Alistair Russell

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Tray.ai

Last Reviewed: September 28, 2026

Executive Summary

Alistair Russell is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Tray.ai, the enterprise integration and AI orchestration platform previously known as Tray.io. He founded the company in 2012 with Rich Waldron, now CEO, and Dominic Lewis, now Chief Revenue Officer. Their aim was to let teams solve business problems through automation and integration without having to write code for basic workflows. The three still lead the company. Russell is also its main technical voice: he writes on AI agents, the Model Context Protocol and governance of AI-built software, and in August 2026 he announced Tray Helix.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Tray.ai, originally Tray.io, in 2012 with Rich Waldron and Dominic Lewis; he is now its CTO.
• Announced Tray Helix in August 2026. Tray describes it as “the governed runtime for AI-built apps”, which takes applications from AI coding tools to a live URL with security controls, identity management and audit trails applied automatically.
• Has written about 20 posts for Tray.ai, including on Model Context Protocol governance, the barriers to enterprise adoption of AI agents, and choosing and integrating large language models.

Professional Journey

Tray began in 2012. In the company’s account, Russell, Rich Waldron and Dominic Lewis started it because there were too many tools, too many blockers and too many problems that needed code written just to fix basic workflows. They built a platform for connecting business applications and automating work between them with visual tools. It was first known as Tray.io and now trades as Tray.ai, which the company describes as an integration and AI orchestration platform with more than 700 connectors.

Today Russell is chief technology officer, while Waldron leads as CEO and Lewis as CRO. The company does not say whether those titles date from the founding. As the platform moved towards AI, his public writing followed. In 2025 he wrote about the obstacles to adopting AI agents, governance of the Model Context Protocol in the enterprise, and a guide to selecting, integrating and governing large language models. In 2026 he turned to the problem of getting AI-built software into production.

On 4 August 2026 he introduced Tray Helix. He argued that fewer than one in twenty AI-built applications reach production, and that those that do “ship ungoverned”. Helix is Tray’s answer: one command deploys an app built in tools such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and Tray’s governance, identity and audit controls are applied along the way. His recent posts cover the same ground, including what he heard about governance of AI-built apps at the Gartner Application Innovation Summit EMEA in September 2026.

Education

No education record was found in a first-party or primary source.