Fast: Business and Executive Team


Fast offers cutting edge investment research and fund. Ready to compete with the best? Go where few investors have gone before. Check the page.

Founder, CEO, and Chairman: Dr. Pankaj Topiwala

Dr. Topiwala did his PhD in Mathematical Physics at the Univ. of Michigan, in 1985. He was junior faculty at the Univ. of Chicago, and has since worked at MITRE, Lockheed-Martin, and USC, before starting FastVDO in 1998. He is the lead inventor of approximately 35 patents. In 2024, Dr. Topiwala launched FastHedge. His LinkedIn page is here.

NE Director: Ms. Yukiko Sugimoto

Ms. Sugimoto did her MBA at the Univ. of Chicago in 1985, and has worked her entire career in the finance industry, where she rose to Managing Director at JP Morgan. Her primary focus was on Japanese securities. She was also a member of the Advisory Board of Panasonic Corporation until 2018. She brings considerable experience in international finance and business. Her LinkedIn page is here.

NE Director: Mr. Richard Diehl

Mr. Diehl holds an MS. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins. He founded Diehl GraphSoft in 1985, and ran it for 16 years until acquired by the German company Nemetschek in 2001. He was then CEO of Nemetschek North America till 2005, and Chairman till 2017, where he increased sales from $8M to $28M/yr. His LinkedIn page is here.

NE Director: Mr. Joseph Schmelzle

Mr. Schmelzle holds an MBA from the Univ. of Rochester in 1979, is a licenced CPA, and has worked in accounting his entire career. He is President of J. J. Schmelzle and Co., P.C., since 1991, where he manages day to day operations of an accounting and financial consulting practice. Services rendered to clients include financial statement auditing and preparation, tax preparation and planning, bookkeeping services and financial consulting which includes business valuations, divorce planning and financial management. Financial consulting services have included serving as a Director and Chief Financial Officer of Nemetschek Vectorworks, Inc., a former public company which develops engineering software. His LinkedIn page is here.

NE Director: Prof. Alan Bovik

Al Bovik holds the Cockrell Family Regents Endowed Chair at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is Director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Wireless Networking and Communication Group (WNCG), and the Institute for Neurosciences. His papers and books on video processing and computational perception, including the Handbook of Image and Video Processing and Modern Image Quality Assessment have been cited more than 110,000 times. For his work on streaming and social media systems and digital photography, he has received the Progress Medal from The Royal Photographic Society, the IEEE Fourier Award, the Edwin Land Medal from The Optical Society, a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development, and a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award for the “Development of Perceptual Metrics for Video Encoding Optimization.” His lab website is here.