Chevron Technology Ventures’ Catalyst Program

  • DATABASE (934)

  • ARTICLES (645)

    • DATABASE (934)
    • ARTICLES (645)
  • Sort by
    • Relevance
    • Date

Tony Fadell is the inventor of the iPod, co-inventor of the iPhone, and former CEO and founder of Nest Labs, which was later acquired by Google. He is also an angel investor and head of Paris-based deeptech advisory and investing firm Future Shape, which has over 200 companies in its portfolio and a focus on issues like the electrification and digital connection of things, biomanufacturing and the eradication of waste. Fadell has invested in at least 10 startups, with his most recent disclosed investments having taken place in 4Q20. These included his participation in the $7m seed round of London-based consumer technology and conceptual design house Nothing, the $45m Series B round of US biotech firm and vegan leather maker MycoWorks, well as the $31m Series A round of video call effects and presentation tools company mmhmm. 

Royal Golden Eagle (RGE) is an industrial group owned by Indonesian tycoon Sukanto Tanoto. It employs 60,000 people worldwide with assets worth over $20bn. Tanoto started his business empire in 1967 as a supplier of spare parts to oil and construction companies in Indonesia. He went on to invest in oil palm plantations in 1979. Since 1985, his group companies have been managing 30,000 acres of oil palm trees each year across a total land area of 160,000 hectares.Headquartered in Singapore, RGE has interests in diverse sectors like paper palm oil, viscose, asset management, real estate, construction and energy. RGE owns the world’s largest viscose producer Sateri, Asia Pacific Rayon and energy firm Pacific Oil & Gas. It is also the owner of the Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Limited (APRIL), one of the world’s largest pulp and paper mills. The Rainforest Action Network and other NGOs like Greenpeace and the WWF have put considerable pressure on the RGE group’s unsustainable operations such as the destruction of rainforests by APRIL. In 2019, RGE announced plans to invest $200m in cellulosic textile fiber research and development over a period of 10 years. Projects will include the scaling up of proven clean technology in fiber manufacturing, bringing pilot-scale production to commercial scale and R&D in emerging frontier solutions.

Co-founder and CEO of VUE Vlog, Kuang Fei was so intrigued by design when he was studying electronics and communication engineering at the Harbin Institute of Technology that he spent most of his time doing part-time designing jobs. Upon graduation, he started his designing career at NetEase in 2007. However his career veered towards product management when, a year later, he joined Tencent in Allen Zhang's team (the team that later designed WeChat). In 2012, Kuang joined a startup, an Android app store called Wandoujia as Chief Product Officer. In late 2015, he left Wandoujia and, in 2016, started VUE with two colleagues, an app that both fits his interest in designing and experience in product.

After graduating in business administration at the University of Michigan-Dearborn in 2013, Ife Oyedele II stayed on at the university to obtain a master’s in information technology in 2016.While studying in Michigan, Oyedele met up with Obi Ozor and the two friends started an e-commerce venture to sell diapers and baby soap from the US to customers in Nigeria. Ozor later moved to Philadelphia to continue his studies at Wharton School.Still at university, he gained work experience in business intelligence at Michigan consultancy firm CFI Group for about three years. He has also conducted some research for pharma group iLabs and completed stints in business analysis and quality assurance at various companies. In May 2014, he joined General Fuels company in Detroit and worked as a business manager for almost two years.In 2016, Ozor and Oyedele co-founded Uber-style logistics platform Kobo360 in Nigeria. Oyedele was CTO at Kobo360 until 2020 when he became the company’s Chief Growth Officer.

Kyle Gazay is a co-founder of Diamond Foundry, the US-based unicorn that makes lab-grown diamonds and which is also the world’s first diamond producer to be certified carbon neutral. He has worked at Diamond Foundry since its launch, and held several roles there, including being COO as well as president of productionCurrently, Gazay oversees all diamond production at the company. Gazay’s expertise is in engineering and production. He has a decade’s track record in working with any equipment to obtain a robust and repeatable baseline output.Like the other co-founders of Diamond Foundry, Gazay previously worked at Nanosolar, a $640m US-based solar power technology provider, which later folded due to pressure from cheaper competition in China. At Nanosolar, Gazay led the development of its production line, and oversaw the translation of the company’s research into development and baseline production output. Upon the closure of Nanosolar, Gazay joined former Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen and former Nanosolar engineer Jeremy Scholz in pivoting to work on lab-grown diamonds, and in establishing Diamond Foundry.

Chen received a bachelor’s degree in material formation from Xiangtan University in 2004. While in college, he co-founded 0755.org.cn, one of the earliest online classifieds providers in China. He is also a co-founder of dunsh.org, a nonprofit search engine optimization website in China. After graduation, he served as senior project manager and chief editor at Xiamen Haowei Network Technology. From June–December 2007, Chen served as head of the product department at ganji.com, an online classified site, responsible for product management and customer experience. He then joined 58.com the same year, serving as senior VP of product management and website operation from December 2007 to August 2014.In November 2014, he founded 58 Daojia and has served as CEO since then. In August 2017, 58 Daojia announced a merger with 58 Su Yun and Gogovan, a logistics platform in Southeast Asia, and he became Chairman of the new company. The merger created Asia's largest city-to-city cargo delivery platform. In 2018, 58 Daojia was rebranded as Daojia Group. The group’s 58 Su Yun received $250m funding and was relaunched as Kuaigou Express.

Ryan Mario Yasin is an engineer, designer and sustainable fashion entrepreneur based in London. Originally from Reykjavik, Iceland, Yasin graduated in aeronautical engineering at Imperial College London and has a master’s in global innovation design from the Royal College of Art.  As a 23-year-old design student, Yasin founded materials technology startup Petit Pli, and developed the design for the company’s first product, a pleated garment that could expand up to seven sizes to last children through their first few years of life. Petit Pli now makes expandable pleated clothes for children and adults, using a fabric derived from recycled plastic and a structure inspired by origami, architecture and space satellites. Petit Pli products have won a number of prestigious awards, such as the UK James Dyson Award, Time Magazine’s best invention of 2020 and the Red Dot Product Design Award.Yasin has a strong interest in photography and in the interplay between art and engineering. In 2020, Yasin was included by Forbes in its 30 Under 30 list for Europe.

Bachtiar Rifai graduated in 2010 with a bachelor's degree in Physics from Universitas Gadjah Mada, but his career has led him towards entrepreneurial pursuits, especially in technology. While he was in university, he worked freelance as a web designer and SEO consultant, and in 2008, founded his own digital marketing company, Jogja Web Services, which was dedicated to helping SMEs. In 2012, he left Jogja Web Services, joined travel booking site Pegipegi – now owned by Traveloka – and founded a new digital marketing consultancy, WireHub.  In 2014, he joined Lazada and Blanja.com. In 2015, Rifai and his co-founders established Kofera, which offers automated digital marketing using AI. Kofera helps its clients efficiently connect various types of data, including sales and stock, on one platform, where the data can be accessed, processed and used to automatically guide ad spending. In 2018, Rifai spun off a new business from Kofera: Volantis, a company that applies Kofera's data-driven principles to more use cases and provides enterprise clients with end-to-end services.

An industrial engineer by training, Rubén Blanco Carrera comes from a family of ranchers in Cabañas, 18 km from Ávila, Spain. Currently he is Commercial Director and co-founder of IoT startup SensoWave, as well as its brand Digitanimal, aimed at remote farming. The business idea of Digitanimal partly came about because of Blanco’s personal experience with his own livestock. Using IoT remote tracking, detecting heat and parturition through the use of sensors , which are analyzed to reflect the behavior of the cattle and notify alert ranchers to the anomalies detected, he was able to save a mother and calf from a difficult delivery. In another incident, the technology helped alert him to the attack of wolves. Blanco holds both a first degree and a master's degree from Madrid's Alfonso X El Sabio University, the former in Technical Engineering in Industrial and Product Design and the latter in Industrial Engineering and Industrial Electronics. He then worked as an industrial engineer at both private company Retailgas and at Alfa Imaging, the startup co-founded by Carlos Callejero, with whom Blanco later co-founded SensoWave.

Aspex Management was founded in 2018 by Hermes Li Ho Kei who was previously the executive MD and Head of Asia Equities at Och-Ziff Capital Management, aka OZ Management. Prior to joining OZ in 2011 Li worked at Goldman, Sachs & Co in Hong Kong.The London School of Economics graduate is now the chief investment officer at Aspex. The Hong Kong firm focuses on equity investments in Pan-Asia, specializing in sectors with long-term market growth potential and companies undergoing structural changes.Aspex led the $64m funding round for South Korean fintech unicorn Toss in August 2019. The P2P money transfer service platform Toss is created by Viva Republica backed by PayPal. Other participants in the round included existing Toss investors Kleiner Perkins, Altos Ventures, Singapore's GIC, Sequoia Capital China, Goodwater Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.In May 2020, Aspex also invested in another startup Market Kurly, a grocery-delivery service provider that became South Korea’s latest unicorn via the Series E funding round that secured $328m led by DST Global. In July, Aspex also joined the $900m Series C+ funding round of Xpeng Motors, Tesla’s EV rival in China.

Born in 1968, Jerry Yang is a Taiwanese-American billionaire computer programmer. After co-creating the Yahoo internet navigational guide in 1994, he co-founded the company Yahoo! Inc in 1995 with David Filo while both were studying at Stanford University. Yang did not complete his PhD in electrical engineering to become an entrepreneur “selling internet advertising”.Yang was Yahoo! CEO for almost two years until 2009, rejecting Microsoft’s takeover offer of $47.5bn in 2008. He eventually left the board in 2012 when he resigned due to strategic disagreements such as whether to sell all or part of the company. In 2016, Yahoo! completed the sale of its core operating business to Verizon for $5bn. Yang was also a board member of the Alibaba Group from 2006 to 2012. Yang met Jack Ma in 1997 when Ma was working as a government-employed tour guide. The former English teacher gave him a tour of the Great Wall of China. Ma went on to found Alibaba a few months after meeting Yang.After leaving Yahoo!, Yang founded AME Cloud Ventures to invest in multiple tech startups. As of November 2020, Yang’s net worth was valued at $2.3bn. In 2017, he and his wife pledged $25m to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the largest gift in the museum's history.

Ferrán Gutiérrez Vilaró has been an entrepreneur since 2008 with a successful track record in video-related technologies. Gutiérrez co-founded NPAW in 2008, where he is currently CEO; until 2014, he was Director of Product and Technology. He also co-founded video-on-demand (VOD) streaming service Wuaki.tv, now RakutenTC, in 2010. He continues to work at RakutenTV and Wuapi.com, a user-generated high-definition video site. He was also previously a senior developer at Atos Origin and Sclipo and systems architect for the Amuso project. Gutiérrez is a computer science graduate from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. 

Pedro Diezma is an entrepreneur, author and professional speaker as well as a co-founder of AI software development company Acuilae. He previously founded Zerintia Technologies, which specializes in wearable technology, IoT and software and business processes and was its CEO until 2017. Diezma was also a senior project manager at Endesa and had developed projects for over 450 enterprises. As an author, his books include The Crown of Adam and The Rebirth of the Hero. According to Onalytica, Diezma is a top influencer on IoT and wearables. Diezma holds a degree in Business Administration and Management from Madrid's Complutense University. 

Julien Denoël is the Belgian co-founder and COO of UK-based VR edtech for soft-skills training Bodyswaps, where he has worked since its founding in 2019. Prior to this, he was CEO and managing director at VR marketing agency Somewhere Else from 2016, before the agency pivoted to training and skills development and became the basis of Bodyswaps’ product offer. The agency had clients such as Adidas, for which Somewhere Else produced an interactive VR in-store promotional tool that was deployed in over 100 locations in China, Europe and the US and was nominated for a VR Award and an Immersive Perspective award. Denoël has also been a guest lecturer in VR and AR at INSEEC business school in London and Geneva since 2017. Prior to this, Denoël  also co-founded another VR agency, Exheb, in 2014, where he worked for almost three years as VR Producer. He also worked in digital marketing for Quotient Technology, formerly Coupons.com for two years, and in business development and marketing at the WorldOne agency for the same amount of time. Denoël holds both a master’s and a bachelor’s degree from HEC Management School in Liege, Belgium, the former in Marketing and Organization, the latter in Management.    

Mark Kotter is the Austrian co-founder at Dutch cell-based meat startup Meatable, the first to use pluripotent stem cells and claim a highly scalable culture technology, which was developed by Kotter prior to founding the startup in 2018. He is also founder at his biotech startup, bit.bio, which is based in Cambridge, UK, since 2016, where he applies his cellular technological innovation to human stem cell research and has raised investments totaling $42m. His main full-time position is at the University of Cambridge, where he has worked since 2009. He has spent more than five years as a clinician-scientist in stem cell research and was previously a lecturer in neurosurgery. Kotter also lectures at Paris Descartes University and is a team leader at the UK’s National Institute for Health Research’s Brain Injury MedTech Co-operative. He also founded Myelopathy.org to raise awareness of cervical myelopathy. His past positions were as a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine for one year, and for two years spent at the Medical University of Vienna. Kotter holds two doctorates; one in philosophy from the University of Cambridge and the other in medicine from the University of Graz in Austria. Kotter also holds a master’s in philosophy from the University of Cambridge.

Sorry, we couldn’t find any matches for“Chevron Technology Ventures’ Catalyst Program”.

Your payment was not successful.

Please make sure you have entered your payment details correctly. Or try again in a few moments.

small logo

The discount code you entered is invalid

Please make sure you have entered your discount code correctly. Or try again in a few moments.

Download successful.

Your sample has been sent. Please check your email.

By accessing and using www.compasslist.com and all pages within the domain (the “Website”), You accept and agree to have read, understood, accepted and agreed to be bound by the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy in full. If you disagree with all or any part of these Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, please do not use or continue any further use of this website. You acknowledge that you are aware that this Website contains an archive of existing content as at 31 December 2021 and is not being actively managed. We are under no obligation to update the content on this Website and, accordingly, no new content or articles will be posted to the Website after 31 December 2021.