This month’s Fintech Spotlight showcases Wallaroo.AI. Wallaroo.AI helps teams easily operationalize AI models to any cloud, edge or on-premises environment. I sat down with Younes Amar, Vice President Product and Customer Success to discuss how becoming an IBM Fintech has benefited their clients and what 2025 technology he is most excited about. We also found out his “go to” karaoke song (hint - 90s boy band)!
To start, could you please tell me about your professional background?
As I reflected on this question, it hit me that time does fly, especially when you enjoy what you do. It’s hard to believe that I have 15+ years of experience building software products that deliver high impact analytics and AI for ESG, government, logistics, healthcare and insurance industries. Currently I am the Vice President of Product & Customer Success at Wallaroo.AI. Prior to joining Wallaroo.AI, I was the Product Lead, Data Science and AI at Tempus Labs, where I worked on the mission of leveraging large scale multimodal clinical and genomic data to develop AI-enabled products that helped accelerate scientific discovery and improve patients’ outcomes.
Tell us about Wallaroo.AI’s software/service offerings and where you are located.
Wallaroo.AI is a software platform enabling turnkey AI inference for standard and custom AI models, with Optimized AI inference performance on CPU and GPU with built-in AI governance and Flexible and Portable MLOps/LLMOps across any AI use case, any hardware and any environment (cloud, on-premises and edge). Wallaroo.AI is headquartered in NYC with a fully distributed team across North America and Europe.
What is your target market?
Wallaroo.AI is heavily invested in the following industries:
- Retail
- Public sector
- Aerospace/Defense
- Healthcare & Life sciences
- Manufacturing
We work with companies ranging from 500 - 15,000 employees.
Most of our collaboration is with:
- Chief AI officer, VP of AI/Engineering/Data science - Acting as decision makers and exec sponsors for our engagements
- Director of AI/Data science/Analytics or Principal Architect - Acting as our Wallaroo.AI champions within our client organizations
- AI developer (Data scientist, ML engineer) - Our beloved daily product users (aka our primary source of feedback)
How has joining the IBM Fintech Program benefited you?
We are early into the program, but the support and GTM assistance has been a great benefit to Wallaroo.AI.
- Co-marketing, events & promotions: We have been working with the Ecosystem team to generate community and joint marketing materials. We attended a Gartner event with IBM Cloud executives, and we are planning on assisting with a technical session at Powerup Common event 2025 in Sweden
- Introductions to existing IBM Power customers: This has been highly beneficial. We have been introduced to several IBM customers and as a result are actively involved in one POC with another POC starting this summer.
- Cloud credits for co-development: We have used cloud credits to stand up our instance in PowerVS and we are leveraging existing cloud credits to create an integration with watsonx.gov.
- Collaboration: Targeting non-IBM cloud customers to migrate AI inference workloads onto IBM Power (including Power VS) has resulted in Wallaroo.AI and IBM enabling CPU inferencing, rivaling GPU performance at a lower cost (learn more).
How does being an IBM Fintech benefit your clients?
As an IBM Fintech, we have been able to provide our clients with solution alternatives to drive better inference performance and lower costs by leveraging IBM’s platforms such as Power/PowerVS. In addition, our clients now have new ways to work with hybrid AI environments and de-risk AI investments across different cloud providers.
What new IT technology are you most excited about for 2025 and why?
I am most excited about GenAI/Agentic AI/ and EdgeAI / Physical AI. As enterprises look to operationalize insights and automate decision making from their distributed data assets, and with the emergence of AI needing to run everywhere, Wallaroo.AI, with its universal and portable AI inference offering, is uniquely positioned to help meet demand for AI models running everywhere while offering optimizations for AI inference performance and cost.
If a fintech is considering joining the IBM Fintech program, what advice would you give them?
- Be clear on your unique selling proposition
- Articulate your target market
- Articulate your solution’s benefits
- Articulate how you would complement IBM’s existing offerings to drive a better together story
Okay now it is time for our Lightning Round (fun) questions:
- If you were a superhero, what would be your superpower and why? Mind reading! I tend to have good intuition about things and I’m able to read people and situations well. Being able to read minds will give me an edge!
- Last podcast you listened to? Business breakdowns
- Favorite ice cream? Mint chocolate chip
- Current favorite app? Apple podcasts
- Last book you read? “Lucky Loser” - By Michael Kosta
- Your go-to karaoke song? “I Want it that Way!”
If people want to connect with you, where can they find you?
Please connect with me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/younes-amar-733a0350/.