Former Deutsche Bank Securities Board Member Alex Giannou Joins Cognisee as Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer

For two decades, he financed the infrastructure of the AI era. Now he is building the cognitive infrastructure for the age of superintelligence. 

Cognisee today announced that Alex Giannou has joined the frontier AI lab as Co-Founder, Chief Strategy Officer, and board member. Giannou previously served on the board of Deutsche Bank Securities.

Giannou will lead the capitalization and global scaling of Cognisee’s scientific research, forge institutional and sovereign partnerships, and build its network of frontier AI labs, beginning with the United States, Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, and the United Arab Emirates.

Giannou spent nearly two decades at Deutsche Bank, where he held senior leadership roles across structured finance, institutional sales, principal lending, and private credit. His work included venture lending and financing for infrastructure, energy, data centers, and other complex, capital-intensive businesses.

Since leaving Deutsche Bank, he has invested in private markets and advised institutions pursuing significant societal impact. He has served on the XPRIZE Innovation Board and is a board member of the MARICI Foundation.

Read More on Fintech : Global Fintech Interview with Rob Young, Managing Director – UK at InDebted

Giannou joins Cognisee with the conviction that the next major AI market will be built beyond the continued scaling of large language models.

“Capital has poured into a single theory of AI progress: larger models trained on increasingly stale records of the past, powered by ever greater compute,” said Giannou. “That investment has created extraordinary capabilities, but the next trillion-scale market will be built beyond model scaling. Superintelligence will require a new stack, from training data and learning architectures to compute and global infrastructure, capable of extending intelligence into the systems on which society depends. That shift can accelerate discovery, strengthen critical infrastructure, and rebuild industrial and institutional capacity while creating shared prosperity rather than repeating the extractive economics of the last era.”

Cognisee is building Artificial Collective Intelligence, cognition infrastructure for superintelligence. Its systems are being designed to learn continually, generate new knowledge, coordinate intelligence across people and machines, and translate cognition into consequential action across digital and physical environments.

“Alex understands how new infrastructure categories are financed, built, and scaled,” said Ahmer Inam, Founder and CEO of Cognisee. “Cognisee’s ambition is planetary in scale. Building it requires mobilizing long-duration capital, aligning sovereign and institutional partners, and translating frontier research into durable infrastructure. Alex has spent nearly two decades operating at that intersection.”

Giannou joins a founding team that includes Dr. Olaf Witkowski, Cognisee’s Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer, whose research spans artificial life, collective intelligence, and open-ended learning. Together, they give Cognisee the scientific and institutional leadership required to build a pathway to superintelligence grounded in human wisdom, agency, and dignity.

Cognisee made its public debut in May 2026 at Superintelligence for Humanity, an invitational summit focused on Artificial Collective Intelligence, open-ended learning, human agency, cultural memory, and the future of human-AI collaboration.

Catch more Fintech Insights : The AI Shift in Fraud: Why Banks Need a New Playbook

[To share your insights with us, please write to psen@itechseries.com ]

The post Former Deutsche Bank Securities Board Member Alex Giannou Joins Cognisee as Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer appeared first on GlobalFinTechSeries.