About the Founders
Shobdo is co-founded and privately owned by Md Iftekhar Tanveer and Faria Azim. Their daughter, Wednesday June Tanveer, is the reason they build what they build — an AI future that respects her privacy, speaks her languages, and leaves a world worth inheriting.
Iftekhar is a Research Scientist with a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester and over a decade of experience in machine learning, speech/audio AI, and natural language processing. He spent nearly six years at Spotify as a Research Scientist, where he led voice-agent research, designed novel multimodal transformer architectures, and secured three patents. Before Spotify, he shipped ML systems at Comcast that served millions of users. He holds four patents, has published at top-tier venues including AAAI, EMNLP, CHI, and Interspeech, and his work has been cited over 1,200 times.
Faria holds an LLB and practiced as a lawyer at Islam & Associates in Dhaka, Bangladesh; where she spent three years in legal drafting and research. A BLAST Scholarship Fellow and a volunteer with the Boston Bar Association's Volunteer Lawyers Project, she is now a prospective law student in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She brings the legal and regulatory perspective that keeps Shobdo honest about the promises it makes — especially around privacy and data ownership.