The Columbia Engineering AI Entrepreneurship Series is a bi-weekly speaker series that brings students and faculty at Columbia together with founders, VCs, technologists, and business leaders to learn about the process of transitioning lessons from research and the classroom into products and value.
September 23, 2025
Tom Effland
Co-founder and CTO, Noetica
Abstract
This talk shares lessons learned going from NLP researcher to building Noetica, a platform that analyzes populations of complex contracts to determine market standards for deal terms. Along the way I'll discuss (1) how LLMs have enabled a new opportunity space for hybrid systems that combine extraction capabilities with formal analytical frameworks, (2) how building these systems still requires deep fusion of subject-matter and technical judgment to identify tractable decompositions of seemingly impossible problems, and (3) how this converges to a new version of the Technical Product Manager role. This role is highly suited to technical researchers willing to tackle sector-specific challenges.
Bio
Tom Effland is the technical founder and CTO of Noetica AI, a fast-growing VC-backed Series A startup. The company's AI-powered knowledge platform helps many top law firms improve outcomes in valuable corporate debt, securities, and M&A transactions. Before founding Noetica, Tom earned his PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University. He was advised by Prof. Michael Collins and received support from a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
This event is organized by Columbia's Data, Agents, and Processes Lab (DAPLab). For more information about the series, see https://daplab.cs.columbia.edu/entrepreneurship.
