About Us

Semiotic Labs was founded in Los Altos, California, in February of 2020. The founding team consisted of Dr. Ahmet Ozcan, Dr. Sam Green, Alexis Asseman, and Dr. Gokay Saldamli. Prior to starting the company, Ahmet managed the Machine Intelligence department at IBM Research, Almaden; Sam was finishing his Computer Science PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Alexis led AI hardware acceleration efforts at IBM Research; and Gokay was researching cryptographic acceleration and serving as a professor of Computer Science at San Jose State University.

From the beginning, Semiotic Labs has created products that combine AI and cryptography. Originally, we focused on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), which is a family of techniques that enables computing directly on encrypted data. We had initial success, winning an NSF SBIR Phase I to use our technology to accelerate FHE. After our first year, we pivoted into blockchain technology, where we found greater demand for our AI and cryptography skills within The Graph protocol, where we have become long-term core developers. Specifically, we now leverage our reinforcement learning expertise to build and validate autonomous agents for Web3. We also apply our cryptography expertise toward the development of zk-SNARK algorithms to reduce Ethereum transaction fees and improve Web3 protocol decentralization.

As we continued to explore Web3, we became fascinated with arbitrage opportunities between decentralized exchanges (DEXs) on Ethereum and other EVM-compatible blockchains. After winning an ETHGlobal hackathon competition with an arbitrage measurement project, Western Gate, we became serious about understanding how to optimally interact with DEXs. Ultimately, this led us to develop Odos. Odos provides savings to users by using a novel optimization technique to pool liquidity across many DEXs.