Hello! I'm Zach Buckner, an entrepreneur, engineer, and investor focused on software to make work simpler.
Most of my career has involved leveraging advanced analytics -- technologies like machine learning, simulation, and optimization -- to solve logistics, operations, and workflow challenges.
I've led teams that have seen what works, in diverse industries including retail, CPG, e-commerce, air freight, medicine, defense intelligence, banking, and investment management.
Current Work
Glyphic Software - CEO and Board Member. Glyphic builds AI-based software that automatically reads and processes large firehoses of documents, for some of the largest global corporations in finance, retail, and consumer products.
Blackmarker - Board Member. Blackmarker builds AI-powered software to automatically redact large streams of documents for many of the nation's biggest banks and law firms.
Burris Logistics - Board Member. Burris is a diversified logistics company, with businesses in foodservice redistribution, freight management, and information technology. Burris has a 100-year history of serving many of North America's leading grocers, distributors, restaurants, and manufacturers.
Prior Work
Relay Foods - Founder and CEO. Relay started in 2006, and grew to serve Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and Washington DC with daily pickup and home-delivery grocery service. Relay was a pioneer. Relay was purchased by private equity in 2016, largely for our software. This software has gone on to serve as the e-commerce backbone for many larger retailers, facilitating billions of dollars of online grocery sales.
Elder Research - Vice President of Technology. Elder Research is one of the nation's largest and most respected advanced analytics consultancies. I joined my grad school professor John Elder in 2004, when ERI was just a few grad students, and a strong belief that "AI" and "ML" tools would grow in capability and demand. Elder Research has enjoyed long-term strategic consulting relationships with many globals leaders within the retail, energy, healthcare, banking, pharmaceutical, and defense intelligence industries.
Education
University of Virginia - Master of Science, Electrical Engineering, 2004. Most memorably, I was married the summer before classes started, and became a father to my first daughter, Isabelle, before I graduated. While a student, I developed a novel high-resolution position sensor that was commercialized by the University of Virginia's Patent Foundation. The patents surrounding this invention are licensed to a market-leading automation company serving well-known automotive brands.
University of Virginia - Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering, 2002. This period of my life included quite a bit of goofing off, so I will not be listing my GPA. Highlights included hitchhiking across Alaska for a summer, and operating a bustling grilled-cheese sandwich business during another summer, circumnavigating the US following music festivals. Academic highlights included co-developing a novel technique to use neural networks to diagnose bridge health, listening for the "acoustic emissions" of intermolecular bonds breaking. Our paper about this technique won 1st place in a UVA undergraduate research challenge. And, working for GE-spinout called Trimation to earn money for college, I designed and built an add-on board for a popular industrial computer, allowing it to receive highly accurate time signals from space (an IRIG-B satellite transceiver for the General Electric 90-30).