Founder in Focus: Jeremiah Lowin of Prefect

I recently caught up with Jeremiah Lowin, founder of Prefect, an exciting AI startup with offices in Washington, DC and San Francisco. Jeremiah has a Finance/Risk Management background. The company is setting the standard in dataflow automation used to build, run, and monitor millions of data workflows and pipelines.

While his father is a value investor and entrepreneur, Jeremiah likes to dabble in side projects that catch his interest, but having started a business a decade ago, being a founder again wasn’t something he was looking for.

Constantly experimenting, Jeremiah discovered people wanted to pay him for what he was building. He thought it might be small potatoes. Selling for a few dollars, lunch with a friend. Small scale. Another fun side project. The feedback and the appetite for what became Prefect was huge. With expertise in Machine Learning and Data Science, and having worked with diverse stakeholders in large financial organizations, Jeremiah has the ability to deliver automation tools that scale. Under the circumstances, it became clear that founding a company was the best way to take advantage of the opportunity. Moving forward, he says, the need to found was obvious.

Existing use cases at big companies were unimaginative. Query, compile, report. Jeremiah says there was no speed, no scale. He leveraged his research on recurrent neural networks to address dynamic, hard to train, get in trouble fast, projects.