Derek Ho is co-founder and chief operating officer of Distyl AI, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm in San Francisco, California, that he started with Arjun Prakash in 2022. Based in New York, he is a former fixed-income trader known for bringing the embedded, outcome-focused deployment style he learned at Palantir Technologies to enterprise generative AI.
A Math Degree, Two Trading Desks and Palantir
He studied mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania and finance at its Wharton School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, graduating in 2009. He traded fixed income at Credit Suisse and then Citadel in New York from 2010 to 2016, and spent 2017 to 2022 in business development at Palantir, deploying data platforms for large companies (LinkedIn).
Starting Distyl with Arjun Prakash
He and Prakash overlapped in Palantir’s business development team and had long planned to start a company together. “It was very obvious to both Derek and I that we would do a startup together for the longest time,” Prakash told Dell Technologies Capital. When OpenAI announced InstructGPT in early 2022, the two saw a gap between AI specialists who did not understand enterprise systems and enterprises that did not follow AI, and Distyl was built to close it (Lightspeed). Lightspeed led its Series A in 2024.