Deep-Learning Company MetaMind Hires Twitter, Salesforce Veteran Ruslan Belkin

MetaMind has named Ruslan Belkin, formerly of Salesforce, Twitter and LinkedIn, as its new vice president of engineering.

The artificial intelligence startup launched late last year with $8 million from Khosla Ventures and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. The company applies deep learning of natural language and images to solve a range of business problems. Currently the platform can be used for analyzing medical images, as well as for solving financial, social and marketing problems.

“Basically artificial intelligence is something I’ve always wanted to do,” Belkin said. “The market for this is really exploding in terms of growth.”

Belkin left his role as vice president of engineering at Salesforce and RelateIQ for the new position. He said he had a positive experience at Salesforce, but the time was right to move to MetaMind.

“I really felt I could help MetaMind at this stage,” Belkin said. “The time is really right now, not two months from now.”

In addition to his experience at Salesforce, Belkin also served as Twitter’s vice president of engineering, search and content, and LinkedIn’s senior director of engineering, content and community products. The MetaMind team hopes he can use those experiences in his new role as they accelerate development of the company.

“The team is excited to benefit from Ruslan’s leadership and experience as we aim to accelerate new developments and adoption of our artificial intelligence platform,” said MetaMind co-founder Richard Socher. “Ruslan adds to our powerhouse team that already includes my co-founder Sven Strohband along with several Stanford PhDs with machine learning experience.”

Last fall at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Vinod Khosla predicted machine learning will have more impact than mobile in the next 20 years. Today he praised Belkin’s addition to the MetaMind team.

“We are excited to add the deep expertise of a hypergrowth veteran like Ruslan to MetaMind,” Khosla said.