Tyler Spalding is the President of Acronym Foundation and the Co-founder of Flexa, the developer organization behind Ampera, a grassroots payments initiative, anchored by the AMP collateral token. ^[1][2]

Education

Spalding attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering and then he got a Master's degree in Aerospace, Aeronautical, and Astronautical Engineering from the same university in 2002. ^[2]

He earned an MBA, Cross Registration from Harvard Business School in 2010, and afterward, he
attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a Master's Degree in Business Administration (MBA), Entrepreneurship and Innovation. ^[2]

Career

Tyler Spalding started his career as a Software Engineer at Microsoft followed by being a Researcher at NASA in 2004. He served as a Design Lead of the United Space Alliance and also, the United States Air Force in 2008. ^[2]

In 2009, Spalding served as the Senior Engineer, NASA Constellation Program / Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, and then as a Researcher at MIT until 2011. ^[2]

He co-founded Tastebud Technologies in May 2011 and served as the CEO leading the company to be acquired by Raise in 2015. ^[3]

“We’ve all recognized how aligned our business objectives were,” Spalding commented on the acquisition.
“Raise not only has a massive company that’s well-capitalized with a great team of investors, but for us, knowing the team and the culture we’d be working with really sealed the deal.”^[3]

Spalding served as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Raise.com post-acquisition until 2018. ^[2]

Flexa

In February 2018, he co-founded Flexa^[5] alongside Zachary Kilgore, a platform that offers omnichannel digital asset payments. It is also the company behind Ampera, a grassroots payments initiative that uses Amp as a digital collateral token.

Flexa is the first use case of Amp's features as a collateral token. The Flexa Capacity contract is a collateral manager that uses Amp to collateralize the payments of merchant locations across the US and Canada. Users stake Amp in exchange for rewards funded by the merchant fees. ^[5]

In January 2023, Spalding was appointed the President of Acronym Foundation, focusing on building open-source Web3 projects including Anvil and Ampera. ^[4]