Mohammed Farooq is bringing more than 25 years of enterprise software experience to the next-gen AI and defense company. He will have GTM, technical, and operations roles at the 230-person startup that has headquarters in Dallas and Austin.
Hypergiant’s Dallas-based CEO Ben Lamm says he’s known Farooq since he was building and running Conversable, a conversational intelligence platform that was later acquired by LivePerson in 2018.
“Mohammed helped me with various architectural and technological challenges that we were working through while developing the Conversable platform,” Lamm told Dallas Innovates.
Although Farooq is just joining the Hypergiant team, Lamm says he’s supported the company—which is poised to hit $100 million in revenue in 2020—previously.
“He has advised me over the years on various technologies and has been helping our team on the core Hypergiant AI platform for some time now. It is incredibly exciting to get him involved full time.”
Before joining Hypergiant, Farooq served as a GM at IBM Global Technology Services, during which time he helped grow the $35 billion IBM GTS group from a single cloud provider business to a hybrid and multi-cloud managed services business, according to a statement.
Farooq originally joined IBM when Gravitant, his cloud software company, was acquired by the tech giant. Before that, he led business and technology operations as the CTO of the State of Texas.
Lamm says Farooq will be based in Hypergiant’s Austin office, where he will use his experience to lead the development of Hypergiant’s core AI platform and distributed cloud services and guide the startup forward as a leader in the company. All engineering will report to Farooq.
He comes to the company at a time when Hypergiant’s partnerships with major organizations including the United States Air Force and Sumitomo, Japan, are in motion.
“Hypergiant is successfully enabling AI solutions with clients in the Space, Defense and Industry Supply Chain verticals,” Farooq said in a statement. “It’s exciting to work with these client use cases to deliver the next generation distributed cloud and AI offerings spanning clouds, edge, IoT and 5G technologies. Hypergiant hits the market at the perfect time and has the right talent, culture and leadership to accelerate that timing.”
Although Lamm isn’t ready to announce plans for other new hires, he says that he wouldn’t be surprised if more announcements happen in 2020.
Quincy Preston contributed to this report.
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