Co-Founder & CTO at Exia Labs
Serj Kazar
Serj is co-founder and CTO of Exia Labs, and is a leading applied AI x Games Engineer. He has working in the data, ML, and AI domain for a decade. Serj's career followed the growth trajectory of the data industry, going from managing data ecosystems and writing MapReduce all the way to integrating ML & AI into games today. Most recently, he was a Principal Engineer where he served as Tech Lead of ML & Data for League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics and Wild Rift. There, he shipped things like ML bots, in-game recommendation systems, MMR systems, player behavior detection systems, and more. He has also developed two data & MLops ecosystems at two different companies, together reaching a scale of petabytes of stored data and terabytes of data being moved per day. He graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.
Questions & Answers
What's the story behind your company?
Jon and I have known each other for a decade, and lived together for 5 years. We have built all kinds of things together on the side. We have always wanted to do a startup together. One day Jon was bored at Walmart and was catching up with his old commander from his Army days. When Jon asked him if there was anything in the AI x Games space that could be done for the military, he was given an answer, "wargames." After that, we searched through what that meant and found that there was real value in the idea of RL + LLMs to simulate friendly and enemy intent, not in wargames, but for our warfighters directly, on the battlefield and off. This was the perfect intersection of our skillsets: AI, games as simulation, and military.
