CTO
Helmsted
Chris is an AI engineer and founder focused on production-grade AI systems. He founded Astral, an AI engineering company building human-AI collaboration systems and real-time data infrastructure, after working as an AI engineering consultant for several Y Combinator-backed startups. He previously served as AI Engineer Lead at 1mind and as a Fixed Income Analyst at BlackRock, with earlier analytical and automation roles at Tesla, in FP&A and Business Operations, and IBM, in Procurement.
He holds a B.S. in Applied Economics and Management with a finance concentration from Cornell University's Dyson School. Chris leads Helmsted's architecture and engineering, with expertise in secure AI infrastructure, data aggregation, and agentic systems.