Management

Gary Conkright

CEO and Founder

A visionary leader with a demonstrated ability to craft innovative strategies and manage results in a fast-changing business environment, Mr. Conkright recently led SmartSignal Corporation, a Chicago-based enterprise software firm, as the company’s chairman, president and chief executive officer. During his tenure, he secured $31 million in venture capital for early-stage development efforts to bring to market equipment health monitoring technology, based upon core technology developed at Argonne National Laboratory.

Matt Pipke

CTO and Founder

A decade ago, Matt left his private practice as an intellectual property attorney to pursue his passion for building solutions based on intelligent software. He has worked since then in high-tech startups, most recently at SmartSignal, where as CTO and IP counsel, he grew the company’s core technology from eight original patents to more than 40, and managed the development of the core technology into software tools incorporated into the company's products and services. He also served as legal counsel for all licensing deals, transactions and partnerships of the company, and managed enforcement of the company's intellectual property. He continues his passionate work building sophisticated products and solutions for healthcare at VG Bioinformatics, where he also remains unable to escape the legal duties for which his attorney experience qualifies him. Matt has a degree in physics and speaks Mandarin Chinese and German.

Stephan Wegerich

Chief Science Officer

Stephan has spent over 13 years researching and developing novel machine learning, pattern recognition and multidimensional signal processing algorithms for use in a wide variety of cutting edge applications in areas as far ranging as condition monitoring of nuclear plants, anomaly detection in computer systems, and incipient fault detection in jet engines. His innovations have formed the technological foundations for both VGBio and his prior company, SmartSignal, where he served as Chief Scientist. Stephan is a recipient of the 1998 RD-100 award for his contributions to the development of MSET. In 2003 he was named one of Chicago's "Top 40 under 40" by Crain's Chicago Business. His technology received the 2003 Chicago Sun-Times Innovation Award and was a runner-up for the 2006 Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards. Stephan holds 24 issued patents and currently has over 20 patent applications pending. Before working at SmartSignal, Stephan was a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory, where his research focused on complex system modeling and pattern recognition for use in a variety of applications. The culmination of his groups work resulted in the development of the multivariate state estimation technique (MSET), a well known anomaly detection technique used throughout industry.