Hamid Azzawe
CPO & CTO at Functional Finance
Leading product and technology strategy at Functional Finance while mentoring founders through BeReady Academy.
Intro
I'm Hamid Azzawe, currently serving as the CPO & CTO at Functional Finance. My career has been defined by a passion for building and scaling transformative technology, from my early days at IBM and Microsoft to leading global engineering and product teams at Amazon, Meta, and Bloomberg. I've also experienced the founder's journey firsthand, having built and exited InfinityCore Health. Currently, I am deeply focused on the 'AI-first' evolution, where I believe we can achieve 20x productivity gains by moving beyond incremental improvements to agentic workflows. Beyond my corporate role, I run BeReady Academy to mentor the next generation of founders and product leaders. I'm always looking to connect with professionals in the FinTech and InsureTech spaces who are interested in modernizing financial infrastructure and leveraging AI to solve complex domain problems.
Networking
What I can offer
- ›Startup advisory for GTM and AI differentiation
- ›Mentorship for high-potential professionals
- ›Strategic guidance on financial and health infrastructure
- ›Expertise in scaling products to billions of users
What I'm looking for
- ›expanding my professional network
- ›exploring mutual opportunities in FinTech and InsureTech
Best fit for
Focus
Current interests
Core competencies
Background
Career
A veteran technology leader with a trajectory spanning IBM and Microsoft to executive roles at Amazon, Meta, and Bloomberg, alongside founding and exiting InfinityCore Health and serving as Interim CEO at TigerGraph.
Education
Master of Software Engineering from University of Waterloo; Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in Computer Science from University of Toronto
Achievements
- ›Founded and exited InfinityCore Health via acquisition
- ›Repositioned TigerGraph as an AI-forward enterprise as Interim CEO
- ›Managed initiatives for 2 billion Messenger users at Meta
- ›Improved Meta Messenger performance and reliability by 30%
- ›Recipient of IBM CTRE Outstanding Technical Achievement Award
- ›Holds multiple patents in AI and cloud architecture
Opinions
- AI agents and guardrails enable 20x to 30x productivity gains
- Traditional ticket-based management should be replaced by clarity of thought and system design
- The value lies in being a domain expert who encodes expertise into AI guardrails
- Product Managers must evolve into Product Management Engineers
Personality
Communication style
Authoritative and visionary, blending high-level strategy with practical advice using structured, short-form prose.
Formality — 7/10
Vocabulary