Hami Bahraynian

Hami Bahraynian is an Iranian-born entrepreneur and conversational AI pioneer based in London, whose career has been defined by a persistent focus on making AI systems that genuinely understand language rather than merely simulating it. He first came to prominence as co-founder of Wluper, a London-based NLP startup that raised seed funding in 2018 to build domain-expert conversational AI — purpose-built agents designed to understand a narrow domain with near-perfect accuracy, in contrast to the shallow general-purpose assistants that dominated the market. That company's work on reasoning, knowledge acquisition, and structured-unstructured data balance gave Bahraynian a foundational understanding of where AI training methods were failing at their roots.

In July 2024, Bahraynian co-founded Inephany alongside Dr. John Torr and Maurice von Sturm — reuniting the Wluper co-founding team to tackle an even more fundamental problem: the soaring cost and inefficiency of training modern neural networks. As Co-founder and COO, Bahraynian leads operations and commercial strategy for a company building an AI-driven optimisation platform that controls the training process in real time, dramatically improving sample efficiency and cutting compute costs by an estimated tenfold. His role bridges the deep technical work of the engineering team with the commercial relationships needed to bring the platform to enterprise customers.

Inephany raised $2.2 million in a pre-seed round in 2025 led by Amadeus Capital Partners, with participation from Sure Valley Ventures and AI pioneer Professor Steve Young — who joined as company chair. The company's platform has applicability across LLMs, recurrent neural networks for financial forecasting, and convolutional neural networks for computer vision, with plans to extend its optimisation capabilities to inference-time compute.