Leadership Team

Untether Al was founded with the mission of making it easier to employ AI by creating Al software, chips, and accelerator boards that are fast, efficient, and cost-effective. With extensive experience with IC technology, AI, and entrepreneurship, UAI’s management team has delivered on this vision.

Management Team

Chris Walker

Chief Executive Officer

Mr. Walker is an innovative and growth driven semiconductor executive having led major initiatives and business units throughout his 30 year career at Intel corporation. His expertise extends across operations, finance, business development/M&A, product, and marketing leadership. Recently he has been a senior advisor with Cerberus Capital supporting investments in technology fund and management consulting.

Robert Beachler

Vice President of Product

Mr. Beachler joins Untether AI in the role of Vice President of Product. A Silicon Valley veteran and proven senior executive with industry leaders such as Altera, Xilinx, and BrainChip, he brings to the company a wealth of experience in the development and marketing of FPGAs, software tools, vision processors, and artificial intelligence acceleration devices.

Alex Grbic PhD

Vice President of Software Engineering

Dr. Grbic is an experienced software and semiconductor executive, who brings valuable software development experience for complex software products to the Untether AI team. Previous to Untether AI, Dr. Grbic enjoyed a storied career at Altera (and later Intel) delivering software development flows for heterogeneous computing and AI acceleration, and served as CTO of Deloitte’s Artificial Intelligence practice in Canada.

Chris Stevens

Vice President of Sales

Mr. Stevens brings with him extensive experience in semiconductor and SaaS sales and business development experience along with building and managing global sales teams. Most recently he was VP Sales at Brainchip, a neuromorphic AI IP company. Prior to Brainchip he was VP Sales at Syntiant, and took on progressively more responsibility at Centercode, Telit, Lantronix, Fairchild, and Mindspeed.

Annette van’t Spyker

Vice President of Human Resources

Ms. van’t Spyker has over 20 years of HR and Talent experience across different industries including manufacturing health care, education, and professional services, in established and start up organizations. In her previous roles she has worked across North America and had responsibility for employees in parts of Europe, Australia, India, and China.

Renxin Xia

Vice President of Hardware Engineering

Mr. Xia is an established technology executive leading technical teams at both startups and Fortune-500 companies. Before joining Untether AI, Mr. Xia served as the chief of staff to the CEO at Cadence Design Systems. Previously, Mr. Xia was Vice President of Engineering at SiFive Inc., where he oversaw the team that delivered the world’s first 64-bit quad-core Linux-capable RISC-V SoC. Prior to SiFive, he led the development of the industry-leading Stratix 10 FPGAs at Altera.

Founders & Advisors

Amir Salek PhD

Senior Technical Advisor

Dr. Salek is a Senior Managing Director at Cerberus. Prior to joining Cerberus in 2022, Dr. Salek was the Founder and head of Silicon for Google Technical Infrastructure and Google Cloud businesses. Over the past two decades, Dr. Salek has led the development of products for a wide range of markets such as machine learning, networking, graphics, video, and mobile processors. Prior to Google, Dr. Salek was a Senior Director of Engineering at Nvidia, where he was the Founder and head of Nvidia’s System-on-a-Chip Design organization.

Raymond Chik PhD

Consultant & Co-Founder

Dr. Chik is a serial entrepreneur, and has co-founded several semiconductor start ups in the areas of ASIC and Analog/Mixed-Signal IP design services and image sensors. He is a senior member of IEEE, and served as the founding chair of the Toronto IEEE Solid-State Circuits Chapter. In 2022, Dr. Chik was honored with the ACCE startup of the year award.

Martin Snelgrove PhD

Consultant & Co-Founder

Dr. Snelgrove has held progressive roles at product and design services firms at scale. Prior to this, he spent many years in academic R&D leading to the commercialization of products in digital, signal processing, and mixed signal processing, and he is widely acknowledged as a pioneer in his field. Dr. Snelgrove is an author of 36 patents and over 100 refereed publications.

Darrick Wiebe

Principal Engineer, Software & Co-Founder

Mr. Wiebe is a software zealot and his software is in use in a wide range of markets including military and data centers. He previously founded two startups developing and leveraging graph database application framework technology.

Imagine Your AI Career With Us

Help Build a Smarter, Safer Future

Our goal is to make it cost-effective and easy to apply AI, safely, where it will do the most good – in applications across the real world. We’re looking for people enthusiastic about AI, IC design, and responsible engineering, and who are eager to work with like-minded people. From our headquarters in Toronto, we offer competitive salaries and benefits to our team members across the planet.

Current vacancies