# Amr Awadallah

> Amr Awadallah is an Egyptian-American engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Cloudera and Vectara after an earlier shopping-search startup was acquired by Yahoo. A Cairo University graduate with a Stanford doctorate, he served as Cloudera’s global CTO, Google Cloud’s VP of developer relations and Vectara’s founding CEO. He announced his departure from the Vectara CEO role in December 2025; September 2026 reporting identifies him as a Synapse Analytics board member.

- **Role:** Board member at Synapse Analytics; co-founder and former CEO of Vectara
- **Organizations:** Vectara, Cloudera, Yahoo, Google Cloud, VivaSmart / Aptivia, Accel Partners, Synapse Analytics, SparkLabs Saudi Arabia
- **From:** Cairo, Egypt
- **Nationality:** Egyptian-American
- **Education:** Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, Cairo University, Master’s degree in computer engineering, Cairo University, PhD in electrical engineering, Stanford University
- **Known for:** Co-founded Cloudera and served as its global chief technology officer for 11 years., Co-founded Vectara with Amin Ahmad and Tallat Shafaat and served as its founding CEO., Built a shopping-search startup acquired by Yahoo in 2000.

## Career timeline

- **1995** — Moved from Egypt to California for graduate study at Stanford.
- **1999** — Joined Thai Tran in the comparison-shopping startup BookSmart, later VivaSmart; his own biography uses the name Aptivia.
- **2000** — Yahoo acquired his shopping-search startup; he joined Yahoo.
- **2007** — Completed his Stanford electrical engineering doctorate, researching the vMatrix.
- **2008** — Entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel; co-founded Cloudera with Mike Olson, Jeff Hammerbacher and Christophe Bisciglia.
- **2017** — Cloudera became publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
- **2019-2021** — Served as Google Cloud VP of developer relations, joining in November 2019 and departing in July 2021.
- **2022** — Vectara publicly launched its neural-search service in October with Awadallah as co-founder and CEO.
- **2024** — Vectara announced a $25 million Series A and the Mockingbird model on July 16.
- **2025** — Announced on December 22 that Tallat Shafaat would succeed him as Vectara CEO.
- **2026** — September reporting confirmed his board role at Synapse Analytics.

## Achievements

- Co-founded Cloudera and served as its global chief technology officer for 11 years.
- Co-founded Vectara with Amin Ahmad and Tallat Shafaat and served as its founding CEO.
- Built a shopping-search startup acquired by Yahoo in 2000.
- Earned a Stanford electrical engineering doctorate in 2007.
- Led an early enterprise use of Hadoop for analytics at Yahoo.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — EnterpriseAM reported him as a Synapse Analytics board member in coverage of the company’s $13 million Series A.
- **2026-03** — Published the LinkedIn article “The Voice That Didn’t Change,” applying computational stylometry to the Quran.
- **2026-02** — Published the LinkedIn article “Error-Detecting Code in a 7th-Century Text? I Ran the Math.”
- **2025-12** — Announced a planned Vectara CEO transition to co-founder Tallat Shafaat.

## Links

- Website: https://www.awadallah.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/awadallah
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/awadallah
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@awadallah
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/awadallah/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Amr_Awadallah/216914

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