Akli Adjaoute, PhD

Founder, President and CEO

Akli Adjaoute is an American French born artificial intelligence pioneer whose inventions and innovations helped shape the deployment of real time artificial intelligence in mission critical systems. Long before AI became mainstream, he was building and deploying  applied AI at scale. Adjaoute was the first to design and deploy real time AI systems in mission critical environments, capable of operating at global scale, securing billions of transactions in under five milliseconds, and providing real time monitoring for defense and national security operations.

He is best known as the founder and former CEO of Brighterion, an artificial intelligence company acquired by Mastercard in 2017. Under his leadership, Brighterion became a global benchmark in real time AI, trusted by 76 of the top 100 U.S. banks and more than 2,000 organizations worldwide. Its technology processes over 200 billion transactions annually and is deployed across fraud prevention, homeland security, healthcare, anti money laundering, credit risk, and data breach detection.

Brighterion received numerous industry honors, including the Innovation World Series Award, the Morgan Stanley Fintech Award, the Business Intelligence Group’s Artificial  Intelligence Excellence Award (2022), the U.S. FinTech Award’s Banking Tech of the Year (2022), the Business Transformation 150 (2021), and the Fortress Cyber Security Award for Threat Detection (2020).

Following the acquisition, Adjaoute founded Exponion, a venture capital firm investing in early stage, Series A, and Series B companies, supporting high potential startups with both capital and strategic expertise.

Adjaoute began his career in artificial intelligence within the French academic system. He earned a master’s degree in computer science from Université de Technologie de Compiègne, followed by a PhD in artificial intelligence at Université Pierre et Marie Curie Paris VI, one of the central pillars of French research in computer science and artificial intelligence. His doctoral work received the highest French academic distinction, Très Honorable avec Félicitations du Jury, and was awarded a Mention Spéciale by La Tribune des Mémoires et Thèses.

During his doctoral work, within the French academic context, Adjaoute founded Conception en Intelligence Artificielle in Paris, France, and developed MINDsuite, an advanced artificial intelligence platform combining Smart Agents, Neural Networks, Business Rules, Genetic Algorithms, Constraint Programming, Fuzzy Logic, and Case Based Reasoning. MINDsuite was deployed across mission critical sectors including defense, finance, healthcare, energy, insurance, and telecommunications. The platform received the Best Data Mining Technology Award from Meta Group and was named Best French Technology Company of the Year by 3IA France in 1998. Through this work, Dr. Adjaoute was the first to invent and deploy real time AI powered smart agents in live, mission critical operational environments.

In addition to his entrepreneurial work, Adjaoute has contributed to AI education. He served as Head of the AI Department and Chair of the Scientific Committee at EPITA, in Paris, France, and as an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco.

Akli Adjaoute holds 41 granted patents, with 58 more pending, and his work has been cited in thousands of patents by leading technology companies including Apple, Google, Tesla, Meta, Amazon, Samsung,  Microsoft, IBM, Mastercard, and Visa. In 2019, Akli Adjaoute achieved a landmark victory before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Ex Parte  Adjaoute (Appeal No. 2018-007443, P.T.A.B. Oct. 10, 2019), a decision that reshaped how real world AI inventions could be protected under U.S. patent law. His success helped make patent protection available for AI innovations across the industry.