Highrise AI (“Highrise” or the “Company”), an AI infrastructure platform and subsidiary of Hut 8 Corp. (NASDAQ, TSX: HUT), today introduced its new Chief Technology Officer, Mark Mendelman. A veteran defense technologist and AI systems architect, Mark leads the development of Highrise’s cloud platform, which combines bare-metal performance with full-stack orchestration for AI workloads.
Mark joined Highrise following a 20-year tenure with the Israel Defense Forces (“IDF”), where he most recently served as Head of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Research & Development (R&D) branch of Sigma, a specialist unit within the IDF’s elite C4I Directorate. Sigma is responsible for developing and operationalizing advanced AI and computing technologies. As Head of AI and R&D, Mark directed cutting-edge AI research groups comprising data scientists, MLOps engineers, and domain experts, leading the IDF’s work in multimodal foundation models, real-time sensor fusion, low-power edge inference, and training pipelines.
Mark has architected and deployed large-scale AI data platforms that ingest, label, and curate structured and unstructured data from dozens of classified sources. These platforms support rapid experimentation, scalable training, and secure data sharing with defense partners. His technical leadership shaped mission-critical systems such as Dror, a secure operational cloud platform that delivers natural-language battlefield intelligence contextualized across time and geography.
Mark is a graduate of Mamram, the IDF’s legendary computer corps established in 1959, which has trained generations of Israel’s top full-stack engineers, data scientists, and systems architects. Mamran alumni are currently entrepreneurs in approximately 25% of Israeli unicorns, with exits totaling approximately $1.9 billion in 2024. We believe Mark’s deep roots in this ecosystem, particularly across Israel’s advanced AI and cybersecurity sectors, will be instrumental in shaping Highrise’s global innovation and partnership strategy. His work has been recognized with both the IDF Chief of General Staff Innovation Award and the Israel National Defense Prize, one of the country’s highest honors for technological contributions to national security.
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