Zara Osei

Zara Osei is the Co-founder and CEO of Vexlora, the AI-native platform helping 12,000+ SaaS teams automate, analyze, and scale. She leads overall company strategy, product direction, and go-to-market execution across 42 countries.

Before Vexlora, Zara spent 6 years at Google Brain where she led applied AI research for enterprise products, contributing to breakthroughs in large-scale language modeling and production ML pipelines used by hundreds of millions of users. She was the youngest person to lead a cross-functional AI program at Google.

Zara is a frequent keynote speaker at NeurIPS, SaaStr, and Web Summit. She was named Forbes 30 Under 30 (2022), Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business (2023), and TIME100 AI honoree (2024).

Expertise

AI & Machine Learning Product Strategy Enterprise GTM Fundraising Large Language Models Team Building Investor Relations Keynote Speaking SaaS Business Models Python

Impact at Vexlora

$48M

Total funding raised

12K+

Customers acquired

Team members hired

Countries reached

Years to $50M ARR

98%

Team retention rate

Career Journey

2021 — Present

Co-founder & CEO

Vexlora · San Francisco, CA

Founded Vexlora with Dev Malhotra after recognizing a critical gap between AI's potential and enterprise adoption. Raised $48M across seed and Series A, scaled to 12,000+ customers and 64 employees across 18 countries.

2015 — 2021

Senior Research Scientist → ML Program Lead

Google Brain · Mountain View, CA

Led applied AI research for Google Workspace and Search. Delivered 4 production ML systems used by 500M+ users. Built and managed a cross-functional team of 28 engineers, researchers, and PMs across 3 time zones.

2013 — 2015

AI Research Intern → Associate Researcher

Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) · Stanford, CA

Published 3 papers on natural language understanding and multi-modal learning. Co-invented a patent for efficient transformer fine-tuning with 200+ citations in the field.

2009 — 2013

BSc Computer Science

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Graduated summa cum laude. Thesis: "Scalable Attention Mechanisms for Long-Context NLP". MIT Presidential Fellow, ACM-W Scholar.

Recognition & Press

Forbes 30 Under 30

Enterprise Technology category. Recognized for building Vexlora into one of the fastest-growing AI platforms in North America.

TIME100 AI Honoree

Named one of TIME's 100 most influential people in AI for democratizing enterprise automation through intuitive, accessible tooling.

Keynote Speaker

Regular speaker at NeurIPS, SaaStr Annual, Web Summit, and TED. 2M+ cumulative views on talks about the future of AI-first companies.

Published Researcher

7 peer-reviewed papers in NeurIPS, ICML, and ACL. 900+ citations. 2 patents in efficient transformer architectures.

Nadia Kim

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Dev Malhotra