Matt Heider

Background

About Matt Heider

The core challenge with AI isn't simply technology development. It's technology adoption — by users, teams, and organizations. I've spent the last 15 years at the intersection of AI development and adoption, focused on how organizations can change the way they work to realize commercial value from emerging technology.That thread started at IBM in 2011, when we were positioning early beta Watson use cases with Fortune 50 finance enterprises, before most people had heard the term machine learning. I watched ground-breaking technology struggle to find traction, because the human and commercial sides of adoption hadn't been deeply considered yet. That gap became a focus for me, because it was clear the scale of the unlock was huge.After moving to the venture-backed space, I joined Andela and built the sales organization from the ground up, helping scale the company through its early growth stages en route to becoming a Unicorn. I then spent almost six years as CEO of Nautilus Labs, building an AI SaaS platform from scratch - raising $45M, achieving 50x ARR growth, growing from 10 to 100+ crew members around the world, and ultimately exiting to a strategic M&A partner. The technical challenge was real, but the harder work was convincing legacy users in an established industry to trust new ways of working. Our innovative product work ultimately earned Nautilus recognition from CB Insights, Bloomberg, and Time Magazine.Now as we move into the Agentic future, the LLM-based talent pool offers as much potential for organizations as the global talent pool did a decade ago at Andela. I'm more excited than ever to see the future I believed in for so long come to fruition, and I'm currently exploring what's next for me in the space. If you're launching, building, or scaling enterprise AI solutions — or doing the hard work of transforming how your own organization works with AI — I'd love to connect.