Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 1)

The world is severely short of AI talent to build complex solutions. It is essential that platforms offer layers of abstraction on top of which systems can be built without getting deep into the weeds. Vantiq is innovating with such a platform and offering excellent business model options including revenue sharing, outcome-based pricing, etc. Very cool company.

Sramana Mitra: All right, Marty, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

Marty Sprinzen: I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I was a little bit of a nerd growing up—building transistor radios, learning electronics. It was mostly hardware-focused in those early days.

I went on to study electrical engineering at Cooper Union, an engineering school in New York. There, I had the good fortune of studying control systems. That turned out to be a pivotal point in shaping how I think.

Sramana Mitra: So, you were studying control systems. Why was it key to your career?

Marty Sprinzen: Control systems are fascinating because they’re rooted in feedback loops—something we see everywhere in nature. In fact, our entire universe operates on feedback. It’s how systems evolve, adjust, and improve. Interestingly, that’s also how modern AI works. Studying control systems trained my mind to think in terms of dynamic systems and feedback.

For instance, long before epigenetics was widely accepted, about 30-40 years ago, I hypothesized that it must exist because of the feedback mechanisms built into biology. I saw the human genome as something that had to adapt, and feedback was the most natural explanation for how that might occur. Now, of course, it’s a widely accepted idea.

So, learning about feedback loops and control systems helped me understand how complex systems operate and work together. That mindset carried through my entire career.

Another influential part of my journey was Cooper Union itself. The school was founded by Peter Cooper in 1859 to provide free education to engineering and architecture students passionate about improving the world through engineering or architecture. That mission stuck with me and shaped how I saw my own purpose.

Then of course, I went into the software industry.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you work?

Marty Sprinzen: I had a small stint as an electrical engineer in New York working for ConEd, where I did software programming to help detect blackouts. But I quickly transitioned to working at a company called Candle Corporation, which focused on performance monitoring for IBM mainframes.

Then, I did other types of programming.

Sramana Mitra: Help me bridge your career to the beginning of your Vantiq company.

Marty Sprinzen: From Candle, I joined Ingres, an SQL database company that competed with Oracle. We worked on advanced user interface technologies, and that experience led me to the realization that the internet had immense potential.

This was in the early ’90s, and I remember talking to venture capitalists who dismissed the internet as a flash in the pan. Despite that skepticism, I founded Forte Software. Our platform supported mission-critical internet applications—things like home banking and New York City’s 911 system.

Sramana Mitra: And that was a services company?

Marty Sprinzen: It was a software company. We built an application development platform that helped you build advanced, sophisticated internet applications.

Sramana Mitra: Did you succeed in raising money for that, or did you bootstrap that company?

Marty Sprinzen: I succeeded in raising money. I had Sutter Hill and Greylock as two venture capitalists who knew me from my time at Ingres. My co-founder, Paul Butterworth, and I were well-known to them. We did it the standard VC route.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen
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