# Emmanouil Koukoumidis

> Emmanouil 'Manos' Koukoumidis is the CEO and co-founder of Oumi (Open Universal Machine Intelligence), a Seattle-area public benefit corporation building what he calls AI's 'Linux moment' - an unconditionally open platform where data, code, model weights and training recipes are all transparent and reproducible. A Princeton PhD who scaled Google Cloud's PaLM with a 300-person virtual team before it became Gemini, and who earlier built emotionally intelligent chatbots at Microsoft, Manos left big tech to give researchers and the wider world the truly open AI he believes they deserve. Oumi raised a $10M seed in early 2025 and launched its commercial custom-model platform in 2026.

- **Role:** CEO & Co-Founder at Oumi
- **Organizations:** Oumi (Open Universal Machine Intelligence) PBC, Google Cloud, Apple, Microsoft, Princeton University, MIT, Microsoft Research, CERN
- **From:** Greece
- **Nationality:** Greek
- **Education:** PhD (mobile-cloud intelligent systems co-design), Princeton University, Diploma (Engineering), National Technical University of Athens
- **Known for:** Led Google Cloud PaLM to General Availability in May 2023 with a 300+ person virtual team, Co-founded Oumi and raised a $10M seed round (2025), Built HallOumi, an open-source hallucination-detection model that outperforms general LLMs at spotting unsupported claims

## Career timeline

- **Early career** — Research positions at MIT, Microsoft Research, SMART (Singapore) and CERN
- **2016** — At Microsoft, led engineering and science for Zo, an open-ended multimodal chatbot, and built an early LSTM-based conversational system and RAG-style prototype; also worked on Cortana
- **2023** — At Google Cloud, bootstrapped Cloud PaLM, built a v-team of 300+ contributors across 30+ teams, and led PaLM to General Availability in May 2023; effort moved to DeepMind as Gemini
- **2024** — Co-founded Oumi as a public benefit corporation to make frontier AI unconditionally open
- **2025-01** — Oumi emerged from stealth with a $10M seed round and the open-source platform vision
- **2025** — Released HallOumi, an open claim-verification model for detecting AI hallucinations
- **2026** — Oumi launched its commercial platform for building custom AI models

## Achievements

- Led Google Cloud PaLM to General Availability in May 2023 with a 300+ person virtual team
- Co-founded Oumi and raised a $10M seed round (2025)
- Built HallOumi, an open-source hallucination-detection model that outperforms general LLMs at spotting unsupported claims
- Pioneered artificial emotional intelligence technology at Microsoft for the Zo chatbot
- Assembled an open AI lab with 6 co-founders, 30+ engineers/researchers, and 25+ founding scholars from CMU, Stanford, Princeton, UC Berkeley

## Latest updates

- **2026-03** — Oumi launched a commercial platform for building custom AI models, extending its open-source roots into enterprise offerings.
- **2025-01** — Oumi came out of stealth with a $10M seed round to give AI its 'Linux moment.'

## Links

- Website: https://www.koukoumidis.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/koukoumidis/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/koukoumidis
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYXHT4DV5_0

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/emmanouil-koukoumidis
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-24