# Reza Zadeh

> Reza Zadeh is the founder and CEO of Matroid, a Palo Alto computer vision company that lets people build and deploy AI detectors without writing code. He is an adjunct professor at Stanford, a founding team member at Databricks, co-author of Apache Spark's machine learning library MLlib, and the person who built the algorithm behind Twitter's first machine-learning product, Who To Follow. Born during the Iran-Iraq war in Ahvaz, raised in London and Toronto, he turned a Stanford PhD on large-scale graphs into a company betting that one day every camera will understand what it sees.

- **Role:** Founder & CEO at Matroid
- **Organizations:** Matroid, Stanford University, Databricks, Apache Spark, Twitter, Google
- **From:** Ahvaz, Iran
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** B.S. in Computer Science, University of Waterloo, M.Sc. in Computer Science and Mathematics, Carnegie Mellon University, Ph.D. in Computational Mathematics (advisor: Gunnar Carlsson), thesis 'Large Scale Graph Completion', Stanford University
- **Known for:** Founder and CEO of Matroid, a no-code computer vision platform, Co-author of Apache Spark and creator of its linear algebra / MLlib machine learning library, Founding team member at Databricks

## Career timeline

- **~2006** — At age 18, worked on the Google Research team
- **2013** — Completed Stanford PhD; received the Gene Golub Outstanding Thesis Award
- **2010s** — Built the machine learning algorithm behind Twitter's Who To Follow, the company's first ML product; later open-sourced
- **2013** — Founding team member at Databricks; co-author of Apache Spark's MLlib and creator of its linear algebra package
- **2016** — Founded Matroid, Inc. to commercialize computer vision; won the KDD Best Paper Award; competed in Princeton's ModelNet challenge
- **2017** — Matroid raised a $10M Series A led by NEA with Intel and others
- **2020** — Series B funding (latest round); total funding reaching roughly $37M
- **2024** — Met Pope Francis at the G7 and King Charles III at Buckingham Palace to discuss responsible AI and aerospace deployments

## Achievements

- Founder and CEO of Matroid, a no-code computer vision platform
- Co-author of Apache Spark and creator of its linear algebra / MLlib machine learning library
- Founding team member at Databricks
- Built the algorithm behind Twitter's Who To Follow recommender, its first ML-powered product
- Adjunct professor at Stanford teaching Distributed Algorithms and Optimization and Discrete Mathematics and Algorithms
- KDD Best Paper Award
- Gene Golub Outstanding Thesis Award at Stanford
- Led research tracking earthquake damage via machine learning that drew wide media attention

## Latest updates

- **2024-06** — Met Pope Francis at the G7 summit to discuss responsible deployment of artificial intelligence.
- **2024** — Met King Charles III at Buckingham Palace; discussed Matroid deployments in aerospace factories and the King's Astra Carta sustainability initiative.

## Links

- Website: https://matroid.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rezab
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/Reza_Zadeh
- GitHub: https://github.com/rezazadeh
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reza.b.zadeh/
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/matroid

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/reza-zadeh
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-08