2026.

## Links

- Website: https://medelyan.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/medelyan/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/zelandiya
- GitHub: https://github.com/zelandiya

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/alyona-medelyan
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-14