Leadership Team
The founding shareholders have invested in building out a
management team capable of driving the business through the next phase of growth
WALTER BATTISTETTI
CEOWalter is a co-founder and has been the CEO of Sovran since it started as an Italian company, forming BlueLab in 2008. He has spent over 21 years in the speech recognition industry and started developing the technology behind Sovran after experiencing first-hand the limitations resulting from ordinary machine learning methodologies applied in speech recognition.
GIOVANNI AGUS
COOGiovanni joined Sovran in 2018 and was tasked to help the company develop its corporate strategy and governance. He is responsible for ensuring the business infrastructure evolves as it goes through its next phase of growth. He brings skills in evaluating risks, developing risk mitigation strategies and corporate strategy.
CLIVE ELLEFORDE
CROClive joined Sovran to lead the company’s growth strategy and revenue. He has over 30yrs experience of B2B marketing and development, especially with scale-ups in the tech sectors. He has worked throughout the UK, EMEA and the US. He commenced in the tech sector in the 90s, developing fraud prevention solutions to the banking and insurance sector, as well as language solutions and technology.
PATRICK BLACKMAN SPHAIER
CTO Patrick is responsible for defining, implementing and ensuring the alignment of the IT strategy to the company’s strategic goals and also leads the company’s R&D team. Prior to Sovran, Patrick worked in technical roles at Unisys Brazil, Banco BBM, Datamec, Contax and Tata.
TOM HOUWING
Chief Programming Officer (CPO)Tom was born in The Hague, in the Netherlands, in 1962. He studied music at the Conservatory of Rotterdam and in 1999, after 15 years within education and the music industry, he switched career to speech technology, leveraging his past experience within the IT industry, starting as Voice User Interface Architect.
