Taylor Downs

Taylor Downs founded OpenFn in 2014 and serves as CEO. He is a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Social & Economic Equity. He received the first annual Harvard SECON Social Impact Award and the 2017 Antonio Pizzigati Prize for software development in the public interest.

He was named to Forbes’ 30 under 30 list, is a 2012 Echoing Green Fellow, a 2014 Rainer Arnhold Fellow, and a 2015 PopTech Fellow. He serves as an advisor to the Product Committee and the Technical Committee at the ITU/GIZ/DIAL-lead GovStack initiative, accelerating the digital transformation of government services through the adoption of digital public goods.

OpenFn is the Digital Public Good for public service automation and AI orchestration. Digital transformation teams safely connect web apps, AI tools, registries, and legacy systems to automate the delivery of public services (from ID to health to finance to environmental protection) with OpenFn in a secure, stable, scalable way. In an age of AI-driven atrophy, OpenFn builds government muscle and increases country’s agency to chart their own digital futures.

Before OpenFn, he co-founded and served as CEO of Vera Solutions. Vera is an impact-first technology company with more than 100 employees and 300 implementations in 40+ countries. Before Vera, he lived and worked in a dozen countries in Africa while focusing on curriculum and M&E at a major public-health implementer and consulting on intervention design, training, and monitoring & evaluation with more than a dozen NGOs around Africa and Asia.

He holds an MSc in inequalities and social sciences from the London School of Economics and Political Science with a focus on AI policy and a BA in religious studies with a focus on Tibetan Buddhism from Amherst College.