Mark Chamness is Partner & Head of Data Science at Invictus Growth Partners. He joined Invictus at the close of the firm's $75 million anchor commitment. Invictus now manages $1.3 billion.
Mark developed DIANE (Deal Intelligence Assessment Neural Engine), the firm's proprietary AI platform. DIANE informs sourcing and investment decisions for the deal team across enterprise cloud software, cybersecurity, and financial technology.
Mark has worked in AI since 1992. Across roles at EMC, Nutanix, and Coursera, he built enterprise AI platforms that generated more than $145 million in annual recurring revenue. Before Invictus, he was Director of Data Science at Nutanix, where he created a forecasting platform that added more than $25 million in ARR. As Principal Research Scientist at EMC, he invented and built an AI forecasting system and drove it into production across engineering, sales, and support; it generated more than $100 million in ARR through automated expansion in the installed base, and won EMC's Global Innovation Award. Mark began his career as a Quantitative Analyst at Financial Security Assurance, building Monte Carlo models to quantify interest rate risk on $2 billion of asset-backed securitizations.
Mark holds 29 granted U.S. patents spanning AI, predictive modeling, and data infrastructure, and is the first-named inventor on the majority of them. His research has been published in ACM Transactions on Storage and at USENIX FAST, the field's leading peer-reviewed venues. He began working on neural networks in 1992 as a graduate researcher under Leon Cooper (Nobel Prize, Physics, 1972) at Brown University's Institute for Brain and Neural Systems, in what is now called unsupervised representation learning. In 1998 he designed and built Visa's first intrusion detection system using deep neural networks. Mark holds a B.S. in Physics with Honors from the California Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Statistics from San José State University.
Outside of work, Mark is a lifelong practitioner of Shotokan Karate. He served ten years as head instructor of the Palo Alto Shotokan dojo and trained under Tsutomu Ohshima, a direct student of Gichin Funakoshi, the founder of Shotokan Karate.