AMPL Optimization builds the algebraic modeling language of the same name - a tool that lets engineers and analysts describe huge, messy real-world decision problems in clean mathematical notation and then hand them to any of dozens of solvers. Born at Bell Labs in the 1980s and now an independent California company, AMPL is used by more than 100 corporations across 40-plus industries to run optimization in production, from power grids and supply chains to portfolios and airline schedules.
Bill Wells is the CEO of AMPL Optimization Inc., the Mountain View company behind AMPL, the algebraic modeling language born at Bell Labs that has long been a gold standard for large-scale mathematical optimization. A UC Berkeley-trained mathematician, Wells runs the small but globally influential team that turns business-critical decisions in energy, finance, supply chain, and transportation into solvable models, while steering the company from a classic modeling language toward a modern, API-driven optimization platform.
Carolyn Mooney is the co-founder and CEO of Nextmv, a Philadelphia-based developer platform for building, testing, and deploying decision models - everything from vehicle routing to staff scheduling. A systems engineer by training, she ran missile simulations at Lockheed Martin, optimized pizza deliveries at Zoomer, and led Grubhub's systems engineering team before deciding the messy gap between data science and operations needed its own discipline. She calls it DecisionOps. In May 2026, FICO acquired Nextmv, vindicating the bet she and co-founder Ryan O'Neil made that optimization deserved the same engineering rigor as software.
Nextmv is a DecisionOps platform that gives developers and operations-research teams the tooling to build, test, deploy, monitor, and govern optimization and decision models - things like vehicle routing, scheduling, and packing. It treats decision models the way DevOps treats software: version control, CI/CD, scenario testing, shadow production tests, and a system of record for every decision. Founded in 2019 by ex-Grubhub engineers Carolyn Mooney and Ryan O'Neil, the company raised an $8M Series A led by FirstMark Capital and was acquired by FICO in May 2026.