Hello! I'm Zach Buckner, an entrepreneur, engineer, and investor focused on software to make work simpler.
Most of my career has involved leveraging advanced analytics -- technologies like machine learning, simulation, and optimization -- to solve logistics, operations, and workflow challenges.
I've led teams that have seen what works, in diverse industries including retail, CPG, e-commerce, air freight, medicine, defense intelligence, banking, and investment management.
Current Work
Glyphic Software - CEO and Board Member. Glyphic builds AI-based software that automatically reads and processes large firehoses of documents, for some of the largest global corporations in finance, retail, and consumer products.
Blackmarker - Board Member. Blackmarker builds AI-powered software to automatically redact large streams of documents for many of the nation's biggest banks and law firms.
Burris Logistics - Board Member. Burris is a diversified logistics company, with businesses in foodservice redistribution, freight management, and information technology. Burris has a 100-year history of serving many of North America's leading grocers, distributors, restaurants, and manufacturers.
High View Farm – Partner. High View is a historic farm at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, directly across from Devil’s Backbone Brewery in Wintergreen, Virginia. The main house, built in the early 1840s, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The farm is home to Highland cows, donkeys, and doves, and also welcomes Airbnb guests looking for a scenic retreat.
Prior Work
Relay Foods - Founder and CEO. Relay started in 2006, and grew to serve Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and Washington DC with daily pickup and home-delivery grocery service. Relay was a pioneer. Relay was purchased by private equity in 2016, largely for our software. This software has gone on to serve as the e-commerce backbone for many larger retailers, facilitating billions of dollars of online grocery sales.
Elder Research - Vice President of Technology. Elder Research is one of the nation's largest and most respected advanced analytics consultancies. I joined my grad school professor John Elder in 2004, when ERI was just a few grad students, and a strong belief that "AI" and "ML" tools would grow in capability and demand. Elder Research has enjoyed long-term strategic consulting relationships with many globals leaders within the retail, energy, healthcare, banking, pharmaceutical, and defense intelligence industries.
Education
University of Virginia - Master of Science, Electrical Engineering, 2004. Most memorably, I was married the summer before classes started, and became a father to my first daughter, Isabelle, before I graduated. While a student, I developed a novel high-resolution position sensor that was commercialized by the University of Virginia's Patent Foundation. The patents surrounding this invention are licensed to a market-leading automation company serving well-known automotive brands.
University of Virginia - Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering, 2002. This period of my life included quite a bit of goofing off, so I will not be listing my GPA. Highlights included hitchhiking across Alaska for a summer, and operating a bustling grilled-cheese sandwich business during another summer, circumnavigating the US following music festivals. Academic highlights included co-developing a novel technique to use neural networks to diagnose bridge health, listening for the "acoustic emissions" of intermolecular bonds breaking. Our paper about this technique won 1st place in a UVA undergraduate research challenge. And, working for GE-spinout called Trimation to earn money for college, I designed and built an add-on board for a popular industrial computer, allowing it to receive highly accurate time signals from space (an IRIG-B satellite transceiver for the General Electric 90-30).