Meet the Team: Ian Hamilton, CEO and Co-Founder
Ian Hamilton is the innovative CEO and Co-Founder of Transparent AI, bringing his unique blend of technical expertise and entrepreneurial acumen to our mission of creating entirely auditable, explainable machine learning tools. A materials scientist and nuclear engineer by training, Ian earned both his Bachelor's in Materials Science Engineering and Master's in Nuclear Engineering from Purdue University. His technical foundation, combined with a natural talent for innovation, has established him as what colleagues affectionately call the company's "idea guy" – a role evidenced by his impressive portfolio of half a dozen patent filings, including our foundational patents for "Auditable Machine Learning on Unstructured Data" and “Deterministic and Auditable AI Decision-Making Agent System and Method.”
Before launching Transparent AI in February 2024, Ian built a remarkable track record as a serial entrepreneur in the hard tech space. He successfully founded and led multiple ventures including Atlas Energy Systems and Inazuma Energy, raising over $2 million in dilutive and non-dilutive funding along the way. His entrepreneurial achievements earned him recognition on the prestigious Forbes 30 Under 30 Energy List in 2018, and his technical leadership capabilities were honed while managing teams of over two dozen engineers and researchers across various projects. Perhaps most notably, Ian served as an entrepreneur at Argonne National Laboratory through their competitive Chain Reaction Innovations program, where he further developed his ability to bridge cutting-edge research with practical business applications.
Ian's journey to founding Transparent AI began during the 2020 pandemic, when he became increasingly concerned about the "black box" nature of AI systems and their potential implications when deployed in regulated industries like nuclear energy. This concern evolved into a passion as he dedicated thousands of hours to self-teaching programming and researching obscure machine learning and artificial intelligence concepts that might offer solutions to the explainability problem. A self-described perpetual learner, Ian dove deep into technical papers and experimental approaches that most others overlooked, searching for novel pathways to create AI systems whose decision-making processes could be fully audited and understood.
Recognizing that bringing truly transparent AI to market would require complementary expertise, Ian reached out to co-founder Aaron Hosford in February 2024, drawn by Aaron's deep knowledge of machine learning and AI, particularly in the esoteric areas that Ian found most promising for solving the explainability challenge. Together, they assembled our founding team with a shared vision: creating AI systems that maintain high performance while offering complete visibility into their operations and decision-making processes. Under Ian's leadership, Transparent AI is poised to transform how organizations in regulated industries can safely and confidently adopt advanced AI capabilities without sacrificing accountability or understanding.