Nick Elprin

Nick Elprin is co-founder, president and chief product officer of Domino Data Lab, a San Francisco, California-based company whose platform lets large companies build, deploy and govern AI models in one place. He started the company in 2013 with two colleagues from Bridgewater Associates and led it as chief executive until 2026, when he moved over to run product and engineering.

Building Research Tools at Bridgewater

Elprin earned bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science at Harvard. At Bridgewater Associates, the hedge fund, he was a senior technologist and manager whose team designed and delivered the firm's next-generation research platform for quantitative researchers, according to his Forbes Technology Council profile. In a 2016 post on Domino's blog he wrote that because quantitative research sat at the heart of Bridgewater's business, the firm was "probably 10-20 years ahead of much of the world" in running a disciplined process for developing models.

Starting Domino With Yang and Granade

He co-founded Domino with Christopher Yang and Matthew Granade, believing, in the words of the company's history, that "businesses are becoming model-driven or they're going extinct." The founders saw that data science teams lacked what Elprin called "a place to work," a shared system of record like the one CRM software gives sales teams or version control gives software engineers. Domino launched its first platform for containerized data science work in 2014, and Sequoia Capital led a $10.5 million investment in the company in late 2016.

Taking Domino Into MLOps

As companies tried to move models out of experiments and into daily operations, a practice the industry came to call MLOps, Domino says it was the first platform to adopt Kubernetes and hybrid cloud setups. Gartner has placed it as a Visionary in its Magic Quadrant for data science and machine learning platforms for three years running, according to the company. Its customers include drugmakers such as GSK, AstraZeneca and Merck, which use it to prepare results for regulatory submission, and financial firms such as UBS, Allstate and Moody's, which run claims, credit and risk models on it.

Handing the CEO Role to Thomas Robinson

In August 2026 Domino promoted its chief operating officer, Thomas Robinson, to chief executive as it repositioned around building enterprise AI solutions with its customers. Elprin stayed on as president, chairman of the board and chief product officer, leading product and engineering, according to the company announcement. He said Domino's decade of deploying mission-critical AI left it well placed for "this next era of enterprise transformation," adding of Robinson, "Thomas understands better than anyone what that takes."