Our Team

Serge Kruppa - CTO, Co-Founder
Serge Kruppa is a co-founder of Peerant. Prior to Peerant Serge was a co-founder and CTO of Simitel, a leading developer of IP contact center software based on Asterisk and a regular speaker at Astricon conferences around the world. Serge has over 15 years experience in telecommunications having worked for Accenture in London and Vocalis in Cambridge where he was in charge of the SPEECHtel carrier-grade speech recognition platform installed in the networks of several telcos worldwide. He is also an avid C and Ruby programmer who has contributed to various open source projects such as Chimera and CURL. In 2004 Serge and Marcus received the prestigious Intel award for a Competitive Mexico for the IceCAP virtual IP contact center, a leading product of Simitel. He holds an MSc (hons) in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Geneva (Switzerland).

Eric Werkhoven - Head of Development/Chief Architect
Eric started his professional career as a scientific linguist for 3 years in the Maxplanck Institute of Psycholinguistics and the University of Texas. He then worked as a free-lancer consultant and head of development for banks and large corporations in both Mexico and Europe from 1997 until 2000.He has significant knowledge of both Java programming and VoiceXML as well as VoIP, SQL, XSL and many other programming languages, databases, architectures, and open source technologies. Eric has been a programming professor in Universities in Mexico. In 2000 Eric founded Plaza Movil where he served as the CTO until he joined SimiTel in 2002. Eric was, until recently, Chief Architect of Simitel. Eric holds a master degree in knowledge engineering with a specialization in computational linguistics from the Catholic University of Nijmegen. He has lived in Mexico for 7 years, and he speaks 5 languages fluently

Chairman - Jeremy Peckham
Jeremy has over 25 years experience as a scientist, consultant and latterly as a businessman and entrepreneur. He began his career as a research scientist with the UK Ministry of Defence at the Royal Aircraft Establishment and subsequently spent 12 years with Logica, now Logica CMG, the International Systems house, as Principal Consultant and Business Manager becoming an internationally recognised expert in computer speech recognition. In 1993 through an MBO from Logica, Jeremy founded Vocalis Ltd, a speech recognition company providing applications to the telecommunications industry worldwide. Jeremy led the company through an IPO in 1996 on the London Stock Exchange achieving a market capitalisation of $70m. As CEO he established a US subsidiary of Vocalis in Silicon Valley.

Since 1997 Jeremy has been an active investor in and founder of a number of technology ventures, as diverse as medical diagnostics, communications and media. Some of these companies were established as technology spin outs from prestigious UK government research facilities such as the Rutherford Appelton and resbury Laboratories. He currently holds board positions, ncluding Chairman, with several companies based in the UK and North America.

Jeremy is a first class honours graduate in Applied Science majoring in medical physics and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1995.


Our Advisors

Jonathan Christensen
Jonathan is a Senior Director at Skype.Previously he was President and CEO of Camino Networks; a voice over IP startup building unique solutions for high quality speech processing, coding, and transmission for the next generation of mobile IP based networks. Camino Networks as sold to Skype/Ebay in 2006. Jonathan has an excellent sense for what is next in Internet communications. Before running his first startup, Jonathan accumulated more than a decade of experience shaping strategy for internet based businesses inside of leading organizations such as Microsoft and Time Warner.For the two years prior to Camino Networks, Jonathan was the Chief Technology Officer and V.P. of Products at FaceTime Communications. Jonathan has a Master of Business Administration from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a Bachelor of Arts in Law and Society from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Greg Robin
Greg is a versatile, software industry veteran with over fifteen years experience working with both enterprise and consumer-focused companies. He has held various business development, partner management and product development roles at the following firms: Excite@Home, Gap Online, Macromedia, Niku, Pacific Bell and Wells Fargo. Prior to his work in the software industry, Greg worked as a technology, investment banker at Hambrecht & Quist.
Greg graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, with a Bachelors of Science in Economics and a concentration in Decision Sciences, in 1988. Since 2001, he has been founder and Principal at Productivity Advisors a firm which provides advice and counsel to web-based software and online ventures focused on delivering services and solutions over the web.

Dennis R.Teifeld
Founder and CEO of Teifeld and Company Insurance Services, Inc. A 16 million dollar San Jose based insurance brokerage started in 1982. Teifeld attended San Jose City College and San Jose State University. He has traveled extensively and has lived in Europe and the Middle East. Teifeld has served or currently serves on the board of directors of many non profits including the Jewish Federation of Silicon Valley, past president of First Community Housing of San Jose, Hillel of Silicon, San Jose Downtown Association, to name a few. Teifeld has or currently serves on the advisory board of several start- up companies such as Corvigo, Inc. (sold to Tumbleweed Communications), Land Sonar, Inc., Inertia Beverage Group, Inc. and Costella- Kirsch a Venture lending fund. Teifeld was a founding shareholder in Silicon Valley Bank and Bridge Bank in San Jose. Teifeld and Company Insurance Services, Inc. does business in eight U.S. states as well as Europe, Russia, China, Mexico and Israel.

Ben Zhao
Ben Zhao is a professor of Computer Science at University of California at Santa Barbara, where he heads the secure and reliable networking research lab. Before UCSB, Ben received his M.S. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2000 and 2004, and his B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University in 1997. At Berkeley, Ben was one of the first to propose and implement structured peer-to-peer overlay networks, large network infrastructures that provided deterministic data lookup and high availability. His publications on the Tapestry P2P overlay are among the most widely cited articles in recent years. At UCSB, Ben is actively researching issues of large-scale distributed systems, reliable networking and secure and private communication. In addition to co-chairing recent workshops on peer-to-peer networking (IPTPS 2006, MobiShare 2007), Ben is a recent recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2005), and the MIT Technology Review's TR-35, Top 35 Innovators under 35 (2006).