Steve Cohen

EVP, COO, & Co-Founder   


Basis Technology

Steve co-founded Basis Technology in 1995 and oversees the firm’s business operations. With his engineering background, Steve seeks to move the dial on real-world problems by finding achievable waypoints between academic thinking and production-grade technology.

In the mid-90s, Steve recognized a common need among major search engines—Infoseek, Lycos, Google, Yahoo!—and led the company to develop its first text analytics products. With the success of these products, the company started building AI applications for mission-critical operations for national security. Steve is now working to bring the technology developed for the US Intelligence community back to the commercial sector for risk management and opportunity building applications.

Prior to Basis Technology, Steve was an engineering manager for Cognex Corporation in Tokyo and development manager for SMT device inspection. He also consulted on software internationalization engineering and developed software for embedded systems and electronic test equipment. Steve has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT and studied at Waseda University in Tokyo. He actively mentors startup companies at Mass Challenge and other incubators.

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