MARK SWARINGEN
Product engineer / founder

I build AI
products &
systems.

I build AI products end to end — discovery, software, ML & LLMs, data, deployment. Before that, I helped grow a fund from five people to $10B in assets.

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AI SYSTEMS    PRODUCT ENGINEERING    VENTURES    DATA    AI SYSTEMS    PRODUCT ENGINEERING    VENTURES    DATA   
15Years building systems
$10BAUM at prior fund
10k+Users in production
4Active ventures
Currently building2020 — present

Four active
ventures.

01

SAPR

AI engineering studio shipping production agentic systems for financial services, education, and workforce clients — discovery through DevOps.

Co-founder2025 — now
02

BAIBU

Community AI for Indonesia, backed by the UNICEF Venture Fund. Founding team; product direction, go-to-market, and the technical build.

CTO2025 — now
03

FirmFlare

AI-powered search and retrieval for brokered business listings. Full technical build, product direction, and commercial model.

Co-founder / CTO2025 — now
04

Ibu Punya Mimpi

Ed-tech platform and micro-venture fund helping mothers in Indonesia become entrepreneurs. Built and run end to end — now at 10,000+ active users.

CTO2020 — now
Markets & investing2010 — now

A decade in
markets.

The engineering came later. First came buy-side investing — finding the problem in a business before writing a line of code is still how every build starts.

01

SteelPath Funds

Joined the ~5-person launch team of the first open-ended public MLP funds; helped build to $10B in assets before acquisition by OppenheimerFunds. Portfolio management across energy, infrastructure, utilities, and shipping.

VP, Investment Research2010 — 2017
02

RS Associates

Private investment and operating group across beauty services, media, healthcare staffing, and broker platforms — from first rounds to mature operations.

Managing Partner2018 — now
BackgroundThe throughline

Find the problem. Build the system. Ship it. Technology is simply the tool I reach for now.

I started in markets, helping grow SteelPath from a five-person launch team to $10B in assets. Since then I've built and operated ventures across finance, education, and healthcare — and today I build AI products end to end: business discovery, solution design, software, ML and LLM fine-tuning, data, and DevOps, shipped to production across multiple products in parallel.

I also teach: co-instructor of “Building Large Language Models from Scratch” in Lisbon.

M.Sc. Information Studies — Data ScienceUniversity of Amsterdam
B.B.A. FinanceUT Austin, McCombs · Exchange: HKUST
Currently thinking aboutAlways in motion

What has my
attention.

  1. 01Agentic retrieval
  2. 02Multi-hop Q&A
  3. 03Enterprise knowledge systems
  4. 04AI-powered real-time data analysis
  5. 05Domain-specific small language models
  6. 06Multi-modal world systems

If you're working on one of these — or think I should be interested in something else — say so.

05 / Say hello

Have a good
problem?

Tell me what you’re working on.
I’ll reply directly to your inbox.LinkedIn ↗