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Dr. Junaid Farooq is an AI researcher and the Chief Architect and Vice President of AI at Sprouts.ai, where he leads the engineering and AI organisation behind the company’s AI-native go-to-market platform and works closely with its executive team. He architected and launched Sprouts Data, a business-data API and MCP server that gives AI agents, developers, professionals and enterprises access to company, people, patent and research data.

At Sprouts.ai he led the technical discussions with investors in the company’s $9M pre-Series A in 2026, presenting the AI-native product platform and the data-processing and MLOps pipelines he architected and built. The same year he led the technical due diligence and negotiations for Sprouts.ai’s acquisition of the search and data technology and AI IP of StartUs Insights.

Before Sprouts.ai, he was Principal Machine Learning Architect and Head of AI at StartUs Insights in Vienna, where he led the platform’s move from big-data SaaS to AI-native products, including a multi-agent AI platform and a semantic search engine used by more than 1,000 corporate partners such as Samsung, Nestlé and Siemens Gamesa. He earlier led research and development at Genie AI in Toronto, and started his career as an engineer in industrial automation in Dubai.

He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the National Institute of Technology Srinagar. His research addresses a core weakness of deep learning models, the errors that build up as they predict further ahead, and has been published in multiple peer-reviewed papers, one of which won the Best Paper Award at ICETCI 2021.

He is the author of two books: ZERO DAY: The Invisible War, on vulnerability and security in the age of artificial intelligence, and The Art of Code, on clean code and software architecture. He writes about how AI teams work, and speaks on AI-native transformation, running AI teams, data architecture for AI, and AI security.