Brian Raymond

Brian Raymond is founder and CEO of Unstructured, which turns messy enterprise documents into data that language models can use. He earned an MBA from Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and an MA and BA in political science from the University of California, Davis, according to Primer.

Leaving a PhD Program for the CIA

"I left a PhD program to join the CIA," he told The Uncharted Algorithm. The chance to write classified assessments for the president every day "was too good to pass up." He worked as an analyst at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and in the Middle East, then moved to the White House to run Iraq and ISIS policy on the National Security Council.

Employee Number 20 at Primer AI

He and his wife wanted to move back to California, where both are from, and he joined Primer AI in San Francisco, California, as roughly employee number 20. After four years there, working on models deployed in classified settings, he saw "this really ugly, nasty problem" of turning raw enterprise data into usable formats, he told Shield Capital. "That was really how Unstructured was born."