William Tunstall-Pedoe

William Tunstall-Pedoe is the Founder and former CEO of deep tech start-up Evi Technologies, and the driving force behind Amazon’s Echo and Alexa. An AI business leader with three decades of experience in software development, he is now a Fellow at Creative Destruction Lab, a Fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School, and an advisor to and investor in numerous companies.

Tunstall-Pedoe began working in software engineering as a teenager, and went on to study Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. He developed the chess-playing package Cyber Chess, which was published by The Fourth Dimension, and also created Anagram Genius, which created the anagrams used by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code and for which Tunstall-Pedoe received acknowledgment in the book. After time working for companies including XOB, Acorn Computers and IOTA Software, Tunstall-Pedoe founded True Knowledge, which would become Evi Technologies. In early 2012, the first version of semantic search engine Evi was launched, quickly racking up millions of downloads and reaching No 1 in the Apple app store. Just a few months later, Evi was acquired by Amazon, where Tunstall-Pedoe continued to work, serving as a Principal Product Manager in the team that developed and launched Amazon Alexa and the first Alexa device Amazon Echo.

Tunstall-Pedoe is a full member of technology and bio-technology investment group Cambridge Angels, is a Fellow in Entrepreneurship at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel at Cambridge Innovation Capital. He is an advisor to speech interface solution Fluent.ai, and an advisor to personalised health platform Ada Health. Since 2016, he has been a Fellow at Creative Destruction Lab, a programme for seed-stage and scalable companies in science and technology industries.