Company / Team

Who is looking after your loved one, and after you.

A doctor, a family caregiver, Proxi drawn as a figure of light, and an engineer, standing in a row with their hands joined.

Clinical: Over 100 years of combined dementia care experience, and senior clinical leadership.
Engineering: Veterans of mission-critical systems, where failure was never an acceptable outcome.
Caregiving: People who have done this at home, for someone they love, without a manual.

Clinical team

The people responsible for what your Proxi says, how it says it, and how safely.

Alla Shapiro, MD

US Chief Medical Officer

35+ years across neurology and psychiatry in three countries. Board certified in Psychiatry and Neurology, consultation-liaison trained: the discipline of deciding whether a symptom is psychiatric or physical. 15+ years in psychiatric leadership, from Medical Director of Psychiatry at Jamaica Hospital to Unit Chief of major teaching units at Kings County and Bronx Psychiatric Center. Faculty appointments at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine and SUNY Downstate. Six teaching awards, including national APA recognition.

Her job at Proxi is the hardest call in dementia care: is it the disease, or is the person in physical distress?

Raisa Kantemirova, MD, PhD, DSc

Head of Clinical Safety

42 years in geriatric medicine and clinical research. D.Sc. / Dr. habil. in Gerontology and Geriatrics. Head of the Therapy Department at the Albrecht Federal Research Center. Professor of Hospital Therapy at Saint Petersburg State University. 15 years as Professor of Gerontology and Geriatrics at Northwestern State Medical University. Over 250 peer-reviewed publications. Editorial boards: Advances in Gerontology, Medicine: Theory and Practice, Russian Journal of Geriatric Medicine.

Her job at Proxi is the medicine of aging itself: the clinical authority behind every decision we make.

Larissa Tadjiev

Head of Patient Care & Clinical Operations

40 years in long-term and dementia care. Creator of the award-winning CARE Program for dementia residents with behavioral challenges. Multiple NYSHFA statewide programming awards. Built a memory care unit from the ground up: policy, interdisciplinary protocols, and care design.

Her job at Proxi is the patient. Watching the patient side. Noticing what would be missed.

Alena Chavychalova

Head of Caregiver Wellbeing

Licensed clinical psychologist with 13+ years in project leadership and 5 years of private clinical practice. Specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy (Association member), schema therapy, and transactional analysis. Built PTSD recovery protocols and behavioral pattern intervention programs. Coordinates scientific research at Proxi.

Her job is you. Caregiver wellbeing is not a marketing word here. It is a job we hired for.

Clinical advisory board

Our advisory board spans dementia care, caregiver psychology, geriatric psychiatry, validation therapy, and bioethics. Names available on request to clinicians and partners.

Founders

The three who started it.

Brandon Brown

Chief Executive Officer

Technology executive with 35+ years building and scaling venture- and private-equity-backed technology companies. Career spans Fortune 100 leadership followed by 20+ years founding and operating high-growth startups and mid-cap buildouts, including Persistence, Sendmail, Intellcom, Rescom, Sigaba, and Develop On Box. 5 mergers, 1 IPO, 13 successful funding rounds.

Runs Proxi with the conviction of someone who has run companies before and knows what doing it well looks like.

Alex Libkind

Chief Operating Officer

Founder and operator with 27+ years building startups across financial governance, compliance, financial services, and food services. Co-founder of Foundation Source and Zodiac Interactive. Grew and managed large cross-functional teams from start-up to post-revenue and profitability. Brings personal caregiver experience to the work alongside the operational discipline of building real businesses from zero.

The reason setup at Proxi is supported and not abandoned to a wizard.

Leon Rivkin

Chief Architect

30+ years building platforms that become industry standards. One of the architects of the OBI standard (1996), the first industrial B2B framework. Built the core of Foundation Source and Cablevision’s digital platforms. Founded Develop On Box, scaled to 700 engineers, deployed on 45M+ devices, 2 Emmy Awards. Built nationwide platforms for EMR/EHR and automated clinical trials. Multiple granted US patents.

His job at Proxi is the depth of the technology and its long-term direction.

Technical leadership

The people who keep the trust intact.

Pavel Sheynkman

Chief Technology Officer

Colonel, IDF (retired). Former Chief Technology Officer of PricewaterhouseCoopers Israel, where he founded the Cloud & AI consultancy practice from zero and grew it into a market leader serving major banks, insurers, healthcare providers, and government. 17+ years in R&D leadership across defense, financial services, and high-growth startups. Built the first military-grade private cloud at scale and led mission-critical systems through years of high-stakes deployment. Established a GenAI practice for regulated industries.

Responsible for how Proxi runs and scales without breaking the trust placed in it.

Dmitry Shaposhnikov

Chief Information Security Officer

Major, IDF (retired). Former head of the cybersecurity practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which he grew from 19 to 70+ professionals in 3.5 years. 15+ years in cybersecurity across defense and enterprise. Former CISO at a regulated identity-verification company. Co-founded a cloud security consultancy specializing in healthcare, fintech, and SaaS. Zero Trust certified.

Responsible for the architecture that keeps your voice and your loved one’s information out of the wrong hands.

Alex Meler, MD, PhD

Chief Science Officer

30+ years across clinical medicine, research, and education. Over 110 publications and granted patents in neuromodulation devices for neurodegenerative disease. Founding Dean of the School of Biological and Medical Physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, a program whose research centers on aging and the mechanisms of dementia. At Proxi he connects us to the academic research world, with doctoral collaborations on machine learning, agentic AI, and small language models.

His job at Proxi is the bridge: keeping the science of brain aging and the science of AI in one conversation.

Ainel Jaras

Head of Translational AI Research

7+ years at the intersection of AI, machine learning, and medicine. Research Affiliate at Stanford’s Department of Biomedical Data Science, where she co-authors genetic research. Most recently built and optimized end-to-end LLM pipelines at Clarity, a voice agent company. Before that: deep learning for lung cancer segmentation and medical imaging, clinical AI systems, and ML models for DNA ancestry analysis. AI Scientist with a career spent turning frontier research into systems used in the real world.

Her job at Proxi is clinical intelligence itself: making sure the AI behind your Proxi is rigorous, useful, and worthy of the trust families place in it.

Denis Perov

Head of Voice Synthesis Engineering

20+ years architecting real-time media systems at scale. Principal Architect at AT&T. Built multimedia processing infrastructure handling tens of thousands of assets daily across 200+ content providers at QuickPlay Media. Co-founded Almipa Limited, with a granted patent in real-time media transport.

Responsible for the part of Proxi that has to sound like you, not like an approximation of you.

Ivan Serbin

Head of Data Science

Product leader with expertise in health-tech, med-tech, and large-scale data systems. Launched nationwide platforms for EMR/EHR, automated clinical trials, and energy-sector data products. Led cross-functional teams and built product strategies grounded in stakeholder feedback and analytical insight.

Responsible for what Proxi feels like to use, and for measuring whether it is actually helping the families it serves.

Why this team

We are not building a generic chatbot.
We are building the system that earns the right to speak in your voice.

Most consumer AI is a foundation model wrapped in a polite UI. Commercial voice cloning sounds fine in relaxed conversation. For the population we serve, “fine” is not good enough. A chatbot that improvises a wrong answer to someone with dementia is not a quality bug. It is a harm event. A voice that drifts out of character at the moment your loved one needs reassurance is the same kind of failure.

So we built something different. We rebuild model behavior where we need control. We add targeted voice rendering for the moments off-the-shelf cloning breaks down. We add anti-drift controls that keep your voice consistent under stress and over time. We add deterministic safety mechanisms: code that physically refuses, not polite instructions in a prompt. We add a governance layer that watches every conversation. We add the product, integration, and operations work that turns the technology into something a family can actually rely on.

This requires four things most teams do not have together: clinical depth, security across data and voice, engineering rigor, and operating discipline. We assembled all four because the alternative is shipping an unsafe chatbot to a vulnerable population, and we are not willing to do that.

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