Edward V. Jennings, President and CEO

Ed Jennings leads the Copanion team as President and CEO.  Ed has progressively emerged as a voice in the tax and accounting industry, specifically in the areas of tax document automation, scanning, and the paperless tax workflow. He has been featured as a content expert in The CPA Technology Advisor, Accounting Today, and USAToday. He was also awarded The CPA Technology Advisor's coveted 40 Under 40 award in 2009 and played an integral role in Copanion's back-to-back Technology Innovation Award wins in 2008 and 2009. He is also a featured speaker at events hosted by the AICPA.

Prior to his appointment as CEO, Ed served as Copanion's Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Before joining Copanion, Ed was Vice President of Marketing at PTC, where he was responsible for all communication vehicles and go-to-market programs in multiple vertical markets. He was previously General Manager at Into Networks, where he led the expansion of the company's technology into the financial services market. He has held senior positions at AT&T, Qwest Communications and Broderbund Software. A graduate of Boston College, Jennings holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Steven K. Ladd, Founder

Steven Ladd is co-founder of Copanion. Earlier in his career, he founded InterChip Systems, Inc., an electronics product development company. InterChip developed its own custom electronic design automation software, which was spun off and sold to Mentor Graphics. The company was subsequently purchased by Honeywell.

Prior to founding Copanion, Ladd was chairman of Systematic Accounting, providing financial and investment management services to businesses in New England before its sale in 2008. He has also acted as a consultant to technology businesses and has managed sales, manufacturing and design operations at venture-backed and Fortune-500 sponsored start-ups.

Ladd holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.

Dr. Venu Govindaraju, Chief Technical Advisor

Copanion's technical direction is being set by Dr. Venu Govindaraju, Chief Technical Advisor. In a research career spanning over 20 years, he has made significant contributions to many areas of pattern recognition, such as document analysis and biometrics. Dr. Govindaraju's seminal work in handwriting recognition was at the core of the first handwritten address interpretation system used by the US Postal Service that now sorts over 18 billion envelopes every year. He is currently Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo. He graduated with high honors from the Indian Institute of Technology, and holds a PhD from the University at Buffalo.