The Brains

“This isn’t well known in the world, but if you live in Austin and understand computer science, you know that many seminal products were developed here, particularly in artificial intelligence,” says Amir Husain, whose A.I. company, SparkCognition, works with such clients as Boeing, Honeywell, and the U.S. Department of Energy. IBM has long had a large presence in Austin— “Much of the development of IBM’s Watson was done here,” he notes. The serial entrepreneur moved to Austin from Lahore, Pakistan, as a teenager to learn from his computer-science hero, Turing Award-winner Edsger Dijkstra, and his colleagues at the University of Texas. Now Husain represents a strain of deep tech in Austin, home to firms like data and engagement platform Umbel, and even the legendary game-developer Richard Garriott’s Portalarium, which Husain admires for its rich in-game A.I. Longtime Austin tech stalwarts including Dell and Bazaarvoice continue to feed the talent pool, but Husain reserves the most credit for UT. “It’s one of the largest universities in the country, in enrollment, with a top 10 computer-science department,” he says. “Plus, Austin has an open-mindedness—it embraces all cultures and the arts along with the sciences. That combination is very hard to beat.”