Our leadership team
DekaBridge is led by seasoned executives with backgrounds at Google and Harvard. They bring deep expertise in machine learning, decision sciences, and the development of world-class AI products.
Dr. Skyler Place is a serial entrepreneur and a world expert in the impact of artificial intelligence on human decision making. He has leveraged this perspective to deploy AI applications at Fortune 500 clients, helping them to unlock the power of artificial intelligence to improve outcomes for their businesses, customers, and employees. He has guided the world's largest consumer brands, healthcare providers, and telecommunication companies to bring emotionally intelligent artificial intelligence into their business operations and product roadmaps. He currently serves on the faculty at Harvard School of Public Health, guiding executives on artificial intelligence strategy and risks.
Dr. Place has authored eight patents and over a dozen publications at the intersection of machine learning, health, and communication. He served for over a decade as the Chief Behavioral Science Officer at Cogito, where his responsibilities included AI strategy and product management. In addition, Dr. Place is a co-founder of CompanionMX, where he led R&D and then product creation of a clinically validated digital health application helping bring scalable objective measurement to psychiatry.
Skyler holds a BA in computer science from Colby College, PhDs in psychology and cognitive science from Indiana University, and completed his post-doctoral work in computational social science at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.
Ms. Ponnuru is an accomplished software engineering leader with deep expertise in machine learning and large-scale cloud systems. Most recently, she has served as a fractional CTO for several early-stage generative AI startups, where she has shaped overall architecture and engineering strategy. Her work focuses on the design and development of cutting-edge agentic frameworks and generative AI systems.
Earlier in her career, Ms. Ponnuru held engineering roles at Microsoft, where she developed backend cloud services for devices tracking human behavior across tens of millions of endpoints.
She then spent nearly a decade at Google, leading teams and contributing to core technologies behind YouTube’s recommendation algorithms and the natural language understanding layer of Google Assistant. During her tenure, she was also a featured speaker for ‘Google for Startups’ and a prominent advocate for integrating conversational AI into real-world products.
Ms. Ponnuru holds a B.Tech in Computer Science and a Master’s in Research in Computer Science from IIIT Hyderabad. She also earned an Executive MBA from the Quantic School of Business and Technology and completed advanced coursework in Generative AI through Stanford University.
Our team & advisors
Former CRO Dialpad, Nextiva, Cogito
Professor, Organizational Behavior, UNC Chapel Hill
Former CEO, Automox
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