Crossing Minds Hires Ching-Wei Chen as VP of Engineering

Chen joins the company from Spotify where he led a team of machine learning engineers developing personalized recommendation technologies.


SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 08, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Crossing Minds, the company behind the smartest and most efficient recommendation platform for business, today announced the hiring of Ching-Wei Chen as VP of Engineering. Chen brings a comprehensive background in machine learning and product development and will lead the expansion of Crossing Minds’ engineering team.

Chen joins Crossing Minds from Spotify, where he most recently worked as Director of Machine Learning and led the team that developed advanced recommendation technologies and product features including Discover Weekly, Daily Mix and Home screen personalization. He previously led teams at SoundCloud and Gracenote that developed large scale content analysis and discovery technologies for consumer and B2B customers.

“Ching-Wei brings incredibly valuable experience and expertise to the Crossing Minds team, having built some of the most impressive recommendation and personalization technology currently available for music and podcasts,” said Emile Contal, CTO and co-founder of Crossing Minds. “With Ching-Wei as our new VP of Engineering, we’ll bring further advancements to our product offerings for businesses and consumers across e-commerce and multimedia content, setting up Crossing Minds to continue to revolutionize online recommendations.”

“At Crossing Minds, we aim to build our team with the best minds in machine learning to power our unique and industry-leading platform for behavior-based recommendations. Ching-Wei is a proven leader in the field of AI and has built exceptional AI teams,” said Alexandre Robicquet, CEO and co-founder of Crossing Minds. “This is a pivotal moment for Crossing Minds, and Ching-Wei will help us bring our team and our platform into the next phase of our business.”

“Crossing Minds is already changing the game when it comes to recommendations, and this is an exciting time to be joining the company,” said Chen. “I’m looking forward to working with this amazing team to continue developing industry-leading personalization technologies that will change the way we all interact with businesses online for the better.”

Built on a foundation of AI research, the Crossing Minds recommendation platform’s advanced models power capabilities that are more robust and require far less data than traditional e-commerce recommender systems. The platform is built with AI embedded into six critical steps of its data pipeline, resulting in an ethical model that requires only first-party data and no personal identifiable information (PII) to deliver behavior-based recommendations that solve the e-commerce “cold start” problem.

Crossing Minds has conducted pilot programs across industries, finding that behavior-based recommendations delivered through their proprietary framework are effective across the board: from e-commerce to video streaming to home sharing marketplaces. In these pilots, Crossing Minds has found that, on average, businesses saw an increase of 92% in sales and 118% in click-through rates with their platform.

This news follows the company’s announcement of a strategic investment from Shopify in April of this year and its Series A funding round in October 2021. Crossing Minds has grown its customer base by 200% in 2022, adding businesses to its customer lineup including Eventbrite, Camp, Brut, and Grailed.

To learn more about Crossing Minds, visit crossingminds.com.

About Crossing Minds
Crossing Minds empowers forward-thinking businesses to create engaging, personalized experiences by deploying behavior-based recommendations. Founded and led by world-renowned AI experts, the Crossing Minds team worked to solve the challenge of truly personalized recommendations, ultimately developing the first end-to-end recommendation platform with AI built into every step of the pipeline. Crossing Minds’ AI is accessible for any business regardless of industry, size, or maturity and empowers the world’s most innovative companies to level up their customer experience. The company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Paris and Toronto. Learn more about Crossing Minds at crossingminds.com.

Media Contact:
media (at) crossingminds (dot) com