Initiative ... Segovia
The People

Some detail about the team at Segovia ... 2016

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

ools to Fight Poverty We’re working to end extreme poverty by making it faster, safer, and easier to pay anyone, anywhere in the emerging markets.

Trillions of dollars are spent every year on global anti-poverty programs, including over $400 billion given directly to the extreme poor. But these programs often rely on outdated, insecure, and incompatible payment systems. We’re changing that.

Segovia’s platform is already being used to deliver critical payments in challenging environments around the world. In Liberia, for example, Save the Children is using Segovia to distribute relief funds to communities hit by Ebola. In East Africa, GiveDirectly has been using Segovia to put working capital in the hands of the extreme poor.

PRODUCT

Our Platform

Our platform supports bulk payments and other distributions (e.g. vouchers) for NGO and commercial partners looking to:

Integrate across payment providers - and across countries - to seamlessly schedule, issue, and reconcile payments.

Secure sensitive data against both malicious attacks and accidental exposure.

Analyze data in real-time, with reports for all the stakeholders in your team, from program managers to funders.

Automate routine tasks and free up staff to focus on their other challenges.

Track every action taken in the system, so everything is easily auditable.

Launch quickly, with configuration in as little as a week.

We take on deployments only when we can add substantial value for our partners. Contact us to discuss your goals and whether we can help.

IN ACTION Better Than Paper Recipient Details Configure Everything Recipient Overview Payment Made Easy

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TEAM JOIN US Segovia is Hiring

We’re a small, venture-backed, NY-based team hiring exceptional people in NY and SF who share our mission of using technology to help the world’s poorest. We have competitive salary and stock options, flexible hours, unlimited vacation, and great medical, dental, and vision benefits.

Our Team

Michael Faye, CEO MICHAEL FAYE, CEO
Michael is a co-founder and the Executive Chairman of GiveDirectly, which was recently recognized as one of the 10 most innovative companies in Finance (FastCompany). He has worked extensively in enterprise technology as an Associate Partner at McKinsey and Company, with international governments at the United Nations Millennium Project, and operating large-scale field projects while earning his PhD in Business Economics from Harvard. Michael also holds a BA from Harvard in Mathematics and Classics (although he didn’t know Segovia is an aqueduct) and was recognized as a top 100 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy.

Paul Niehaus, Co-Founder PAUL NIEHAUS, CO-FOUNDER
Paul has a track record of leadership in the practice and study of anti-corruption in developing countries. He is a co-founder and the President of GiveDirectly and is Assistant Professor of Economics at UC San Diego. He is also Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an Affiliate of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), and a Junior Affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development. In 2013 Foreign Policy named him one of its top 100 Global Thinkers.

Satwik Seshasai, CTO SATWIK SESHASAI, CTO
Satwik has built and deployed technology systems in global enterprise and entrepreneurial environments. As Program Director of Engineering at IBM, he helped build the SmartCloud platform deployed across 17 countries and 18 million users, including multiple international social programs. He was Chief Technology Officer of NextDocs, and a senior advisor to Oscar and K2 Intelligence. He earned a PhD in Engineering systems with research focused on technology deployment in Nairobi, Abu Dhabi and the US. Satwik also holds a MS in Technology and Policy, and BS/MEng in Computer Science from MIT.

Steve Grimm, Software Engineer STEVE GRIMM, SOFTWARE ENGINEER Steve has diverse experience developing scalable online systems, from multiplayer games to social networks. He was an early employee at Facebook where he served for over six years as technical lead on projects in server infrastructure, internationalization, and test automation. Prior to Facebook, after working as a software engineer at Sun Microsystems for several years, he consulted for a series of venture-backed startups, helping them build their technical teams and implement their software systems. He has a bachelor's degree in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Charles Guo, Software Engineer CHARLES GUO, SOFTWARE ENGINEER Charles recently graduated from Princeton University with a degree in physics, where he did research on astrophysical accretion disks and Bitcoin. He previously worked at Addepar and the Boston Consulting Group.

Trey Harris, DevOps Site Reliability Engineer TREY HARRIS, DEVOPS SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER
Trey has been a system administrator and DevOps developer for 25 years, beginning as a student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he created the first campus-wide email and Internet access system and expanded it into the backbone of UNC’s distributed computing environment. He has since worked on infrastructure and automation at companies including Morgan Stanley, Amazon, and Bloomberg. As an SRE at Google he was a pre-launch product privacy reviewer and a member of Mission Control and Resident Hackers. He enjoys tabletop and video gaming, arguing about politics, fiddling with virtual reality, and studying dead languages like Haskell and Perl 6. At UNC he studied computational linguistics with a minor in economics.

Sajid Mehmood, Software Engineer SAJID MEHMOOD, SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Sajid Mehmood is an engineer with broad experience in product development, distributed systems, and security. Most recently, he was a Technical Lead at Foursquare, where he led development of several products, including the developer platform, social features, and user growth initiatives. Sajid has also worked at Google building its next-generation global networking infrastructure and at Microsoft on distributed storage. He holds a BSE in Computer Science from Princeton University, where he did research at the Center for IT Policy on privacy-preserving location-aware services.

Sid Nair, Software Engineer SID NAIR, SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Sid was previously at Foursquare, where he worked on everything from the website to the Android app to the recommendations API. Before that, he studied Computer Science at Columbia and did research in the Systems Lab. In his free time, he enjoys playing and watching soccer.

Emily Pakulski, Software Engineer EMILY PAKULSKI, SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Emily is a recent grad from Columbia University's Computer Science department. She's excited about backend and systems engineering. Her favorite drink is Thai iced tea and her favorite food may be cornbread. Emily was previously at Nest, MongoDB, and Xbox.

Jon Warman, Software Engineer JON WARMAN, SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Jon was an early engineer at Facebook, where he worked on Pages, Profiles, Events, Notifications, and Ads as the product grew from 5 million to 500 million users and the team grew from 50 to 1,500 people. Jon has co-founded multiple companies, including an enterprise SaaS business, and is an advisor to Footnote, a media site which translates academic research for mainstream use. Prior to joining Facebook, he worked at Amazon. Jon holds a BS in Computer Science and BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University.

Aadil Mamujee, Head of Product and Deployments AADIL MAMUJEE, HEAD OF PRODUCT AND DEPLOYMENTS
Aadil has spent the last decade working in technology in Europe and USA. He was most recently VP of Product Management at Pocket Gems, a mobile entertainment company, where he was one of the founding employees and first product manager. He helped grow the company profitably to 200+ staff and 200M users. Previously Aadil worked in the early-stage investment team at Index Ventures and at Google in London. Aadil has a MEng from Cambridge University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Aadil was born and raised in Mombasa, Kenya.

Alex Zhang, Product Deployment Manager ALEX ZHANG, PRODUCT DEPLOYMENT MANAGER
Alex has experience in both product development and implementation of enterprise software. Prior to Segovia, he was at AppNexus as a team lead of Implementation Consultants and then as a product manager overseeing the development of novel algorithms to improve the efficiency of online ad spend. Alex also co-founded a startup that designed an automated market for the transaction of illiquid assets like private equity. He studied at Duke University where he holds a degree in biology.

Michael Goldfarb, Director of Operations MICHAEL GOLDFARB, DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
Michael was a member of the investment team at Centerbridge Partners, where he focused on private equity and distressed investments. He evaluated new opportunities and oversaw portfolio company operations across a range of geographies, including North America, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East, and industries, including payment processing, telecommunications and logistics. Before joining Centerbridge, Michael worked at Blackstone Advisory Partners and in finance and education in Shanghai and Chongqing. He holds a BA from Harvard in Economics.

Johannes Jaeckle, Business Analyst JOHANNES JAECKLE, BUSINESS ANALYST
Johannes joined Segovia in October, working on operations. He has previous experience in helping organizations expand financial access to underserved populations and working with promising startups across Sub-Saharan Africa. He holds an MSc in Development Economics, where he worked on Chinese state finance to African countries, and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, both from Oxford University.

Melissa Harpool, Admin MELISSA HARPOOL, ADMIN
Melissa was an Executive Assistant to top-level management at McKinsey and Company, where she focused on communications and external relations. She has experience managing account relations for companies ranging from small private businesses to global industry leaders and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Organizational Communication from the University of Central Florida.

Our Board and Advisors

Chris Schroeder CHRIS SCHROEDER
Christopher M. Schroeder, joining Segovia's Board, is a Washington D.C. and New York City based entrepreneur and venture investor. He co-founded HealthCentral.com, has been CEO of washingtonpost.newsweek interactive and LegiSlate.com, and is an active investor in and advisor to top US venture capital funds and over a dozen startups. He also served in President George HW Bush's White House and Department of State. Schroeder has written extensively about startups and technology in emerging growth markets for The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, AllThingsD, TechCrunch, Pando Daily, Harvard Business Review, and Business Insider. He sits on the board of advisors of The American University of Cairo School of Business, the Jordanian incubator Oasis500, the Middle East online entrepreneur information platform and network wamda.com and on the Board of Directors of the American Council on Germany, The Dean's Board of the American University School of International Service, and member of the French American Foundation and Council on Foreign Relations. Schroeder graduated with honors from Harvard Business School, and magna cum laude from Harvard College. Schroeder is married to Alexandra Coburn and has three children.

Ron Brachman RON BRACHMAN
Ron Brachman is Head of Yahoo Labs and Chief Scientist of Yahoo. He has overall responsibility for leading all of Yahoo's science activities worldwide, including research and applied science, research engineering, and Academic Relations. Ron joined Yahoo in 2005. He was one of the original leaders who helped to define and build Yahoo Research. Ron founded the research lab in New York City and established the basic operational procedures for the entire Research and Labs organizations, acting as its main liaison to key corporate support functions. Prior to joining Yahoo, Ron was the Director of the Information Processing Technology Office at DARPA; before that he held various research leadership and management positions at AT&T, both at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Labs. Ron holds a B.S.E.E. degree from Princeton University (summa cum laude) as well as the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Fellow of IEEE, and a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He won IJCAI's Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award and AAAI's Distinguished Service Award. He served as President of AAAI from 2003 to 2005. He also edits the Synthesis Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning series of online publications for Morgan & Claypool.

Maura O'Neill MAURA O'NEILL
Maura has been thrilled to grow businesses, teach, and mentor others wanting to make a big difference. In 2009 she was appointed by President Obama to be the first Chief Innovation Officer of the US Agency for International Development. Serving until 2013, she was responsible for inspiring and leading breakthrough innovations in foreign assistance and development worldwide. Maura is best known for adapting venture capital and drug discovery methods to global development by co-creating the Development Innovation Venture Fund that has expanded into the Global Innovation Fund. She also served as a member of the White House Innovation Cohort and a Chief of Staff in the U.S. Senate and founded companies in the fields of electricity efficiency, smart grid and customer info systems & billing, e-commerce, and digital education. In 1989, she was named the Greater Seattle Business Person of the Year. Currently Maura is teaching at Berkeley, Stanford, and Columbia and advising start-ups, global companies, foundations and global government agencies. Maura has MBAs from Columbia and Berkeley and a PhD from University of Washington. She helped found a public charter school, Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women (grades 6-12) and continues to serve as Vice Chair. Maura is married and has two grown kids, a digital journalist who cooks the most amazing vegetables and a basketball-playing particle physicist.