On Maury Argento’s first day at Siemens Ultrasound, one of the warehouse employees looked at her and asked how old she was.
Argento had just left the Army. She was the new warehouse manager, walking into a room full of people who had been doing the job for years. She didn’t flinch.
“Don’t worry about that,” she told them. “Here’s what I can do for you.”
It was the same approach she’d taken as a second lieutenant fresh out of college, assigned to work with an NCO who knew far more than she did about everything that mattered.
“I came in and said, basically, ‘Here’s the deal. This is what I can bring. These are the things I know. This is how I can be helpful,’” she says. “‘I’m not going to tell you how to do your job. I need you to teach me, but let me help you in the ways that I can help you.’”
Argento did not come from a military family. She signed up for ROTC because she needed a way to pay for college at Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied biology and psychology. She was an athlete. She thought she’d give it a shot.
“It was not anything that I expected,” she says. “It was incredible people solving problems, being really smart, communicating.”
She didn’t expect the meritocracy of the Army. There, she says, soldiers didn’t care where you came from or what accent you had. People cared whether you could be trusted and whether you had your team’s back.
She still remembers an NCO with a beautiful singing voice leading a ruck march during training. The whole formation was jogging and he was singing cadence, and it was, she says, like magic. The kind of experience that doesn’t happen anywhere else.
After the Army, Argento built a career across Silicon Valley. She worked in med tech companies building technology to help people, then spent years in robotics before getting deep into manufacturing and the tools that support it. Eventually she made a pivot into aerospace, which turned out to be less of a leap than it seemed: another world of highly technical, complicated manufacturing problems.
“I just kind of became an expert on building technology to solve complicated problems,” she says.
The path to Immediator started when a friend asked her to help with a new company. A personal injury lawyer named Jason Crawford had an idea, and they needed someone who understood products to figure out whether it could become real. Argento started as a consultant, then came on as COO, and eventually they asked her to run the company.
“It wasn’t exactly my original path plan,” she says. “But it turns out I am made for this.”
Immediator is a legal technology company built around dispute resolution. When someone is injured, the process of reaching a settlement can drag on for months or years. Both sides build their cases, prepare for court, and then, right before trial, begin negotiating. In many cases, the two sides were actually close to agreement much earlier, but neither side had a way to know that.
“Nobody wins,” Argento says. “The injured party’s waiting, the insurer has money sitting in reserves, the defendant is waiting, the lawyers can’t take on new cases because this case is dragging along.”
Immediator’s tool, called PRISM, lets both sides in a personal injury case independently assess the case by answering a set of questions. The algorithm generates a score based on how aligned the two parties are. A high score means there’s common ground to work with. If the alignment is there, the tool provides a communication platform for direct negotiation.
“It’s a tool that is helping people not only communicate, but find common ground. Which across the world, I think we could all benefit from.” Argento says
Getting the industry to trust the tool has been the hardest part. Insurance carriers and plaintiff attorneys exist in an adversarial relationship by design. When Immediator invites the opposing side into the platform, some attorneys see it as a weapon the other side might use against them. Once someone gets on the phone and hears the explanation, they understand. But that first phone call is the hard part.
“We are agnostic to settlement amounts,” Argento says. “We don’t take a side. What we really want to do is get people on with their lives quicker.”
The company is in pilot with an insurance carrier, working through live cases and inviting plaintiff firms onto the platform. Right now, the work is getting Immediator’s name and its neutrality into the market so people stop wondering whose side it’s on.
Years before Immediator, Argento had tried building a company on her own.
“I started a company years ago where I tried to do it all myself, and what I learned is that I can learn these things,” she says. “But I’m never gonna be as good as somebody who actually does it and knows how to do it.”
At Immediator, founders Jill Ferdinands, the data scientist who holds a PhD from Harvard and spent 25 years at the CDC and Crawford brings more than 30 years in personal injury law. The companies’ head of engineering, Juan Raigosa, a close friend and 30 year Silicon Valley developer, is also earning his master’s in data science, which creates productive overlap with Ferdinands’s expertise. Argento thinks of the team as a Venn diagram, with each person owning a core area of knowledge and just enough overlap at the edges to keep everyone connected.
She uses a soccer analogy to explain her philosophy. For more than a decade, Argento ran adult soccer leagues, and she saw the same problem over and over: a forward asked to play defense will try, but you’ll watch them creep toward the goal every chance they get.
“Finding what people love and what motivates them, and really trying to get them into that spot where they can excel, is so valuable,” she says.
When the conversation turns to being a woman in technology, Argento is direct about a pattern she’s observed in herself and others. In environments where you’re in the minority, there’s a pull toward climbing over the people around you just to get noticed.
“There’s this feeling that you have this need to push everybody else around you down so that you can get up and breathe,” she says. “Kind of like if you’re swimming.”
She says she’s done it. She had to become aware of it. What she found to be more effective, and more honest, was the opposite.
“Let’s come up together,” she says. “Tell me what you’ve learned. Let’s help each other. Let’s build this ladder together instead of climbing on top of each other.”
Argento has two children, ages four and seven. The days are long, she says, but the years are short. She coaches her daughter’s soccer teams. She lives in San Francisco, surrounded by the startup ecosystem she’s spent her entire career in but now on the other side of it, running the company instead of building the product inside one.
“I didn’t know how to CEO,” she says, with the kind of candor that suggests she’s figuring it out anyway. “I didn’t know how to do fundraising. And so I’m learning as I go.”
She’s learning it the way she learns everything, by collecting from the people around her. Friends who are investors or who run companies like hers. Mentors who can answer the questions she didn’t know she’d need to ask. The company has bootstrapped so far, and Argento and her team are weighing how much outside capital, if any, they actually need.
“I feel lucky to be in a position where I’m heading the ship with a bunch of people who I really respect,” she says, “and we’re all a team, and it’s not just my way or the highway.”
Maury Argento is the CEO of Immediator, a legal technology company based in San Francisco that uses AI and data science to accelerate personal injury case resolution. A U.S. Army veteran, Argento held leadership roles across Silicon Valley’s advanced technology sector, including positions in medical device manufacturing, robotics, and aerospace. She holds an MBA from the University of San Francisco and a BS in Biology and Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis.