Our Mission
Simantex will be a leader in the application of diverse Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods to create actionable solutions for business, integrating both “black box” and our proprietary “white box” approaches. First, we are leveraging our deep expertise in AI, sports and legal gaming, to create solutions that ensure the Integrity of contests, and the legalized wagering associated with them.
Who We are
- A start-up company, incorporated in Rhode Island
- Founded by experts in diverse public gaming, artificial intelligence applications, e-commerce, and software development
- With deep gaming industry experiece in lottery, casino, horse racing, sports betting, and esports (Global B2B, B2C, and B2G)
- Having a large business/enterprise pedigree complemented by start-up experience
- A track record of creating partnerships, ecosystems, and collaboration
- With the ability and resouce access to scale up
Brian Kennedy
Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder
Brian Kennedy is CTO and Co-Founder of Simantex, where he leads the R&D and Engineering teams developing the Athena Platform, an enterprise artificial intelligence and simulation platform enabling advanced fraud detection and player performance improvements in esports. He has worked in the software industry for over 28 years. Previously, Brian was the CTO of Precision Design Studio, where he established and led an advanced research lab to focus on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced architectures and algorithms designed for massively parallel systems using NVIDIA's CUDA and GPUs.
Brian has also servered as CTO of InMotion System - the developers of HitTrax, a game changing system for baseball and softball training based on a high-tech data collection system focused on player engagement and performance improvement. Prior to that, he serverd as Senior Director of Center of Excellence / Enterprise Architecture at Salesforce Cloud Commerce, as well as Director of Mobile / Web Development for MasterCard Advisors, and Founder and CEO of Prism Technologies.
Kevin Kennedy
Co-Founder
Kevin is a technical visionary with 15+ years of experience leading and growing teams and organizations. His experience is in Information Technology, Ecommerce and Financial Systems in Fortune 500 companies, as well as startup environments. Prior to founding Precision Design Studios, Kevin served in a senior technical role in Demandware's client services division, which he helped to grow in both an architecture and technical sales capacity. With a strong entrepreneurial spirit, Kevin was confident he could build a successful Demandware implementation company.
In 2014, Kevin's vision for the Precision Design Studios to be a self-sustaining company led to the engineering of pdsCommerce, an enterprise commerce platform that will pioneer the industry.
CEO by day, car aficionado by night. When Kevin is not at the office, you can find him on the race track with his Ferrari. He also loves 3D printing, the Oculus, drones – any form of new technology!
John Flynn
Co-Founder
John is a global management executive with extensive experience in operations, international leadership, project management, business & strategy development, PMO development, and venture capital in the industries of ecommerce, information technologies, lottery gaming, financial services, health care, government and commercial services transaction processing. John has significant experience on large scale systems integration projects and operations management within EMEA, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific. At Simantex, John ensures that all teams work in synergy with the company's executives and sales teams to support global business development.
John's advice for life is to enjoy the journey. He loves to travel (he's hoping for a Simantex office in the Caribbean!), all things Rhode Island (beaches, restaurants, politics), sports (Patriots, Celtics, college basketball, and lacrosse), watching and helping his son's swim team, cooking, dinner with family and friends, and sometimes a nice quiet time at home with his dog (oh, and the family, too!)
James Herbert
Co-Founder
Jim is a strategic marketing executive and consultant, working with software, IT, and complex services companies. He is a former executive with two major public companies, and for the past 16 years, has consulted to businesses selling mainly to governments and industry. Jim first worked for a defense contractor, then for the world’s largest public gaming company. At both places, he built marketing groups from the ground up and then led them. He managed campaigns to win major contracts with governments and other businesses; ranging from war gaming software, to real-time military command and control systems, to public gaming/lottery enterprise solutions on six continents.
After 18 years of that, Jim started a management consulting practice, providing actionable strategic marketing counsel and new business campaign support for IT, software, and defense-oriented companies. For the owners of smaller companies and startups, this involves overall CMO-type support. For small and major companies in the public gaming and IT sectors, it involves key account capture planning support through negotiations and close. Whenever possible, Jim heads to the woods with his German Shepherd Dog. Ivan is like a perfect client. He is always forthcoming with his needs, presenting them clearly and unambiguously. Further, he always provides an immediate positive response (visual and auditory) once those needs are met.
Steve Beason
Co-Founder
Steve Beason was appointed Chief Technology Officer of Scientific Games in August,2005 and later in 2006 was appointed to President of the Lottery Systems Group. In 2014 he was named the Enterprise Chief Technology Officer for Scientific Games Corporation after the purchase and integration of both WMS and Bally Technologies. Scientific Games is the worlds largest gaming product and services provider headquartered in Las Vegas Nevada. Scientific Games employees a total of over 8500 employees and Mr. Beason manages a team of over 1800 technology professionals situated in 5 centers of excellence located in Las Vegas, Chicago, Silicon Valley, Atlanta and India. Yearly revenue for Scientific Games was $2.8 Billion in 2015. In 2016 he also took on the additional title of CIO for Scientific Games.
Prior to joining the Company, Mr. Beason was Executive Director, Information Technology of The Hong Kong Jockey Club. Mr. Beason managed a staff of nearly 400 IT professionals and was responsible for leveraging Information Technology to support the Club's mission to deliver world-class horseracing and betting services to the Hong Kong public.
Prior to that, Mr. Beason was Vice President, Software Engineering of GTECH, a global supplier of systems and services to the lottery and gaming/entertainment industries. Responsible for building and customizing software for specific clients, he oversaw 20 regional development centers on 5 continents and successfully developed and installed over 40 major gaming systems world-wide. In his 12 years at the company, Mr Beason also held a number of other key technical and managerial positions.
Earlier in his career, Mr Beason spent two years in Sweden as Technical Project Manager of AB Trav och Gallop, where he worked on the deployment of a national multi-track pari-mutuel wagering system for The Swedish National Horse Racing Association.
