Dr. Amr Awadallah is the CEO and cofounder of Vectara, a company that is enabling organizations to leverage GenAI in business applications by reducing risks from hallucinations, bias, copyright infringement, and model weight pollution.  

Amr previously served as VP of Developer Relations for Google Cloud. Prior to joining Google in Nov 2019, Amr co-founded Cloudera in 2008 and as Global CTO, he spent 11 years working closely with enterprises around the world on how to ingest and extract value from big data (he famously coined the concept of “schema-on-read vs schema-on-write”). Cloudera went public in 2017 on the NYSE, and was acquired by KKR + CD&R in 2021 for $5.3b. 

He also served as vice president of product intelligence engineering at Yahoo! from 2000-2008. Amr joined Yahoo after they acquired his first startup, Aptivia, in mid-2000 which was a search engine for online product information. Amr received his PhD in EE from Stanford University, and his Bachelor and Master Degrees from Cairo University, Egypt.

Amr is one of 10 luminary scientists and technologists that were granted honorary citizenship to Saudi Arabia in 2021.