# Tom Hamer

> Tom Hamer is the co-founder and CEO of Marqo and a co-founder of Celeris Labs. A former AWS software engineer who studied computer science at the Australian National University and machine learning at Cambridge, he helped build Marqo from its 2022 beginnings into a retail search and product discovery company. He relocated to San Francisco in 2024; his newer work at Celeris focuses on language-model response speed.

- **Role:** Co-founder and CEO at Marqo
- **Organizations:** Marqo, Celeris Labs, Amazon Web Services
- **Education:** Computer science studies, Australian National University, Master’s specialising in machine learning, University of Cambridge
- **Known for:** Built an educational iPhone app used by more than 40,000 people., Co-founded Marqo with Jesse Clark., Led Marqo as CEO when it announced a US$12.5 million Series A in February 2024.

## Career timeline

- **Age 14** — Built an educational iPhone app that taught users how to create iPhone apps; it attracted more than 40,000 users.
- **Before Marqo** — Worked as an AWS software engineer on Relational Database Service.
- **2022-04** — Initially incorporated Marqo in London; later established the company with Jesse Clark in Melbourne.
- **2022-09** — Published Marqo: An Introduction, introducing the open-source tensor search framework.
- **2023-08** — Marqo announced its seed financing and general availability of Marqo Cloud.
- **2024-02** — Marqo announced a US$12.5 million Series A and its headquarters relocation to San Francisco, where Hamer would move.
- **2024-09** — Co-authored Designing Interfaces for Multimodal Vector Search Applications.
- **2026** — Co-founded Celeris Labs with Jesse Clark alongside Marqo.

## Achievements

- Built an educational iPhone app used by more than 40,000 people.
- Co-founded Marqo with Jesse Clark.
- Led Marqo as CEO when it announced a US$12.5 million Series A in February 2024.
- Co-authored a 2024 paper on multimodal search interfaces.
- Co-founded Celeris Labs, which develops language models focused on response speed.

## Latest updates

- **2026-10** — On October 8, published the introduction to Celeris-1-decision, a hosted model for typed decisions that returns probabilities and optional explanations; Celeris reported a 67 ms median response for a single question in its own end-to-end tests.
- **2026-07** — Celeris published its research agenda focused on hybrid sequential and parallel language generation and architecture search.
- **2026-05** — Featured in The First podcast, discussing Marqo’s product development, business-outcome positioning, hiring and move to the Bay Area.

## Links

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-hamer-04a6369b/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/tom_w_hamer
- GitHub: https://github.com/tomhamer

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/tom-hamer
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-22