Zaki Manian is Co-Founder of Sommelier and Co-Founder of Iqlusion, and is widely recognized as an early founding-team contributor to the Cosmos ecosystem. He held a Director of Tendermint role at Tendermint Inc., the company that built the Tendermint consensus engine and early Cosmos SDK, but he is not the sole founder of Cosmos; the Cosmos project is attributed to multiple founders including Jae Kwon and Ethan Buchman.
Manian co-founded Iqlusion, a blockchain infrastructure and validator company, and co-founded Sommelier in 2020 with Kristi Poldsam and other founding team members. Sommelier is a Cosmos SDK-based blockchain providing automated DeFi strategy management through its Cellar vault architecture. Strategy providers submit vault strategies that are implemented on Ethereum mainnet through Sommelier's decentralized governance mechanism, using the SOMM token for staking and governance. Sommelier strategies do not guarantee yield or principal protection.
Manian's work spans validator infrastructure, IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) protocol engineering, distributed systems, and DeFi strategy automation. His contributions to the Cosmos ecosystem include participation in IBC protocol development and early Cosmos network operations. Education details have not been confirmed from primary institutional sources. In 2026, Manian continues his work at Iqlusion and within the Sommelier/Cosmos ecosystem.
