Moughees Ahmed - 🇨🇦
currently working on applied ML TTS @rimelabs // interested in discovering new knowledge using LLMs, improving core learning algorithms, on-device inference of mid-sized models, and bioML

About Me

  • Bio: I am Moughees, born and raised in Pakistan.
  • Twitter: I am super super active on X.
  • ML Research: I spent two years (before the hype) leading cutting-edge TTS/ASR models for low-resource languages at an NLP lab in Pakistan funded by Facebook. My work was covered by Voice of America (Urdu).
  • Current Role: I am the founding ML engineer at Rime Labs , working on cutting edge synthetic voices.
  • First Startup Experience: Realizing the lack of resources in Pakistan, I convinced a New York startup to sponsor me to Toronto over a cold DM on Twitter. (Sent 300 embarrassing msgs to succeed)
  • I was engineer #1 at Column and helped build the team; Column went on to join Techstars. For over a year, I did my research job during the day and helped Column at nights whilst still in Pakistan.
  • Last Role:After leaving Column, I joined Loop, a leading fintech in Toronto, where I am a senior engineer. Loop has raised 5M+ and has grown over 400 percent since I joined.
  • At Loop, I have worked on products that have moved millions of dollars helping small businesses.
  • I have led many end-to-end projects like 2FA Auth, cross border money movement, Banking as a Service, cross-currency conversions, multi-user support and many more.
  • BioML Research: I convinced a post-doc at an infectious disease lab to let me assist on his genomics project remotely. I trained models on read-level DNA to predict presence of specific genes before fully sequencing a gene. We were able to get 90 percent + accuracy. Sadly, we could not publish since a different lab published a similar method in Nature. My interest in bioML has grown immensely since.
  • Hackathons: Jealous of SF, I decided to throw my own builders hackathon with sponsorships from Chroma, Replit and Cohere - gave away 5K in cash prizes

Previous Experience

Sep 2022 - Present

Senior Engineer #4 (Raised 5M+), Loop Financial

Jan 2021 - Sep 2022

Founding Engineer (Raised 2M), Column

Jun 2020 - Dec 2021

Generative AI Research (Speech/Deepfakes), CSALT (NLP Research Lab)

Products built at Loop