Tomi Poutanen
CEO, Signal 1
Tomi Poutanen is the CEO and a co-founder of Signal 1, a health AI start-up on a mission to empower frontline care providers with accurate, timely, and easy-to-use patient insights.
Tomi is a computer scientist, serial entrepreneur, and AI pioneer. He has spent his career building machine learning systems for large enterprises. He is the founder of four AI companies with exits to Microsoft, Yahoo!, and TD Bank. He is also a co-founder of the Vector Institute, a world-renowned academic research institute for deep learning, and a co-founder of Radical Ventures, a leading venture capital fund investing in companies working at the frontier of AI.
Over his career, Tomi has personally helped bring AI into use in what has proven to be some of technology’s most important applications to date. He spent the first part of his career in Silicon Valley where he pioneered the use of machine learning in web search, first at Yahoo! Search and then at Bing. In 2012, Tomi co-founded Layer 6, an applied AI company which was acquired in 2018 by TD Bank Group, one of North America’s leading financial services companies. He served as SVP and Chief AI Officer at TD Bank and oversaw the successful deployment of AI across the Bank’s lines of business in Canada and the US.
Tomi is a recognized thought leader and frequent speaker on all things AI. He was a co-author of Canada’s first National AI Policy in 2017, the first AI policy to be developed by a government anywhere in the world. He co-authored Canada’s first set of guidelines for the responsible use of AI in financial services. He is regularly invited by industry, government, and universities to share his views on the promise of AI and other emerging technologies.
Tomi holds an MSc in Computer Engineering and an MBA from the University of Toronto.