Team
Meet the leadership team that's redefining intelligence.
Together, the team brings a diverse set of skills and experience to the table
Casey Schmidt
CEO
Casey is a lifelong leader and entrepreneur with a relentless drive to empower and inspire people to make a positive difference in the world. Whether it’s delivering the highest quality intelligence for the President of the United States, negotiating peace in the Horn of Africa, or using the power of professional soccer to educate at-risk-youth in Zimbabwe, Casey’s diverse 20-year career is rooted in a deep sense of purpose to solve complex global challenges by listening and understanding people at hyperlocal levels.
For VoxCroft, Casey is charged with building and leading VoxCroft Analytics Inc, the company arm driving population-centric intelligence solutions for the U.S Government. He also is responsible for honing VoxCroft’s AI/ML capabilities and data-driven analytics into powerful intelligence tradecraft that helps clients understand global risk and achieve better business outcomes.
Sarah-Leah Pimentel
Head of Language Solutions
Sarah-Leah has a strong background in language studies and speaks six languages. Prior to co-founding VoxCroft, she worked for the U.S. government for 12 years as an open-source media and language expert, and participated in explorative research into the use of machine translation as a tool to identify political threats in fast-paced online media environments. She is also a passionate advocate for the preservation and advancement of national languages, particularly in her home continent of Africa.
At VoxCroft, Sarah-Leah is the Head of Language and Collection Solutions where she is responsible for developing language datasets for low-density languages and leveraging the power of the company’s proprietary technology to ensure high-quality and curated datasets. She also manages large teams of translators and is particularly adept at finding linguists in even the most obscure languages.
Barend Lutz
COO, VP Innovation, head of VoxCroft Labs
Before co-founding VoxCroft in 2018, Barend spearheaded data-driven sociopolitical and economic open-source intelligence methods and tech in the private, public, and academic landscape. His published work focuses on understanding the new public spaces that are emerging with technological growth. Barend worked for the U.S. government as an open-source media and data expert, where he explored big data and machine learning.
Barend is entrusted with the leadership of VoxCroft’s global team, providing support to the private sector business. His strategic acumen blends the strengths of VoxCroft’s analytics, data collection, and technology divisions to enable leading global companies to attain superior insights and actionable intelligence.
Emily Columbo
VP Analytics
Emily is an intelligence analyst with 18 years’ experience in providing high-level US policymakers with current and long-term analytic assessments of national security issues.
A professional-level Spanish and Portuguese speaker, she has combined her linguistic and analytic skills with deep expertise African and Latin American political-security issues to provide in-depth strategic analytic insights to high-level US officials in the White House, US Congress, US Departments of State, Justice, Commerce, and Defense through written products and oral briefings.
Emily is currently a Senior Associate (non-resident) with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) where she has written extensively on the conflict in northern Mozambique.
William Galloway
Chief of Intelligence
William is an open-source exploitation expert with 19 years' experience in the field.
He previously led big data and social media exploitation efforts for the US government and worked across geographic programs to deliver insights on countries in sub-Saharan Africa and further abroad.
A particularly notable achievement was his groundbreaking work in contextualizing and understanding extremist networks on social media platforms, along with identifying and tracking hate speech.
William also made valuable contributions in training the broader open-source intelligence community on data-driven methodologies that he and his team had developed.
As co-founder and Chief of Intelligence of VoxCroft Analytics, he is responsible for aligning the analyst and technology team in the identification and development of new collection and analysis methods.