Stavros Papadopoulos is the founder and CEO of TileDB, a revolutionary Big Data management platform. Prior to launching TileDB, Stavros’ journey started in Xanthi where he was born and raised, taking him around the globe from Boston to Hong Kong. The desire for travel and entrepreneurship was introduced to him in the early 90s by his cousin when she first told him about Silicon Valley. Nearly 20 years later, in 2017, TileDB started in collaboration with MIT University and Intel, where Stavros worked prior to founding TileDB headquartered in Cambridge Massachusetts.

At MIT, Stavros was a Senior Research Scientist at the Intel Parallel Computing Lab, and a member of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data at MIT CSAIL for three years. He also spent two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Stavros received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at HKUST and held a postdoc fellow position at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Under Papadopoulos' leadership, TileDB has become a critical tool for data-intensive industries dealing with large amounts of data such as genomics and geospatial data. The company was inspired by one of Mike Stonebraker’s companies, Sci DB, and the challenges which this platform was facing. Consequently, Stavros started by addressing the way in which different types of data were being stored and building the solution from the ground up. In 2017, TileDB was launched as an Intel and MIT spin-out.