Brendan Playford

Technical Founder & CEO | AI Infrastructure | $75M+ Raised

San Francisco, California, United States

About

I build infrastructure companies at the intersection of AI and financial markets -- and I write the code myself. Currently Founder and CEO of Gopher, where we're building institutional-grade infrastructure for LLM-powered trading. I'm publishing research on structured prompting for algorithmic trading. Recently built and launched Eva Everywhere, a ubiquitous AI agent platform where a swarm of specialist agents collaborate under a CEO to serve as a fully autonomous executive assistant. Eva lives across cloud, mobile, web, and the physical world as a robot built on HuggingFace's Reachy platform. Written in Go, Kubernetes orchestrated, and designed for non-AI native businesses, creatives, and solopreneurs. Three founder journeys. $75M+ raised. Products scaled to hundreds of thousands of users. Complex operational challenges navigated: token launches, regulatory frameworks, enterprise partnerships across multiple continents. I left a physics degree at UCL to care for both parents through cancer while starting my first company. I've been building ever since.

Experience

  • CEO | Founder at Gopher
    Jan 2021 - Apr 2026 · 5 yrs 4 mos

    Gopher builds autonomous agentic systems for live financial markets. The platform spans the full strategy lifecycle: agents evolve trading strategies through eval-driven tool-use loops with long-horizon reasoning across 256k-token context windows, stress-test them via Monte Carlo simulation, and deploy them in production for autonomous execution -- with durable state, full decision audit trails, and sub-millisecond observability across thousands of concurrent agents. We build agents that reason reliably under uncertainty, at scale, with real stakes.

  • CEO | Co-Founder at Pngme (We're Hiring)
    Aug 2018 - Dec 2022 · 4 yrs 5 mos

    Credit and Lending API for Banks, Fintechs, and Credit Bureaus in Africa. We are on a mission to give everyone equal access to finance 💸🤩

  • Founding Partner at The Bureau
    Sep 2017 - Jan 2021 · 3 yrs 5 mos

    Founding partner of The Bureau, a blockchain incubator in San Francisco. I advise The Bureau's portfolio of blockchain clients to bring blockchain technology to mass adoption.

  • CEO | Founder at Constellation Labs
    Jun 2017 - Oct 2018 · 1 yr 5 mos

    Constellation is a third-generation (Directed Acyclic Graph), horizontally scalable, distributed operating system with a distributed enterprise API.

  • Head of Demand Generation at DroneDeploy
    Jun 2016 - Aug 2017 · 1 yr 3 mos

    As the Head of Demand Generation at DroneDeploy I have been responsible for leading the creation of our demand generation program. I work cross-functionally with marketing, sales, product, and engineering to build a fully-integrated demand generation program along with the underlying technology stack. I have built and scaled our inbound and outbound lead generation programs, built funnel reporting, and full lifecycle ROI reporting for each channel. Our lead segmentation, scoring, and management platform is built using a highly integrated Hubspot and Salesforce instance that I designed. This custom-build includes substantial funnel reporting and analytics. Significant achievements include: Scaled webinars to 2000+ registrations 2x organic search traffic in a quarter Increased signups by 200% Grew sales pipeline by 38% (average month-over-month) Grew self-serve revenue by 25% (average month-over-month)