About Us
We handle the complexity so you don't have to.
Tensor Garden is an AI implementation and automation company in Overland Park, Kansas. We work at the intersection of AI, operational risk, and commercial insurance, led by people who have run the kinds of businesses they now automate.
Nobody was looking at the whole company.
Three camps dominated the market. Enterprise shops charging hundreds of thousands. Point-solution vendors who'd automate one thing and never touch the operations underneath. And the worst kind: good at sales, clueless at delivery, closing deals then running to Upwork to find someone offshore for $50/hour.
Nobody was getting inside the operations, finding what's broken, fixing it, and building AI around the company's actual DNA. And when the software that connects everything didn't exist, nobody was building that either. They'd just stitch APIs together and call it done. That's the gap. That's why Tensor Garden exists.
Why “Tensor Garden”?
A tensor is a mathematical object that generalizes scalars, vectors, and matrices to higher dimensions, representing data with multiple directional components, invariant under coordinate changes. A garden is where things grow from good soil and careful cultivation. We named ourselves for both. The intelligence we build is multi-dimensional, structured, and designed to grow with your business.
Proven before Tensor Garden ever existed.
Nobody got hired off a resume. We all earned it in real rooms, on real problems, before this company was ever an idea.
Ash Vaja
Founder
Twenty-plus years of insurance industry experience. Built one agency from $1.5M to $12M as CEO. Took another from zero to $8M in roughly 32 months as COO. He didn't come from AI. He came from operations. When he left his last agency, he went looking for a company that understood this. Every one said they were going to be tech forward. Every one had nothing behind it. So he stopped looking and built Tensor Garden instead.
Antonio Pernicano
Co-Founder · CTO
Air Force avionics background. Former IT company owner. Security consultant who came into Tensor Garden after remediating a major breach for a company Ash was running. Military-grade cybersecurity and infrastructure experience. Owns technical direction, security architecture, and infrastructure for both Tensor Garden and Uncovered. When you're trusting AI to handle data for your agency or practice, the person responsible for how that data is protected matters.
Matt Whiteman
Co-Founder · COO
Twenty-plus years in operations, consulting, and project management. Former COO with government and enterprise PM experience. Six Sigma Black Belt. Lean process and manufacturing specialist. Then he learned to ship code himself. Five years across web applications and game design. The rare operator who can lead engineering teams and write the code himself. When something hard needs to be built from scratch, the pieces that don't exist yet, Matt builds them.
The people who actually build your system.
Five specialists across three countries. Each one hired for what they can build, not where they studied. They've delivered government infrastructure, large-scale data platforms, and production AI systems. That's who builds your system.
Software Architect
Designs systems that hold up under real load. 15+ years across distributed systems, large-scale platforms, and API architecture. Owns the decisions that determine whether your build scales or breaks.
AI Engineer
Builds the models and pipelines that make AI work in production. Machine learning, LLMs, NLP, computer vision, and Azure cloud infrastructure. Turns research into systems that run reliably.
Senior Frontend Developer
7+ years building fast, accessible interfaces with React, Next.js, and TypeScript. Focused on performance, user experience, and code that doesn't slow the product down.
Full-Stack Developer
Builds and scales data platforms end to end. Node.js, Python, React, PostgreSQL. Strong on API development and DevOps. Leads with a quality-first approach at every layer.
QA Lead
Makes sure what ships actually works. Test strategy, automated testing, API testing, and compliance auditing. The last line of defense before anything reaches a client.