# Hassan Sawaf

> Hassan Sawaf is the founder and CEO of aiXplain, a San Jose-based enterprise AI platform. Born and raised in Germany with Syrian origins, he built a career in speech recognition, machine translation and applied AI, with leadership roles at AppTek, SAIC, eBay, Amazon and Facebook before founding aiXplain in June 2020.

- **Role:** Founder and CEO at aiXplain
- **Organizations:** aiXplain, AIXPLAIN AG, AppTek, SAIC, eBay, Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Facebook AI, RWTH Aachen University
- **Nationality:** Syrian-German
- **Education:** Master of Science in Computer Science, RWTH Aachen University
- **Known for:** Commercialised English-German speech translation with AIXPLAIN AG in 2002., Led AppTek teams developing hybrid machine translation and multilingual speech recognition., Awarded the SAIC Technical Fellow title in 2011.

## Career timeline

- **1996** — Project manager and lead developer for automated SITA messaging analysis at Daimler Benz InterServices.
- **1999-2000** — Co-founded the RWTH Aachen spin-off AIXPLAIN AG; public accounts differ on the precise founding year.
- **2002** — AIXPLAIN AG presented a commercial English-German speech-to-speech translation system.
- **2004** — AppTek acquired AIXPLAIN assets; Sawaf moved to the United States and became AppTek COO and chief scientist.
- **2010** — Became chief scientist for human language technology at SAIC.
- **2011** — Named SAIC Technical Fellow.
- **2013** — Joined eBay as senior director and established AI teams, including machine translation for cross-border trade.
- **2016** — Joined Amazon in September.
- **2017** — Joined AWS in January as director of applied science and artificial intelligence.
- **2019** — Joined Facebook AI in October as director, working on AI for augmented reality.
- **2020** — Left Facebook AI and founded aiXplain in June.
- **2026** — Co-authored an EACL system-demonstration paper on AI-assisted candidate assessment.

## Achievements

- Commercialised English-German speech translation with AIXPLAIN AG in 2002.
- Led AppTek teams developing hybrid machine translation and multilingual speech recognition.
- Awarded the SAIC Technical Fellow title in 2011.
- Established AI teams at eBay supporting cross-border trade.
- Led applied AI work at Amazon and AWS, including language services.
- Founded aiXplain in June 2020; the company announced an $8 million seed round in 2023 and a $6.5 million pre-Series A in 2024.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — Listed in the LEAP 2026 speaker programme, including the panel Resilience as Infrastructure: How Syrian Founders Built What Didn’t Exist.
- **2026-03** — Co-authored Agentic AI for Human Resources: LLM-Driven Candidate Assessment, published in the EACL 2026 system-demonstration proceedings.
- **2025-09** — Discussed managing AI agents with Robert Scoble in a conversation featured by aiXplain on September 3.
- **2024-07** — aiXplain announced a $6.5 million pre-Series A led by Wa’ed Ventures.

## Links

- Website: https://hsawaf.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sawaf/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/hassan_sawaf
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@hassan_sawaf
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hsawaf/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hsawaf

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/hassan-sawaf
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-25