Apera AI's management team and board of directors have experience with several high-growth companies.

Leadership team

Apera AI's management team has considerable experience in high-growth technology companies and the robotics / automation space. Collectively, they have more than U.S.$1.5 billion in successful exits.

Sina Afrooze is Apera AI's CEO. He previously worked at Avigilon and Amazon.

Sina Afrooze

Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder

Sina is a technical entrepreneur in artificial intelligence, machine learning and systems engineering, with more than 20 years of experience. He was a founding engineer at Avigilon, an innovator in the surveillance market acquired by Motorola for U.S.$1.2 billion. He was then a major contributor to the SageMaker Reinforcement Learning service used to train AI for robotic simulation at Amazon Web Services (AWS). He holds 10 patents in the fields of AI, digital imaging, image processing, and media streaming. Sina holds a Bachelor of Systems Engineering from Simon Fraser University.

Armin Khatoonabadi is Apera AI's Chief Operating Officer and is responsible for implementing 4D Vision in partnership with integrators and end-users.

Armin Khatoonabadi

Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder

Armin is a serial entrepreneur with more than 25 years of experience crossing engineering, business development, operations and project management. He holds a Master of Engineering degree from Tehran University and an MBA from Sharif University.

Nick Hobbs is the VP of Sales at Apera AI.

Nick Hobbs

Vice President, Sales

Nick has 13+ years of experience in automation sales and leads sales activities for Apera AI. Before joining Apera, he started the Indiana branch of a major systems integrator and grew the territory to be the largest in the company. Nick holds a Bachelor of Science in Manufacturing Engineering Technology from Ball State University.

Eric Petz is Apera AI's Head of Marketing and brings considerable experience in leading growth for high-tech B2B companies.

Eric Petz

Head of Marketing

Eric brings 20+ years of experience marketing fast-growth, disruptive B2B technologies. Most recently, he led the marketing team at Vanrx Pharmasystems, which placed #1 on the Canadian Deloitte Fast 50 list. Vanrx was acquired in 2021 by Cytiva, part of the Danaher Corporation. He holds an MBA focusing on technology commercialization from the University of Alberta.