#181 Artem Koren: When Your Moat Becomes the Floor

Artem Koren is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Sembly AI, a meeting intelligence platform that transcribes, analyzes, and synthesizes professional service meetings into structured work products. Rising to prominence in the early 2020s, he became widely known for building enterprise-grade AI transcription and natural language processing systems before large language models made such capabilities broadly accessible — engineering custom models from scratch for a category that had no clear precedent. The company, which he co-founded in 2019 alongside Gil Makleff, operates across 35 languages, holds SOC 2 Type 2 certification, has raised $4.64 million in total funding, and was named in the 2025 Gartner Innovation Guide for Generative AI Technologies.

Previously, as Senior Manager and Director in the IT Capital Markets Services practice at EY, Koren spent more than a decade advising Fortune 500 clients across financial services, auto insurance, energy, and professional services sectors in North America and Europe. He was recognized as a top 1 percent performer and became known for deploying enterprise-scale work management applications — hands-on experience in the client service delivery cycle that would later define Sembly’s product thesis.

Earlier in his career, Koren served as CEO and CTO of Visual Trading Systems, where he built and distributed technology solutions for the capital and commodity markets, and co-founded Neusana, applying deep learning to digital biopsy image analysis. He holds a BS in Computer Science and Economics from Columbia University and an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business.

Hey, Thanks for reading this. I mean that. There's a lot of content out there competing for your attention, and you spent some of it here. I hope it was worth it. Even better, I hope it prompted you to think about something differently enough that you'd share it with someone who'd get something out of it too.I started this podcast because tactics never stuck with me. What stuck were stories — business biographies, autobiographies, the decisions people made and why they made them. The principle only clicks once you know the story behind it.

So I built the thing I wanted to read. Every week I have two conversations with people who build in technology and product. Then I write the essay I wish I could find — one that puts you inside the conversation, through my eyes. What caught me off guard. What I kept thinking about after we hung up. Where the principle actually lives once you strip away the jargon.

I make this for myself first. If you read the way I do, you’ll want it too.

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