Eightfold.ai hires first general counsel

Mountain View, California-based artificial intelligence (AI) company Eightfold.ai has appointed its first general counsel.

Dr Roy Wang joined the firm from Marvell Technology Group, where he was associate general counsel leading a team of legal professionals that advised clients on intellectual property rights, litigation risk clearance, standards activities, open source software, product security, licensing and M&A.

Before that, he was a partner at Kirkland & Ellis offering counsel to high-tech companies on litigation and licensing matters.

In addition to his legal experience, Wang is an AI expert, according to Eightfold.ai. He has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed journal and conference papers on AI topics.

Eightfold produces an AI-based ‘talent intelligence platform,’ which is designed to help companies spot promising employee candidates, improve diversity hiring and retain top performers. Chief technology officer and co-founder Varun Kacholia previously led the news feed team at Facebook and the YouTube search and recommendations team at Google. The company in April announced its $28 million Series C funding led by IVP and has more recently opened an office in India.

‘In our search for the right general counsel we wanted to find someone who is not only a legal expert, but who also understands the changing world where AI is at the center of everything, and that is exactly who we found in Dr Roy Wang,’ Ashutosh Garg, co-founder and CEO of Eightfold.ai, says in a statement. ‘Roy is probably the only lawyer in the world who brings deep AI understanding to the legal world because he has actually worked at building machine learning systems.’

‘I personally have witnessed the frustration and challenges that organizations face in finding, hiring and retaining the best talent. The problem affects everyone involved in the process, from the candidate to the employer,’ Wang says.