Jason Lopatecki

Jason Lopatecki is co-founder and chief executive of Arize AI, a Berkeley, California, company that sells observability and evaluation tools for machine learning models and AI agents. He founded it with chief product officer Aparna Dhinakaran.

Garage to IPO at TubeMogul

Lopatecki was a co-founder and chief innovation officer of TubeMogul, a video advertising company he helped scale into a public company and an eventual acquisition by Adobe, according to his Arize profile, which calls him a "garage-to-IPO executive." He also served as its chief strategy officer.

His background spans big data architectures, programmatic advertising systems and machine learning, and he studied electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley.

Launching Arize With Aparna Dhinakaran

He and Dhinakaran were leading separate startups when they found they were solving similar problems they had both seen at large companies, TechCrunch reported when Arize launched in February 2020. "Businesses are deploying these complex models that are hard to understand, they're not easy to troubleshoot or debug," Lopatecki said. When a model misbehaves, "The state of the art today is: You file a ticket, the data scientist comes back with a complicated answer, everyone's scratching their head, everyone hopes the problem's gone away." Before writing code, the two spent time studying the common features of the problem across companies, a choice they discussed in a Founder File case study.

Staying Focused on Production

Lopatecki has admitted that the AI tooling market can be hard to read. "I'm technical, I did EECS at Berkeley, I understand ML extremely well, but even I can be confused by some of the companies in this space," he said. While other companies tried to cover the whole AI pipeline, his answer was narrower: "We're really focusing on production." He has described Arize as an engineering product, similar to Splunk, built for engineers rather than executives.

Personal Life

In his free time he tinkers with personal machine learning projects, with a special interest in unsupervised learning and deep neural networks, his Arize profile says.