Sanome is delighted to share that Co-Founder, Paul Aykroyd has accepted the role of COO.
Paul brings decades of industry experience to Sanome. His passion for ensuring that the interface between complex technology, digital development, data science and successful teams continues to contribute to the massive success Sanome has seen this year.
This isn’t the first time Paul has worked with Benedikt (Sanome Founder & CEO). The pair met at Speechmatics as the first few hires, and in their respective roles as VP Engineering and Operations, and CEO, they took Speechmatics from an an early stage machine learning startup to a deep tech scaleup specialising in automatic speech recognition. Latest funding round (2022) closed at £62M.
As the VP Engineering and Operations, Paul’s dynamism saw him quickly assuming responsibility for operations across the wider business, beyond the engineering bias; including Speechmatics’ people, talent and facilities functions. Through implementing his time-proven successful leadership principles, Paul transformed and scaled the small research group comprising eight researchers into an industry leading research & development team comprising sixty technical members of staff in three geographic locations. Sanome’s technical and data science team is rapidly expanding and quickly becoming home to industry experts – for Benedikt, there was only one person for the job of leading such an important group of people, Paul Aykroyd.
The two self-describe as ‘ying and yang’. Previously, Benedikt operated with a greater external focus, complemented by Paul’s internal focus. Not only did he support the companies personnel growth, Paul successfully led the build and implementation of the external support function at Speechmatics enabling the provision of 24/7 365 coverage for our Multi-Tenant SaaS along with an internal IT support and security function. As Sanome develops software and hardware solutions for complex clinical environments with sensitive data, the pair will be able to reflect on their prior experience of deploying equally complex software in different but challenging environments at Speechmatics.
Paul commented, “My vision for Sanome is to use my decades of experience as a leader in the tech World – for good – firstly in supporting the leadership team to continuously and clearly define our strategy along with technical roadmaps; secondly guiding the entire team through embedding appropriate methodology, tooling and process whilst fostering the culture required for success.”
“We have achieved unthinkable milestones at Sanome this year and I am looking forward to continuing this incredible growth and product development”.
CEO, Benedikt von Thüngen adds, “Paul and I have a history of success. We built Speechmatics from the ground-up – Paul is incredible, he took a team of eight researchers to become a product-focused team of over 60 when I left and more than 150 when he left. Paul left the company as it closed a £62M funding round, on to the next scale-up adventure and I couldn’t be more grateful that he has chosen to join forces with me again as we move to change healthcare.”
“Paul is a truly respected leader with people skills I have never seen anywhere else – all of this makes him uniquely talented at building incredibly efficient, effective, and most importantly HAPPY teams. I can’t wait to continue growing Sanome with him”.
