Emil Mikhailov

"The unexamined life is not worth living." - Socrates

I'm an engineer with an AI background - I've been building applied AI since 2015, well before it went mainstream, and that thread runs through everything I've built since, right up to the autonomous aircraft I work on today.

Work

Sorian Aerospace - Founder, CEO & CTO

I founded Sorian and run both the business and the engineering. We build autonomous supersonic aircraft for the defense market, with two programs in development: Unforgiven, a full-size supersonic autonomous jet, and Sandman, a subscale supersonic autonomous demonstrator and threat-emulation platform. It's my second company as founder and CEO.

  • We've compressed the conceptual-through-preliminary aircraft design cycle from the months or years it usually takes a team of discipline specialists down to a matter of days - by treating aircraft development as software, orchestrating industry-standard solvers into a single deterministic, fully traceable workflow.
  • That velocity is what lets a small, capital-efficient team advance two supersonic programs at once. I engineer the way the company designs aircraft, rather than only managing it.
  • Autonomy is, at its core, an AI problem - exactly the kind of problem I've spent my career learning to solve.
  • Currently recruiting elite mechanical, software, and systems engineers who thrive on ground-zero challenges.

Rx360 - Fractional CTO

Took a wearable safety device for seniors - satellite and LTE comms with automatic fall detection - from concept to its first fully functional unit in 10.5 weeks for under $119K. A representative demonstration of the speed and capital efficiency I bring to hardware.

Cribl - Staff Product Manager, Search

  • Took Cribl Search from whiteboard to GA in < 6 months.
  • Grew it from $0 to over $3M in ARR while serving Fortune 100 customers operating at petabyte scale.
  • Shipped foundational features across 14 rapid releases.
  • More detail in my Cribl blog posts (opens in a new tab).

XIX.ai - Founder & CEO

  • XIX.ai was an AI company from day one. I led development of Entry, a sensorless biometric SSO for the web built on deep-learning facial-recognition and anti-spoofing models that were state of the art at the time, with our research extending into reinforcement learning and predictive on-device intelligence. Technical details here (opens in a new tab).
  • Raised over $5M, backed by Y Combinator (W2017), Two Bear Capital, CabraVC, and a fantastic group of angel investors.
  • Founded and ran an AI meetup series in San Francisco - a fixture of the city's early AI community.

Personal Pursuits and Interests

  • AI - Deep learning, computer vision, and reinforcement learning have been my home turf since my early San Francisco days.
  • Engineering - 15 years writing and shipping production code, and hands-on with control systems and the digital-engineering tooling I design aircraft with (SUAVE, OpenVSP, Fusion 360).
  • Aviation - Licensed pilot, designing and prototyping next-gen aircraft; I also figured out how to make scramjets work - a first-principles look at the flameholding problem that governs scramjet design.
  • Impact Work - Applied ML to combat human trafficking, featured in Business Insider (opens in a new tab).

Education

  • Master's degree in International Law, Belarusian State University.
  • Continuing and executive studies at Stanford University and the Startup Academy of the Moscow School of Management, SKOLKOVO.

Life in SoCal

I live in Southern California, with my wife Anna and my son Michael.

Let's Connect

© Emil Mikhailov.