Sasha Ostojic is a Venture Partner at Playground Global where he actively invests in the areas of AI, nextgen compute, automation, and robotics, while also assisting and advising portfolio companies on defining and executing technology and business strategies. Playground benefits from Sasha’s decades of operating experience in building and scaling companies and engineering teams to achieve product and commercial success.

Born in the former Yugoslavia, Sasha moved to the U.S. in the late-1980s where his technical expertise and appetite for knowledge generated an early opportunity at General Electric (GE). As a pioneer in large-scale real-time systems, he was a lead software architect for IBM's innovative DirectTalk Voice Application platform.

Drawn to risk taking and entrepreneurship, he founded Ultimate Technology, Inc with a colleague to evolve and deploy the speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis technologies they invented at IBM. Sasha built the company from the ground up as the CEO and VP of Engineering, serving in the role for 14 years and achieving profitability each year. Under his leadership, Ultimate Technology served Fortune 500 companies including Fidelity, Cisco, and Sun Microsystems. 

Sasha then spent close to 10 years at Nvidia where, as Vice President of Software, he was in charge of some of the key initiatives that contributed to the visual computing company becoming the global leader in gaming, AI, and data center technologies.  He owned the core software stack that was leveraged across all of Nvidia’s verticals (consumer, professional graphics, high performance computing, data center, and automotive), as well as being directly responsible for the engineering relationships with some of Nvidia’s key technology partners such as Apple and Microsoft.

His last stop before joining Playground was at Cruise Automation, where he led and scaled the engineering team for the General Motors autonomous vehicle subsidiary. But once he started spending time at Playground’s Palo Alto campus, there was no turning back.  

On top of his Venture Partner role, Sasha organizes and leads various engineering leadership events as well as the acclaimed Robochat event series featuring prestigious guest speakers.

Sasha sits on the boards of d-Matrix, Anari AI (chairman), and Allison Transmission (NYSE:ALSN), as well as advisory boards at Zoox, HTEC and the Serbian AI Institute.  In his spare time, he is an avid tennis and basketball player and enjoys spending time with his wife and son.