BEFORE ACCORDION
CEO, Stride
Co-Founder & CEO, Conductor
VP of Business Development, Thrive Global
VP & GM Americas, SparkBeyond
VP & GM Global Markets, Thoughtworks
Co-Founder & COO, ShuttleCloud
Product Manager, Unitec
ALMA MATER
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL. M.S. Computer Science
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain. M.S. Electrical Engineering
Francisco Martin is a Managing Director and Head of AI Product & Engineering at Accordion with more than two decades of experience building software, AI products and the engineering teams that ship them.
Francisco joined Accordion through its 2026 acquisition of Stride, the AI engineering firm he led as CEO. He joined Stride in 2021 as CTO and became CEO in 2023, leading the firm’s transformation from a product engineering consultancy into an AI-powered engineering firm focused on building production-grade agentic systems and AI software in regulated industries. Before Stride, he built the Americas business for SparkBeyond, the Israeli AI platform and McKinsey’s exclusive AI/ML partner, from zero to $15M ARR.
He led global business development at Thrive Global, and spent six years at Thoughtworks, where he started as a software engineer and went on to run a $90M P&L for their East US market and launch the firm’s businesses in Spain and Latin America. Earlier, he co-founded ShuttleCloud, a Techstars New York company.
Francisco’s expertise sits at the intersection of engineering and the P&L. He has written production code, run a 200-person delivery organization, helped the C-suite of Fortune 500 companies adopt AI, and led a firm through a business-model transition. His client work has spanned financial services, healthcare, insurance, energy, retail, media and life sciences, across North America, Latin America and Europe. His work today focuses on the gap between AI experimentation and AI in production: agentic workflows that automate real business processes with measurable return, AI-accelerated software delivery, and modernization of the legacy systems that slow down value creation.
He speaks and writes regularly on pragmatic AI adoption at scale, and on what it takes to run value-accretive AI. Francisco holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. He has written for Fast Company, is a regular guest on AI and technology podcasts, and has delivered talks at Microsoft Inspire and Ai4, among others. He has also served on General Assembly’s Artificial Intelligence & Data Science Standards Board and is a Techstars New York alumnus.