Our mission is to connect people to their best work by making AI practical for the enterprise

AI is making a real difference in people's lives. We’re seeing those who use it experience significant improvements in their productivity, create better quality work, and get things done faster than ever before.

It's also become clear that the companies who fail to leverage AI will fall behind. Yet, while there is exceptional demand for generative AI technologies within organizations, companies often find themselves at a crossroads.

Existing solutions in the market often fall short of meeting the complex needs and requirements of an enterprise business, such as:

  • Reduce third-party API risks.
  • Ensure compliance with your organization’s stance on data privacy and regulations.
  • Deploy generative AI in any environment—whether inside your own data center, private cloud, or Yurts’ cloud.

The Yurts
Point of View

Our vision is to create a future where every enterprise can effortlessly harness the power of generative AI in a private and secure way.

The Team

Ben Van Roo

CEO and Founder

Ben is the CEO/Co-Founder of Yurts. Ben served as the EVP of National Security at Primer AI, VP of Data Science at Chegg, and was a Researcher at RAND working with the DOD. Ben has spent his career building technology companies serving the Public and the Private sector.

He enjoys trail running and Trader Joe's Scandinavian Swimmers (gummies).

Jason Schnitzer

CTO

As CTO at Yurts, Jason supports the tech org. His journey includes roles in Production Engineering at Meta, VP on Infra at Looker, and CTO at Chegg.

Throughout his career, Jason's passion has remained constant: building platforms, products, and teams.

Jessica Agarwal

Head of Marketing

Jessica is fueled by curiosity and is passionate about building human-centric experiences.

Before Yurts, Jessica led Walmart’s marketing efforts in launching their people band to their 2.3 million associates globally, having joined them with acquisition of Jet.com, a company that redefined e-commerce and became a challenger to Amazon. Jessica previously held leadership roles in marketing at Chegg all the way from an early startup to IPO.

Jessica’s superpower is naming that tune from the late 80s-early 90s.

Guruprasad Raghavan

Lead Research Scientist and Founder

Guru is an ardent explorer of the domains where neuroscience, differential geometry and artificial intelligence converge.

He have had the fortune of learning from the best, and standing on the shoulders of giants, while at IIT-M, CMU and recently at Caltech (where he got his PhD in the realm of computational neuroscience).

Things he loves (apart from Neuro-AI): Running, 5AM club and Studying Eastern Philosophy.

Chris Jung

Chief of Staff

Chris focuses on delivering value for Yurts customers and runs internal business operations at the company. Prior to Yurts, Chris was the Director of GTM Operations and Customer Success at Primer AI and was technology consultant at PwC.

The Yurts team voted Chris most likely to practice his golf swing during a meeting.

William Du

Staff Engineer, Applications Lead

William dreams about ML user experiences, ML system architectures and the next generation of productivity tooling with generative AI. 

Before Yurts, William led applied machine learning teams and the technical roadmap for the natural-language model training platform at Primer.

The Yurts team voted William to be most likely to “know someone you know.”

Mark Allen

Head of Commercial Delivery

Mark is currently helping to launch the Yurts product in the commercial space. Most recently Mark was the CTO at FutureProof Technologies and the Director of Business Analytics at Chegg.

Mark has a hairless cat who attends meetings alongside Mark.

Maddie Wolf

Head of Operations

Maddie leads operations at Yurts. She knows that “operations” can mean pretty much anything, so she’s aware that saying she “leads it” is an incredibly vague statement. Before joining Yurts, Maddie was VP of Operations at Gatsby, where she touched nearly every aspect of the business and led the acquisition of the company by Netlify.

Maddie voted herself as most likely to pet your dog.


Nick Weir

Head of Federal Delivery

Prior to Yurts, Nick led the AWS US Federal Professional Services team for Computer Vision. Nick previously held Data Scientist Roles at AWS and In-Q-Tel, as well as serving on the Advisory Board for the non-profit SpaceNet LLC partnership.

Nick has a passion for delivering mission impact by enabling the federal government to harness new technologies.

Matt Hooper

Senior Engineer, Core Frontend Lead

Matt focuses on creating a beautiful experience between human and machine.

Matt has operated businesses on 3 continents and will deny that he's ever played pickleball. The Yurts team voted him most likely to be backpacking in a different country.

Jon Gill

Senior Engineer, ML Platform

Jon conducts applied research and MLOps to power the Yurts Platform. Before Yurts, Jon worked on an AL-based model training platform at Primer.

The Yurts team voted him most likely to be training a model in between outdoor climbs.

Daniel Au

Senior Engineer, Core Platform

Daniel is currently building out infrastructure and key pieces of the Yurts Platform. Before Yurts, Daniel led a team of engineers to develop a natural language processing tool, enabling users to quickly sift through and understand large amounts of text data.

When not coding, you can find him snowboarding, eating a bowl of ramen, and perfecting his caffe affogato recipe.

Katherine Curtis

Senior Engineer, Applications

Katherine focuses on building out components of the Yurts Platform. Previously, Katherine led a team of backend engineers building products at Primer.

The Yurts team voted her most likely to help you find your new favorite song.

Brian Kruger

Infrastructure Engineer

Brian works on infrastructure at Yurts. You might find him setting up Kubernetes operators some days, chasing down compliance, or setting up MDM for new hires. Prior to Yurts, he was a Devops Manager at Primer and an Architect at Yahoo.

Brian holds the high-score on pinball machines in no fewer than 11 municipalities.

Rocky Ongkowidjojo

Senior Engineer, DevOps

Rocky joins the DevOps team to build Yurts infra and tooling to the next level as the company grows to scale. Prior to joining Yurts, Rocky was working as Lead DevOps Engineer at Firstbase and SRE at Google.

Rocky grew up in Indonesia in a town surrounded by 6 active volcanoes.

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