# Marilyn Matz

> Marilyn Matz is the CEO and co-founder of Paradigm4, the Waltham, Massachusetts company behind SciDB, an array-native computational database built for the tangled, multi-dimensional data of genomics, clinical research, and imaging. She launched it in 2010 with database legend and Turing Award laureate Mike Stonebraker to move his MIT research into the hands of working scientists. Decades earlier she left MIT to co-found Cognex, now a global machine-vision powerhouse, where she ran worldwide engineering and later a business unit. A two-time technical founder who codes the deep infrastructure and still sells to the customer, Matz has spent a career making impossibly large scientific data explorable, reproducible, and fast.

- **Role:** CEO & Co-founder at Paradigm4
- **Organizations:** Paradigm4, Cognex Corporation, Teradyne (Board of Directors), LogMeIn (former board member), Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC), Automated Imaging Association (former board)
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** MS in Computer Science (MIT AI Lab); left the PhD program to found Cognex, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- **Known for:** Co-founded two enduring deep-technology companies: Cognex (public, global machine vision) and Paradigm4 (scientific computing)., Received the 2005 SEMI industry award for outstanding technical contributions to the semiconductor industry, with her Cognex co-founders., Named a 2020 NACD Directorship 100 honoree.

## Career timeline

- **1981** — Co-founded Cognex Corporation, a machine-vision company for industrial automation, after leaving MIT.
- **1989** — Cognex goes public; Matz runs worldwide PC Vision engineering with a large staff.
- **2005** — With her two Cognex co-founders, receives the SEMI industry award for outstanding technical contributions to the semiconductor industry.
- **2009** — Paradigm4 raises early capital from Sigma Partners and Kepha Partners (December).
- **2010** — Co-founds Paradigm4 with Turing Award laureate Mike Stonebraker to commercialize SciDB out of his MIT lab.
- **2015** — Paradigm4 raises a Series A round (last reported raise, November 2015).
- **2020** — Paradigm4 technology used during COVID-19 to identify tissues expressing SARS-CoV-2 entry genes; Matz named a NACD Directorship 100 honoree.
- **present** — Continues as CEO of Paradigm4 and serves on the board of Teradyne.

## Achievements

- Co-founded two enduring deep-technology companies: Cognex (public, global machine vision) and Paradigm4 (scientific computing).
- Received the 2005 SEMI industry award for outstanding technical contributions to the semiconductor industry, with her Cognex co-founders.
- Named a 2020 NACD Directorship 100 honoree.
- Serves on the Board of Directors of Teradyne; former board member of LogMeIn.
- Co-chaired the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council's Big Data cluster.
- Built SciDB, an array-native database adopted for genomics, clinical, imaging, and financial data.
- Deployed Paradigm4 to help researchers answer COVID-19 tissue-expression questions across 30+ datasets in seconds.

## Latest updates

- **2020-09** — Named a NACD Directorship 100 honoree and featured discussing SciDB's role in life-sciences data work, including COVID-19 research.
- **2021-02** — Featured in Scimcon's Industry Leader interview series on translational research, precision medicine, and single-cell omics.

## Links

- Website: https://paradigm4.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marilynmatz/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/paradigm4
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/paradigm4

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/marilyn-matz
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Last updated: 2026-07-01