Soofi Safavi

Three-time founder. Technology architect. Engineer.

Building infrastructure for the physical world, onchain.

Technology leadership across financial services, real estate, AI, and infrastructure.

Current Work

Elephant Network

FounderJul 2025—Present

Elephant Network is building a verifiable semantic memory for the physical world. It helps teams putting property data in front of AI agents move from fragmented property records to verified, onchain data that AI agents can actually use. It starts with one record, maps fragments across sources and counties, and makes it verified once, ready for every agent.

Learn more about Elephant
Prism

FounderPresent

Prism helps leadership teams move their organizations from scattered AI-tool adoption to a governed human-agent operating model. It starts with one governed agent, maps where people are acting as workflow connectors, and redesigns the workflow with clear ownership, access, and escalation.

Learn more about Prism

Open to advisory, employment, project, partnership, and acquisition conversations.

Expertise & Outcomes

Technical Leadership outcomes

  • 3 companies foundedHeavyWater, Staircase, and Elephant Network
  • 7 leadership rolesacross founder, C-suite, and VP appointments

Selected Work

  • Radian — Enterprise modernization

    VP, Business Segment Partner → SVP & CTO

    Jul 2006—Sep 2015

    Led business and IT modernization, AWS cloud strategy, and B2B technology integrations. Insourced mortgage document management processing millions of pages each month, reducing cost and turnaround time by 70%.

    2015 AWS presentation

  • HeavyWater — AI document intelligence

    Founder & CEO

    Sep 2015—Feb 2020

    Founded HeavyWater to apply AI and machine learning to mortgage-document work. AIVA read documents, extracted information, and automated repetitive verification. Black Knight acquired HeavyWater in June 2018.

    Acquisition announcement

  • Staircase — Real-estate workflow infrastructure

    Co-founder & CTO

    Mar 2020—Dec 2025

    Built APIs and data infrastructure to automate mortgage workflows and connect fragmented systems. TechCrunch described Staircase’s vision as an “AWS Marketplace for the mortgage industry.” Staircase raised an $18M Series A in 2021, bringing total funding to $24M.

    TechCrunch profile

Technology Adoption

Selected milestone: 2018, Applied AI in mortgage operations

HeavyWater’s AIVA used AI, machine learning, neural, and contextual techniques for mortgage documents. Black Knight acquired HeavyWater that year.

Acquisition announcement

Early Career

JPMorgan Chase — VP, Application Development

2001—2006

Led application development in financial services.

  • Engineering Leadership
  • Software Architecture
  • FinTech

Verizon — Application Architect

Jan 1999—Jan 2001

Designed application systems in a telecommunications environment.

  • Software Architecture

IBM — Knowledge Engineer

Jan 1997—Jan 1998

Worked on knowledge-engineering systems before the current wave of AI.

  • AI/ML
  • Knowledge Engineering

CGI — Software Architect

Jan 1995—Jan 1997

Designed software systems and application architecture.

  • Software Architecture
  • Software Engineering

Bell Canada — Application Architect

Jan 1994—Jan 1995

Designed application systems in telecommunications.

  • Software Architecture

Scotiabank — Senior Software Engineer

Jan 1993—Jan 1994

Built software systems in financial services.

  • Software Engineering
  • FinTech

Talks & Publications

  • Building ML Platforms in Financial Services with Serverless

    AWS New York Summit 2019July 18, 2019

  • Infrastructure as Code

    AWS re:InventOctober 12, 2015

  • Processing Money in the Cloud

    AWS re:InventNovember 17, 2014

Awards

Credentials

Entrepreneurship

Industry

Education

  • Carnegie Mellon University, Heinz College

    2 years · Graduate Study · Information Technology

  • Drexel University

    6 years · PhD Study · Brain-Computer Interface

  • University of Pennsylvania

    4 years · PhD Study · Systems Engineering

  • Rutgers University

    Graduate Study · Mathematics

  • Johns Hopkins University

    Graduate Study · Computational and Applied Mathematics