CORE.TEAM 01 / ABOUT
Team

About Us

Say hi via hello@schemantic.io.

Wing Yew Lum

Wing Yew Lum

Founder, Chair, Janitor Mostly Emeritus

Tries to be helpful.

A veteran of Amazon (AWS, Marketplace, Alexa), Wing Yew led most functions—data science, engineering, product, programs, UX research, analytics, and marketing. He delivered S-Team / board-level goals that ultimately produced "stock doubling" (S-Team's words) results via billions in A/B validated impact.

He then founded one of Inc Magazine's fastest growing companies. Later, with some amazing and beautiful people, he launched an incubator focused on human flourishing, which includes Schemantic.

Prior to corporate and thanks to the encouragement of his mom, he finished some degrees at the University of Washington and led the honors college.

He is a proud husband to Kirsten, father to two incredible daughters, and unashamed follower of Jesus.

Sheffield Leithart

Sheffield Leithart

VP of Engineering

Does a lot of engineering and algorithms.

Six-year engineering veteran of Amazon, across AWS and Marketplace. He is a filmmaker and photographer. He went to the University of Idaho for computer science but dropped out to become Zac Brown Band's tour photographer. He dropped out of the Zac Brown Band tour to start a family.

He is a National Merit Scholar (99th percentile) with near-perfect ACT scores (99th percentile).

Garrett Fiddler

Garrett Fiddler

VP of Science

Does a lot of science.

Over a decade of experience in machine learning and data science, having built high-performance models across half a dozen verticals.

Garrett enjoys playing music, reading books in dead languages, building impractical NLP projects, floating Pacific Northwest rivers, and casually cosplaying Lord of the Rings characters — and he swears he will get back to writing fiction more regularly any day now. In the meantime he is happy to give extemporaneous lectures at no additional cost on subjects including all-in-one basketball metrics, the problem of reference, how Louis Brandeis saved America, and what really caused the bronze age collapse.

Garrett graduated from Yale University with honors. He holds near perfect GRE scores (99th percentile) and near perfect SAT scores (99th percentile).

Jonathan Brownell

Jonathan Brownell

Principal Engineer

Does a lot of engineering.

Over 30 years in the technology sector. Has led the development and delivery of solutions to global companies including Hewlett-Packard, Walmart, John Deere, SUSE, General Motors, and the U.S. Dept. of Defense, and has assisted a host of startups in launching successful products and services.

Jonathan spent his formative years with a juggling & unicycling troupe before concluding that it might not be his greatest calling in life. He was disappointed to find that prowess with torches & machetes was deemed neither relevant nor appropriate for data center environments.

Because Wing Yew has insisted that Jonathan overshare: Jonathan was homeschooled as a child and has insisted on inflicting the same upon his own progeny. He comes from five generations of music teachers and strives to be the most insufferable of them all.

Jaimil Dalwadi

Jaimil Dalwadi

Founding Engineer

Does a lot of engineering.

Previously, Jaimil was a software engineer/quant building trading models at Bloomberg in New York.

Prior to that, he interned with the Schemantic team, where at some point Wing Yew started shouting at Jaimil: "I, Wing Yew, declare you the strongest (intern) of them all!" #madara #guy #the8thgate

Somewhere between that pivotal moment, Wing Yew saying "I'm pushing to main, mane!", and Jaimil contemplating what must be "done for the plot," he accepted a role as a founding engineer.

Jaimil graduated with high honors (magna cum laude) from Waterloo's Computer Science program (3.9 GPA, 8x Term Distinction).

Wing Yew, who barely graduated college, still asks: "High honors good. But why no highest honors?"

Anna Kepes

Anna Kepes

Partner

Does a lot of whatever it takes.

Before joining, Anna went to school and spent time volunteering in and around war zones delivering humanitarian aid. By partnering with the team, Anna discovered that ontological frameworks, data provenance, and the MECE outlay of reality are, improbably, where she has the most fun. She almost became an event coordinator at what Wing Yew called a "Tier 4 non-profit" before Wing Yew and divine forces (so he claims) conspired to redirect her.

While Anna does not come from a conventional analytics background, and no one is 100% sure why we hired her, the decision has held until now (March 25th, 2026 at 9:51 AM PST). Related, Anna has developed a habit of volunteering + being volun-told for tasks described as "functionally impossible" and against most of the odds, made them less impossible by deconstructing and rebuilding them from scratch — earning the nickname "Annabolic".

Outside of that, she cries at sunsets, has 2x raged out not super respectfully at Wing Yew after 11 PM local time, and credits an aggressively curated childhood diet of LOTR and Star Wars for her strong sense of justice.

Unlike Jaimil, she graduated summa cum laude.

Erin Torgerson

Erin Torgerson

Product Manager & QA Engineer

Does a lot of product management and quality assurance.

Erin is our founder Kirsten's sister and was given a potentially less fair advantage in life: learning to code, evaluate data, and build machine learning models directly from Kirsten. She's completed and deployed dozens of machine learning models and over a hundred intensive analyses across multiple verticals.

She's the resident AI expert for an emerging incubator in Seattle, studied data science at the University of Washington, and true to regional Seattle vibes, is a certified trauma-informed yoga instructor.

Philip Gallo

Philip Gallo

Founding Executive and Partner

Does a lot of product evangelism.

Phil has spent nearly two decades building, advising, and scaling technology companies. He founded QubeWorks, a software company serving Department of Defense and Intelligence Community agencies handling Top Secret/SCI work, and led it through a successful acquisition. He went on to grow a new vertical at Domain7 into $2M+ in revenue, owned the purchase funnel for Xbox at Microsoft, and ran applied R&D for Point B, a national consulting firm.

Phil raised $7M to acquire a small business and helped scale a startup from 55M to 75M+ monthly engaged users. He holds a security clearance background from his Pentagon-adjacent work and has a habit of making things operational that others leave theoretical.

Wing Yew, who writes some/most of the bios, says Phil is among the best fathers and friends any human could know.