It is undeniable that for most individuals with a very strong technological mind, people skills are often a challenge. However, Taha Yassine Zinifi is a rare breed who seems to possess both a technical genius, and a brilliant ability to mentor and support those coming up in the tech world. In fact, he was granted the Outstanding Investment and Leadership award, as a graduate student from the highly-prestigious Ecole Polytechnique in France - a distinguished honor awarded to less than 1% of his class. It was clear from his time in college that he would find the greatest satisfaction and inspiration in his career by fusing both of these talents together.
A Man of Community
Taha Zinifi is a natural born leader. And so, as he began his career with ClearMetal in 2017, he also dedicated his free time and energy to community building events and peer mentoring.
"As an entrepreneur, I'm committed to [helping] organizations around the world leverage technology as a force of good and [contributing] to build a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable society," he shares about his personal mission.
During his early years in the industry, Taha worked with Talentspace - an all-in-one live online recruiting event platform, where participants and employers connect and interact digitally - as a Lead Organizer. With this event planning experience under his belt, he went on to organize substantial fundraising efforts for several non-profit events. As a tech enthusiast, he also enjoyed organizing hackathons, which he did for various organizations including universities, nonprofits (such as AI for Good and France is AI) and private institutions (such as EY and RATP). As an event organizer, Taha was able to successfully fundraise over $2M for startup weekends, hackathons, conferences and workshops.
Sharing the Knowledge
As an entrepreneur, Taha found great success with his own startup, Kernel Risk. The company leveraged satellite imagery to transform how insurers model catastrophic risk, in particular regarding natural disasters, in order to bring more financial resilience and to improve the emergency response on the ground. Kernel Risk helped to raise government awareness on the necessity to better model risks and their work with large European insurance companies was impactful. In fact, it made such an impact that Kernel Risk was recognized by the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator with both funding and support. Taha Zinifi enjoyed the great success of Kernel Risk, however, he was ready to pursue other projects and went on to sell the core technology to a late stage startup just one year later.
Taha is a very generous man, and found a passion in helping to guide and coach those following in his entrepreneurial footsteps. His deep understanding of product development and management made him an asset in consulting, and he developed a strong reputation in the industry. He has assisted early-stage ventures in conducting product discovery and delivering impactful proofs of concept to demonstrate the viability of their business. In this role, he has helped to launch over 100 ventures, with more than a dozen of those still active and thriving. Taha has also served as a consultant for Fortune 500 companies, such as TotalEnergies and EY, to coach and mentor their cohorts of intrapreneurs.
Products with an Impact
Taha is now an experienced product leader who specializes in driving vision and roadmapping for businesses. His primary focus is on effective collaboration between customer and company, with cross-functional partners to deliver successful results.
Although he originally worked with ClearMetal as a data scientist, he returned to the company with a wealth of new experience to lead the product team in 2019. ClearMetal, Inc. was a leader in the Continuous Delivery Experience (CDX), enabling supply chain organizations to optimize logistics and provide their customers with easy access to trusted, live information about their shipments. The platform used proprietary machine learning algorithms to escape static-visibility paradigms, making more sense of supply chain data. Taha played a critical role in building this highly differentiated product, while simultaneously shaping the company's award-winning customer-centric culture.
As Product Manager, Taha controlled the product strategy and execution of ClearMetal's business. Leading a team of seven engineers, he launched the company's Rail Visibility product, which was a complex enterprise product that required ingesting and processing new data sources and redesigning a significant part of the UI. Overall, his work has contributed to saving customers over $50M in fees related to lack of transportation visibility. And, most recently, his work was featured in a webinar with their largest customer about how ClearMetal helped many prominent US manufacturers survive the COVID-19 crisis.
Earlier this year, ClearMetal was acquired by project44, a supply chain visibility leader according to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, partly for the quality of the user interface. In the new establishment, Taha is now leading the Application Experience department responsible for building the next-generation platform at project44. This product, inspired from the work done at
ClearMetal will similarly transform how global supply chains run their transportation operations.
It is without a doubt that Taha Yassine Zinifi is a man of many talents, who is self-motivated and passionate about creating a better world. In a time when the global supply chain is facing massive challenges, his technological expertise, combined with a big heart and innovative mind, are sure to birth new products that will save and sustain the industry for many years to come.
