About Me
My story, background, and what drives me
In case it's a bit challenging to weave my story so far — it's always been centered around a few wholehearted ideas: Working on projects I deeply believe in, alongside amazing colleagues, and striving to create sustained impact.
Currently shaping a better future by leading AI initiatives (including Toqan.ai) for our Prosus customers across the globe — focusing on the intersection of technology, AI, and product.
Speaking & Media
Conferences, publications, and featured discussions
From Agents to Product: Toqan Data Analyst
MLOps Community Conference — Amsterdam, 2024
Presented how Toqan Data Analyst was brought from prototype to hundreds of active users, covering deterministic workflows, expert-in-the-loop monitoring, and agent resilience patterns.
Watch recordingProLLM: LLM Benchmarks for Real-World Use-Cases
Prosus AI Tech Blog & prollm.ai — 2024
Published evaluation framework for benchmarking LLMs on practical business use cases across Prosus Group companies. Launched prollm.ai with leaderboards for SQL, summarization, function calling, and more.
AI Impact Across Prosus Portfolio
LinkedIn Feature with Coen Brouwer (Prosus) — 2024
Featured in a discussion on AI impact across Prosus's portfolio of 100+ companies, reaching over 2 billion people.
The Emerging AI AgentOps Landscape
Prosus Ventures with Tania Hoeding — 2024
Contributed to Prosus Ventures' research mapping the AI agent and AgentOps ecosystem — categorising general, function-specific, and vertical agents for investment and product strategy.
Read on ProsusJust Ask: Data Insights for Everyone
Prosus AI Tech Blog — 2024
Published deep-dive on making data accessible to non-technical employees through natural language. Introduced Toqan Data Analyst — a text-to-SQL agent deployed across iFood, Glovo, and OLX.
Read on MediumMy Journey
Career milestones, education, and achievements
Prosus 10x Program
Stanford University Graduate School of Business
Executive program focused on scaling technology businesses and leadership.
Director of AI & Data Science
Prosus Group
Rotterdam, Netherlands
Leading the intersection of product & AI development of Toqan.ai. Scaled to 20k monthly active users with 10 weekly active agents across customer support, coding, pricing, and automation. Leading a team of 20+ engineers.
AI-by-Design.com
Published Whitepaper
Authored whitepaper on combining AI with human-centred design. Presented the concept at multiple conferences.
Head of Global Data Science & AI Services
OLX Group
Built a team of 30 data scientists/engineers and product owners. Led the development of the OLX Group ML platform. Shipped 8 models with notable user impact (+200% leads, +3% CTR, +45% impressions). Led global projects in marketing ($30M budget), recommendations, and trust & safety.
Head of AI & Product
Tradus
Developed ML project canvas and processes for quick experimentation. Created workshops to educate around ML capabilities. Successfully integrated with OLX Group post-acquisition.
Scrum Product Owner Certified (SPOC)
Scrum.org
Lead Data Scientist & Product Lead
IRM Systems
Led B2B product development of a data platform for predictive maintenance. Managed a team of 5+ data scientists and 2 DevOps engineers. Launched first 3 POCs resulting in +500k savings with leading NL oil & gas companies.
Senior Data Scientist & Scrum Master
Glencore
Designed and shipped their first agri-forecasting tool. Led a team of 5 data scientists/BI analysts.
Business Data Scientist
Boskalis
Initiated the data-analytic function within Offshore Energy. Developed first data-driven applications for energy-offshore. Provided end-to-end solutions from data gathering to visualization.
M.Sc. Operations Research & Management Science + Honours
Tilburg University
Member of Asset Econometrics. Courses including Econometrics, Operations Research, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Finance.
CentER Honor Programme
Tilburg University
2 Research Sessions, 5 Courses including Econometrics, Operations Research, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Finance.
PhD Studies in Artificial Intelligence (discontinued)
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Research in artificial intelligence.
M.Sc. Empirical Finance and Banking
University of Essex, UK
Dissertation with Distinction
University of Essex, UK
"How short term Interest Rates affect USA bank stock returns: An Exponential GARCH-M investigation"
B.A. Economic Sciences
University of Macedonia, Greece
Let's Connect
I'm always interested in hearing about new projects and opportunities.