Glossary
The firms, disciplines and terms behind James Tannahill's work.
Organizations
Firms, institutions and memberships in James Tannahill's career, and what he did at each.
- ATLAS SP Partners, L.P. ATLAS SP · Atlas SP Partners
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Asset-backed finance and capital markets firm, an Apollo Global Management company. James is VP of Super Intelligence Innovation, applying AI and machine learning to asset-backed finance and capital markets (2026 to present).
- Apollo Global Management Apollo
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Global alternative asset manager. ATLAS SP Partners, where James works, is an Apollo Global Management company.
- SpaceX xAI · SpaceXAI · SpaceXSI
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James worked on AI/ML for Capital Markets here (2025 to 2026), building the financial-reasoning data and evaluation systems used to train frontier models. xAI, SpaceXAI, SpaceXSI and SpaceX are the same company.
- Plocamium Holdings Plocamium
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Operator-led private equity platform deploying patient capital across industrial technologies and healthcare, a third-generation family enterprise. James was its founder and President & Managing Partner.
- 1ness Strategies 1nessAgency · 1Ness
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Digital marketing and growth systems for regulated industries, an operating company of Plocamium. James built it to 80+ clients (2023 to 2025).
- RDLB
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Strategic brand architecture and capital markets advisory for investors and operators. James advised RDLB, including on $150M+ in capital raises.
- PROSEC Defense Group ProSecPR · PROSEC
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Veteran-led security advisory based in Puerto Rico: risk intelligence, protective operations and crisis planning across Latin America and the Caribbean. James was Head of Field Operations.
- NewYorkLab
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Urban intelligence platform that uses sensor networks and environmental analytics to map how cities change. Built by James.
- Vaxart Vaxart, Inc. · NASDAQ: VXRT
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Clinical-stage biotechnology company developing oral vaccines. As AVP, Strategic Finance (2021 to 2023), James led $100M+ in strategic transactions, including a $50M manufacturing acquisition and $50M+ in BARDA and DoD non-dilutive funding.
- M Science M Science (Jefferies)
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Alternative-data research firm, part of Jefferies. James delivered healthcare alternative-data research to institutional investors, including funds managing $5B+ (2019 to 2020).
mscience.com (opens in new tab) jefferies.com (opens in new tab)
- Accrete.ai Accrete
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AI analytics for healthcare and defense. James built the NLP pipelines that turned news, social and clinical text into investable signal (2018 to 2019).
- H.C. Wainwright & Co. H.C. Wainwright
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Investment bank. James was a sell-side biotechnology analyst there and initiated coverage on 50+ companies (2016 to 2018).
- Cornell University, SC Johnson College of Business Cornell Johnson · Johnson School
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MBA, Finance & Strategy (2024). James was also an Associate at the Big Red Venture Fund.
- University of Essex
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M.S. in Biotechnology.
- Denison University
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B.S. in Biochemistry (2015). James captained the sailing team.
- YPO Young Presidents' Organization
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Global leadership community of chief executives. James is a member.
Disciplines
The six areas of practice listed on the home page, defined as James practices them.
- Capital & Financial Architecture
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Strategic finance, capital deployment, investment structuring and M&A advisory, as practiced at Plocamium Holdings and Vaxart.
- Applied Intelligence
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Designing and shipping production AI and machine learning systems, for example a multi-agent research and entity-intelligence engine on AWS.
- AI Evaluation
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Building tests that measure what a model can really do: expert tasks, binary weighted rubrics and assessments written from real analyst workflows.
- AI in Regulated Markets
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Using AI in capital markets, healthcare and life sciences, with model governance and compliant deployment.
- Operational Engineering
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Post-transaction integration, organizational design and operational change, done from inside the business.
- Leadership & Decision Design
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Board and executive advisory, operating cadence and incentive design.
Terms of art
Finance and machine learning terms that come up in James's work.
- Alternative data
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Non-traditional datasets, such as transaction panels, web data and text, used in investment research. James worked with it at Accrete.ai and M Science.
- Asset-backed finance ABF
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Lending secured by pools of assets such as loans, leases or receivables. It is the focus of ATLAS SP Partners.
- Patient capital
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Long-horizon investment that is not tied to a fund's return clock. It is the Plocamium Holdings model.
- LBO Leveraged buyout
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An acquisition funded largely with debt that is repaid from the target's own cash flows.
- DCF Discounted cash flow
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Valuing a business as the present value of the cash it is expected to generate.
- Accretion/dilution
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Whether a deal raises or lowers the buyer's earnings per share.
- RLHF / RLVR Reinforcement learning from human feedback · Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards
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Ways of training a model with rewards: from human judgments (RLHF), or from answers that can be checked automatically, such as a correct number (RLVR).
- Evaluation rubric
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A set of yes-or-no criteria, each weighted, that a grader checks one at a time to score a model's answer.
- Benchmark saturation
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When a test stops separating models because they all score near the top.
- Entity resolution
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Matching mentions of the same company or person across sources into one record. It is the core of the Plocamium entity graph.
- Deflated Sharpe Ratio
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A Sharpe ratio adjusted for how many strategies were tried, used to tell real edge from luck.