- Founded Tephra while winding down Carbondrop, working with early-stage startups and established SMEs on applied AI products and visual content.
- Lead projects end to end, from discovery and scoping through requirements, build, and handover, while developing internal products alongside client work.
Peter Nemec
Product Leader · AI & B2B SaaS · Vienna, Austria
I love turning the latest AI into successful products, from 0 to 1.
Product leader with eight years of experience building AI and data products across commercial, product, and founder roles. At NewsAPI.ai, I joined in Business Development, moved into product as customer work increasingly shaped the roadmap, and eventually became CPO. Over seven years, I helped grow the business from $50K to $1M+ ARR while scaling an API-first news intelligence platform processing more than one million articles a day. Since 2025, I have also built companies in climate tech and applied AI. I am now looking to bring that breadth back into a senior product role at an AI-first company.
I’m the founder of Tephra d.o.o., an applied AI studio serving startups and SMEs in Southeastern Europe. Previously CPO of NewsAPI.ai, product consultant for Bloomberg Media, and co-founder of Carbondrop.
Highlights
- Progressed from Business Development to CPO at NewsAPI.ai, helping grow ARR from $50K to $1M+.
- Helped scale an API-first news intelligence platform to process more than one million articles a day, and later led product work on AI analytics for Bloomberg Media.
- Shipped five production NLP services across entity recognition, sentiment, classification, semantic filtering, and metadata extraction.
Experience
Founder, product, and commercial roles across AI and B2B SaaS.
- Co-founded and led Carbondrop, taking a carbon-removal and MRV concept from early research to a working product and field deployment.
- Worked with climate scientists and enterprise partners such as Novonesis to turn complex measurement and compliance methodologies into product requirements, automated data workflows, and reporting. Participated in REMOVE, a leading European carbon-removal accelerator.
- Started in Business Development, moved into product as customer work increasingly shaped the roadmap, and ultimately took ownership of the product organization as CPO.
- Helped grow ARR from $50K to $1M+ by reshaping pricing and packaging and building enterprise features around real customer needs and usage.
- Owned product for an API-first platform processing more than one million articles a day, spanning roadmap, customer discovery, developer experience, and enterprise integrations.
- Shipped five production NLP services across entity recognition, sentiment, classification, semantic filtering, and metadata extraction, turning research capabilities into commercial product features.
- Worked across engineering and data science to move research prototypes into production with clearer evaluation, prioritization, and release processes.
- Combined product analytics with continuous customer discovery, using usage data and enterprise conversations to validate roadmap decisions before committing engineering resources.
- Owned the roadmap for the NLP, metadata, and semantic-search pipelines behind AIQ, used by financial analysts and enterprise intelligence teams.
- Worked across research, engineering, and product to move machine-learning capabilities into production analytics workflows.
- Redesigned the metadata architecture to improve query performance and reduce manual tagging in high-volume research workflows.
- Worked on EU Horizon projects covering NLP, information retrieval, and knowledge graphs alongside my role at NewsAPI.ai.
- Built commercial cases for three research spin-offs, defining target segments, pricing, and routes to market for lab-stage technology.
Education & Languages
A systems thinker by training, with a design background applied to complex products and platforms.
BSc Architecture and Urban Engineering
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia · 2012 – 2017
Languages
Slovenian Native · Croatian Native · English C2 · German A2
How I work
I move between strategy, AI execution, and commercial growth, using each to make the other better.
01
Shape the strategy
I build and validate products from early scientific evidence, partnering with large corporations and leading research labs, and participating in the Remove accelerator.
02
Ship the AI product
I lead engineering and data science teams to ship generative AI, LLM, and NLP capabilities that work reliably inside real enterprise workflows.
03
Scale the business
I carry product decisions into packaging, go-to-market, and enterprise adoption, and measure them against revenue, retention, and usage.
Skills
Across product, AI and ML, platform, and tools.
Product
Product strategy and roadmapping, pricing and packaging, customer discovery, KPI frameworks, experimentation, agile delivery
AI and ML
Production NLP, semantic search, LLM integration and RAG, agent workflows, prompt design and evaluation
Platform
API-first SaaS, developer experience, usage-based metering, enterprise integrations, large-scale information retrieval
Tools
JavaScript, Linear, Figma, Amplitude, OpenAI Codex, vector databases, Git
Open Source
Things I build in public: AI-native apps, tooling, and weekend projects. Source code lives on GitHub.
tailor-layer
Evidence-first security review for agent repositories, with source-linked findings, suggested fixes, and drift checks. Built and deployed, live at tailor-layer.vercel.app.
nexvi.xyz
An AI app that turns your experience into better job applications. Tailor, score, and humanize applications against specific job descriptions. Built in Lovable and running at nexvi.xyz.
silba
A conversational CRM that turns cold prospecting into instant sales conversations. A weekend project I built for myself to find, filter, and engage leads.
Start a conversation
Let’s build AI products people actually use and enterprises pay for.
I’m looking to bring my breadth back into a senior product role at an AI-first company. Share the idea, the problem, or the rough brief, and we can start with a focused conversation about what the product needs.