Kasian Franks
Kasian Franks is the founder, CEO, and CVO of SeeqPod.
Career
Franks was born and raised in Berkeley California. At UC Berkeley, he studied Computer Science and Software Engineering. While at UC Berkeley, Franks consulted for Genentech and eventually started his own company in 1993, The Berkeley Integration Group, which later landed Genentech as its first client. While working with Genentech, Franks helped develop and manage the Pharmaceutical Recipe Builder (PRB), a toolset for construction and revision control of genetic “recipes” used to design breast cancer, asthma and blood clotting drugs (HER2, DNASE and ProtienA).
Franks worked as software engineer and product developer specializing in pattern matching algorithms and tools for companies and organizations such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Motorola,Tivo, mPower, and X-Mine. Franks worked at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Life Sciences Division, as a Genomic Research Scientist from 2002-2005, where, along with Raf Podowski, and Connie Myers, he developed the technology behind SeeqPod. Franks began to study biomimetics along with pattern matching in data and nature. This lead to 5 patents in the area of search and discovery. Later he went on to start SeeqPod Inc. a music search, discovery and pattern matching company in which the U.S. Department of Energy, along with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, holds a 5% stake. Under Steven Chu and Lawerence Berkeley National Lab, Franks and SeeqPod won the 2008 R&D 100 award for biomimetic search engines. A number of record companies have attempted to sue SeeqPod, including Warner Music Group, Electra Records, Rhino Records, and most recently EMI and Capitol Records.
Franks currently holds the CEO and CVO position at SeeqPod..