Maria is a computer scientist turned entrepreneur. She is currently the co-founder and CEO of Orb Intelligence, a company that builds a firmographics database for marketing software vendors and B2B marketing agencies.

Previously Maria worked for Yandex, a leading Russian web search company, where she built social search product for the US market. In 2009 she co-founded news personalization startup TweetedTimes which was acquired by Yandex in 2011.

Before that Maria spent 8 years in academia: She received her PhD in Computer Science from Russian Academy of Sciences, and spent 2 years as postdoc at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Her area of research was building scalable database systems, semi-structured data, Natural Language Processing.