Founders

Sagittal is co-founded by Michael Smith and Jose Palazon, who collectively have over 50 years of experience in software development and product leadership, world-class experience building AI/ML products, scaling startups to exits, and are deeply hands-on. Michael has corporate experience with Google, SwiftKey, Qualcomm, Yahoo, and Amazon. Jose has corporate experience with Yahoo, Telefonica and the Spanish Government.

Michael Smith, CEO

With over 25 years in tech, Michael has built and led teams across a wide range of domains, including search, ads, finance, mobile, machine learning, embedded systems, and video streaming.

He’s held senior engineering and product roles at some of the world’s leading tech companies—Qualcomm, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and SwiftKey—and served as VP of Product or CPO at multiple startups from Series A to Series C. Michael has a track record of bringing complex, multi-million dollar platforms to market and scaling teams from the ground up.

At Sagittal, Michael’s focus is on delivering real business outcomes—not just AI that autocompletes code. His conviction: AI should adapt to the way teams work, not the other way around.

Jose Palazon, CTO

Jose is a builder at heart—and a battle-tested leader across startups, multinationals, government organisations and everything in between. With 12 years of C-level experience, He’s led engineering teams of all shapes and sizes, including a 400+ person org at Telefónica, sat on multiple boards, and played key roles in three startups that went on to achieve breakout growth.

Despite the scale, he’s always stayed close to the code. Jose is an elite architect and hands-on engineer with deep expertise across AI, ML, big data, cybersecurity, mobile, and large-scale distributed systems. He’s worked at real global scale (Yahoo! Search and mobile)—massive concurrency, huge data pipelines—across all three major cloud platforms and on-prem infrastructure.

He’s also a recognised cybersecurity expert. He’s spoken at DEF CON, Black Hat, and Shmoocon, and literally wrote the book on secure programming—it’s used in Spanish universities to this day.

At Sagittal, Jose’s job is making sure Neo isn’t just smart—it’s safe, fast, and production-ready. He thrives at the intersection of innovation and pragmatism, turning complex systems into rock-solid solutions that teams can trust.