The Marr Labs Team

Marr Labs is led by a team with extensive experience in AI and technology, refined through years of collaboration and a track record of bringing cutting-edge innovations to market.

Founders Dave Grannan, Han Shu, and Ghinwa Choueiter, together with Joe Pirone and Chris Barnett, collaborated at Vlingo to create the technology powering Siri and Samsung’s S-Voice. Dave and Chris reunited at Light, where Rob Bajohr joined the team, driving its growth and eventual acquisition by John Deere.  After Han’s startup Wyth was acquired by Airbnb, Han led Airbnb's ML and AI groups and built a team that drove large-scale innovation while Gwendolyn Cassling helped build Operations and QA for most of Airbnb's CX tiers from the ground up.

The reunion of this exceptional group at Marr Labs represents a rare convergence of talent and proven teamwork, poised to deliver transformative technologies to marketa div block.

Founders

Dave, Han, and Ghinwa first joined forces at Vlingo, where they developed the technology that powered Siri and Samsung’s S-Voice. Their groundbreaking work at Vlingo set the stage for modern conversational AI.

The emergence of Large Language Models has created a new opportunity to advance this field even further. Reuniting with other key collaborators from their Vlingo days, the founders have come together again at Marr Labs, building on their shared history of innovation and teamwork to transform the next generation of conversational AI.
Ghinwa F. Choueiter
Co-Founder & Head of AI & Data Science
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Ghinwa F. Choueiter
Co-Founder & Head of AI & Data Science
Ghinwa F. Choueiter is a veteran tech leader with more than 15 years of expertise in AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Voice Recognition predominantly within the startup ecosystem. After receiving her Ph.D. from MIT in Automatic Speech Recognition, she joined Vlingo, a startup developing an AI-based personal assistant. She played a pivotal role in expanding speech recognition systems to a dozen languages across six continents, reaching millions of users worldwide. Since then, she has led AI and ML teams across several startups in the Boston area and internationally, in the ad tech, home energy monitoring, and credit risk modeling fields.
Dave Grannan
Co-Founder & CEO
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Dave Grannan
Co-Founder & CEO
A 3X startup CEO, Dave has an exceptional track record pioneering AI/ML solutions from concept to commercialization. As CEO, Dave propelled Vlingo to become the first mobile speech recognition service and fuel the first Siri app and Samsung's S-Voice product. Recently, he co-founded and served as CEO of Light, a machine vision company rooted in ML, before its acquisition by John Deere. He also led the mobile middleware company, Geoworks. Dave holds an MBA from Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and is a US Marine Corps veteran.
Han Shu
Co-Founder & CTO
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Han Shu
Co-Founder & CTO
Han is an AI/ML pioneer and 2X entrepreneur. As a co-founder of Vlingo (acquired by Nuance), he developed speech recognition technology for Siri and led the NLU stack for Samsung’s S-Voice, which shipped on over 100M Galaxy phones. As co-founder of Wyth (acquired by Airbnb), he developed mobile personal assistant technology for collaborative productivity applications. Han led the ML and AI groups at both Airbnb and DoorDash. Early in his career, he led BBN's winning effort for a large-vocabulary Mandarin Chinese system, part of the Hub-5 speech recognition evaluation sponsored by NIST and DARPA. Han holds Ph.D., M.Eng., and B.S. degrees from MIT, and over 25 patents.

Leadership

Marr Labs’ leadership team combines expertise in engineering, product innovation, sales, and marketing to drive the company’s growth. With a focus on developing cutting-edge solutions, building strong customer relationships, and delivering impactful market strategies, the team ensures Marr Labs is well-equipped to bring transformative technologies to market.
Chris Barnett
Business Development
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Chris Barnett
Business Development
As Head of Product & Solutions at Marr Labs, Chris works with customers, partners and internal Marr teams to craft the best application of AI voice agents to today’s business problems. Prior to Marr, Chris had a 20+ year career in senior leadership roles in business development and marketing at innovative tech start ups such as Handmark (smartphone apps), Vlingo (voice assistants), EyeVerify (Eyeprint ID biometrics) and Light Labs (computational photography).
Gwendolyn Cassling
AI-Voice Operations Manager
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Gwendolyn Cassling
AI-Voice Operations Manager
As Marr Labs' AI Voice Operations Manager, Gwendolyn Cassling brings over 10 years' experience rapidly building and scaling UX & CX Operations, QA, services, programs, and teams in tech start-ups from the ground up, beginning with 9 years at Airbnb before it became a household name. At Airbnb Gwendolyn set the standards for their internal and call center agents globally across most of their CX service tiers and managed performance across multiple contact channels (including phone) and languages. Gwendolyn's time at Airbnb also united her with co-founder and CTO Han Shu, and she's thrilled to leverage her experience to translate client visions into natural-sounding, conversational AI Voice Agents that deliver on clients' goals.
Joe Pirone
VP Engineering
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Joe Pirone
VP Engineering
Joe is a seasoned technology leader with over two decades of experience building and scaling engineering teams at both startups and established companies. As VP of Engineering at Marr Labs, he leads the development of cutting-edge conversational AI solutions. Previously, Joe served as VP of Engineering for Genesys Journey Management after joining through the acquisition of Pointillist, a customer intelligence platform he helped build from the ground up. His leadership was pivotal in developing a scalable SaaS solution for cross-channel customer experience optimization. Joe’s track record includes successful exits, having led engineering teams through acquisitions at both Pointillist and Vlingo.
Rob Bajohr
Marketing
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Rob Bajohr
Marketing
Rob brings a unique blend of creative and business expertise, with experience spanning award-winning creative direction in advertising and marketing leadership in startups. He has crafted campaigns for clients like the United States Army and American Express and led marketing efforts across industries such as machine vision and cybersecurity. Rob holds an Executive MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and a BFA in Design from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.