# Daniel Chalef

> Daniel Chalef is the CEO and co-founder of Zep AI, which builds context infrastructure for AI agents, and a creator of the open-source temporal knowledge-graph framework Graphiti. Originally from South Africa, he previously co-founded KnowledgeTree, led marketing at Domino Data Lab and held senior data-science and corporate-development roles at SparkPost.

- **Role:** CEO & Co-Founder at Zep AI
- **Organizations:** Zep AI, KnowledgeTree, Domino Data Lab, SparkPost
- **Nationality:** South African
- **Education:** Bachelor of Business Science with honours in Information Systems, University of Cape Town
- **Known for:** Co-founded KnowledgeTree and led its expansion from South Africa to the United States., Co-founded Zep AI, a Y Combinator Winter 2024 company., Helped create Graphiti, which Zep’s YC profile reports has more than 30,000 GitHub stars as of the research date.

## Career timeline

- **Early 1990s** — Began using open-source software, according to his 2009 first-person interview.
- **Before 2009** — As CTO of a South African systems integrator, helped release the customer project that became KnowledgeTree; subsequently became CEO of the US company.
- **2012** — KnowledgeTree secured a $4.75 million Series B round after relocating its headquarters to Raleigh, North Carolina.
- **Before Zep** — Led marketing at Domino Data Lab and held senior data-science and corporate-development roles at SparkPost.
- **2023** — Founded Zep AI; published early work on conversation memory and entity extraction.
- **2024** — Zep joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch; the team released Graphiti as open source.
- **2025** — Co-authored Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memory.
- **2026** — Published technical accounts of Zep’s Konig graph database, source provenance and memory-poisoning defenses.

## Achievements

- Co-founded KnowledgeTree and led its expansion from South Africa to the United States.
- Co-founded Zep AI, a Y Combinator Winter 2024 company.
- Helped create Graphiti, which Zep’s YC profile reports has more than 30,000 GitHub stars as of the research date.
- Co-authored the January 2025 Zep temporal knowledge-graph research paper.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — Published Defending Agent Memory Against Poisoning, addressing persistent prompt injection and controls for agent memory.
- **2026-08** — Published Why we built a graph database service for agent memory, describing Konig and its production development.
- **2026-07** — Published How Zep tracks provenance in agent memory, following his AI Engineer World’s Fair 2026 presentation.
- **2026-06** — Published Building Agents in Go Without a Framework.

## Links

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielchalef
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/danielchalef
- GitHub: https://github.com/danielchalef

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/daniel-chalef
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-20