Chas Ballew

Chas Ballew is founder and CEO of Conveyor, a San Francisco, California, company that uses AI to answer customer security questionnaires and requests for proposals for business software vendors. He is a lawyer and second-time founder whose first company, Aptible, hosted software for companies handling regulated health data.

Studying Psychology at Princeton

He graduated from Princeton University in 2006 with a degree in psychology on a pre-law track and ran on the varsity track and field team, according to Princeton Army ROTC. His senior thesis, on predicting elections from quick judgments of candidates' faces, won the Edward E. Jones Prize for the best thesis in social psychology.

Becoming an Army Lawyer

He then earned a law degree at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was a research assistant to Bridget Mary McCormack, later chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. After law school he served as a judge advocate in the Army's Office of General Counsel, in its installations, environment and civil works practice group.

Building Aptible

In 2014 he co-founded Aptible with a college friend to give software teams secure hosting, databases and deployment tools, he told Cervin Ventures. Many of its customers had to comply with HIPAA, and he watched them lose weeks or months on large deals explaining their security to each buyer. He grew Aptible to more than $25 million in annual recurring revenue.

Spinning Out Conveyor

Conveyor began in 2021 as a product inside Aptible. When much larger companies that did not use Aptible's hosting asked for it, he made it a separate company. "The ultimate goal for Conveyor is to build a visa type of network that can connect businesses so that they can instantly build trust in the future," he told Cervin, one of its investors. He later told TechCrunch that Conveyor was the first AI vendor fully deployed in production at Zendesk, Atlassian and Qualtrics.