Founder Institute

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Brij Sahi is CEO and co-founder at Swiss biotech SwissDeCode, which applies DNA testing to food traceability, He has worked there full-time since April 2016. Since 2011, Sahi has also been an adjunct professor at Webster University in Geneva, teaching Business Policy, Strategic Management and Leadership. He is also a Swiss-based private investor in unnamed companies.From 2000–2008, Sahi worked at airline IT and telecommunications company SITA in both Singapore and Switzerland, where he reached the role of VP working in sales and marketing. He previously worked for two-and-a-half years in the area of sales and marketing at GAMECO, an aircraft maintenance and services company in China. Sahi started his corporate career at British Airways, where he spent over 11 years in marketing and business development.  Sahi holds an MBA from Cass Business School in London and a first degree in air transport engineering from City University, London. 

Zhang Haoqian completed a doctorate degree in systems and synthetic biology at Peking University in 2016. He has published more than 20 papers in international academic journals. In 2019, he was honored as one of China's 100 Most Creative People in Business. He is also a member of the Synthetic Biology Committee under China Society of Biotechnology.Peking University has participated in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competitions, with Zhang as a team member or leader between 2008 and 2010. The team has won gold medals twice at the iGEM competitions supported by MIT. He was also coaching the university’s iGEM team from 2011 until 2017. Zhang also founded the committee of China iGEMer Community.In 2010, Zhang met fellow iGEMer and Bluepha co-founder Li Teng at the iGEM giant jamboree event. They co-founded SynBio startup Bluepha in 2016, a spin-off from Tsinghua University.

She Wei graduated from Tsinghua University with a master's in Computer Science in 2006 and has since worked for IBM, CDL and HP Labs China. He joined Miaozhen Systems at the end of 2011, where he developed a series of B2B products for brands and advertisers. She joined MININGLAMP Technology as co-founder and CTO in 2013; led development of DataInsight (MININGLAMP's data mining platform); and headed the algorithm team, which served clients in the sectors of finance, homeland security and manufacture. A serial entrepreneur, he co-founded game media platform Ye Zizhu in 2003.

Xavier Sans Serra is the founder and CEO of payment and interactive chat app and IoT hardware startup Orain. He is based in Barcelona, where he has worked since 2016. Prior to this, he founded two other tech startups: Knowxel, which has been in operation from 2013 to 2016, and Neqta, which operated from 2011 to 2013. Knowxel was a social network for seeking skilled people for one-off work projects while Neqta was a research project to develop hardware to power portable devices. Both companies were developed at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where the initial development of Orain also took place. Sans holds two master's degrees from Barcelona's Ramon Llull University: one in Engineering and Telecommunications Engineering and the other in Networks and Telecommunications. Between 2010 to 2012, he was a member of the Electromagnetism and Communications Research Group at Ramon Llull University's La Salle campus, where he was involved in a research project on geomagnetically-induced currents, which led to publications in scientific journals.

With a PhD in molecular biology from NUS, Bao Shengjie, CEO and co-founder of Singrow, is a plant physiology expert who has been focusing his research for more than six years on expediting growth and improving yields. He grew up in Ningbo, a coastal city of China’s eastern Zhejiang Province. In 2011, he graduated from esteemed Zhejiang University with a bachelor's degree. He also studied bioinformatics at North Carolina State University, followed by studies at NUS. Since 2017, he has been an NUS research fellow. Strawberry has his favourite fruit since childhood. After moving to Singapore, he found that strawberries from the local supermarket were nothing close to those he had been eating for years. That sparked his study into the problem of Singapore’s local strawberry market, which in turn caused him to explore the urban farming industry with his plant physiology and molecular biology knowledge. Besides founding Singrow, he is the breeder of the company’s signature White Crystal Strawberry and invented the Fast Cultivation Method.

Christopher Mortensen is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at UK-based Modulous, the first end-to-end generative design and delivery solution for affordable, sustainable and modulized housing, where he has worked since 2018.  Before that, he worked for two years as technical director at engineering, sustainability and energy consultancy Hydrock. Previously, he was at Atelier Ten for ten years working as a senior engineer, an environmental design consultant, a building services engineer and a lighting designer. Mortensen’s previous posts were all in his native US: as a mechanical project engineer at Oregon-based Interface Engineering 2004-8, as a mechanical designer at Philadelphia-based Associated Engineering Consultants, and as an assistant hut master at the Appalachian Mountain Club. He holds an Executive MBA from Cass Business School in London and also studied Blockchain in 2018 at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School Mortensen is a keen public speaker and, in 2017, gave a TedX talk on ’Beyond Sustainable Design.’

Sarah Hordern is a co-founder, CFO and Group Development Leader at UK-based Modulous, the first end-to-end generative design and delivery solution for affordable, sustainable and modulized housing, where she has worked since 2019. She is simultaneously a non-executive director at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and at lenders Newbury Building Society. She was previously executive advisor at the Cambridge Code 2018-19, the first digital tool that measures subconscious drivers of behavior, and spent two years as COO at residential management company Meyrick Estate Management. From 1999 to 2014, she was a joint managing director in the area of property and finance at Newbury Racecourse, one of the UK’s largest horse-racing establishments, where she was responsible for the design and commercial negotiations for a new community of 1,500 homes. Prior to this, Hordern spent five years at PwC in corporate tax management. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from Oxford University in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

Gianpaolo Rando is CTO and co-founder at Swiss biotech SwissDeCode, which applies DNA testing to food traceability. He has worked there full-time since April 2016. Prior to this, Rando gained significant experience working in the field of genomics. He spent three years prior to SwissDeCode’s foundation trialing his DNA food testing technology in his startup BeerDeCoded and assisted in the launch of a compact DNA laboratory at Bento Bio in London. He previously spent almost three years at the University of Geneva in research, co-inventing a technology for ink to change color in response to a specific DNA sequence. His earlier position at the University of Lausanne as a post-doctoral fellow in genomics saw him lead a nine-man team for three and a half years, discovering the hormone that prepares newborns to lactate. Rando’s first post was at Trangenic Operative Products, leading animal research there. Italian-born Rando holds a PhD in biotechnology and pharmacology from the University of Milan as well as a qualification in data science. 

Former US investment banker Frank Wooten graduated in accounting and finance at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He also went on a study program in Madrid at Saint Louis University in 2002.After his graduation in 2003, he worked as managing director of CJS Securities in New York, a company that follows 100 underpriced stocks. In July 2008, he founded Point Blank Capital and became the managing partner of the financial services company based in Miami. In January 2016, he became the CFO and COO for Sao Paulo-based startup Squad, a platform that connects self-employed workers with companies.Wooten also met up with Jasper Holdsworth, a cattle rancher from New Zealand who was exploring the use of GPS tracking sensors to create a virtual fencing system for livestock management. In July 2016, Wooten became the CEO and co-founder of Vence Corp. The tech company designs and makes AI-enabled tracking devices like animal collars to help livestock owners reduce animal husbandry costs and improve the productivity of their pastureland.

Reimell Ragnauth is co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer at UK-based Modulous, the first end-to-end generative design and delivery solution for affordable, sustainable and modulized housing, where he has worked since 2019. He also works part-time as a strategic investor to data analysis company iaidō and is a non-executive chairman at construction insulation company PMP Manufacturing.Before Modulous, he was chief business development officer at gold fintech startup Glint for a year and established its US office. He previously worked as the managing director of Spiralite Ductwork in the area of building energy efficiency from 2010-17. Prior to this, all of his positions were in the finance and investment area: at 3i Group as Associated Director of Quoted Private Equity 2007-9; at the Electra Group as a senior associate of the EQMC Fund 2006-7; at consultancy Deloitte as an associate director of private equity transaction services 2004-6; at Orbis Investments 2001-4 working in investment analysis; and as Manager of Business Recovery Services at PwC in London 1996-2000. Ragnauth holds a Master’s in Law from Cambridge University. 

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.

Industrial business entrepreneur Jasper Holdsworth comes from a multi-generational family of cattle ranchers. In 2013, he became a director of his family’s 100-year-old Paringahau Farm Company in New Zealand. He also co-founded a virtual fencing startup for livestock management, Vence Corp, with US-based investment banker Frank Wooten in 2016.After graduating in forestry engineering in 1995, Holdsworth obtained a master’s in engineering management at his alma mater University of Canterbury. In 1998, he completed a master’s in applied finance at Macquarie University and started his banking career at WestLB and Deutsche Bank in Sydney.He completed an entrepreneurship development program run by MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 2010. He has also undertaken an advanced management program run by Harvard Business School in 2012.Since 2004, he has been working as the CEO of New Zealand-based Pultron Composites Ltd, an industrial technology company focused on the development and manufacture of glass fiber-reinforced polymers.In 2019, he became the chairman and co-founder of Mateenbar Ltd to produce composite reinforcement for infrastructure building materials in New Zealand, North Carolina and Saudi Arabia.

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.

Daan Luining is the Dutch co-founder and CTO at cell-based meat startup Meatable, the first to claim a highly scalable culture technology, where he has worked since 2018.  He is also a research director at the Cellular Agriculture Society in Leiden, a joint initiative for cell-based startups to share knowledge and to collaborate on projects to further scale the sector. Luining is also on the board of directors at the not-for-profit Cultured Meat Foundation that promotes sector innovation. His past posts have all been in the area of research, either as a researcher or a technician, and at the same time as completing studies. His last job was as a research strategist at New York-based New Harvest, a callular food rsearch funding body, where he worked for a year and met Dr. Kotter, the inventor of Meatable’s cellular technology. His research positions from 2009–15 were in the area of cell culture,  mass spectrometry and DNA sequencing at the Maastricht University, University Medical Center Amsterdam, Utrecht University and Leiden University. Luining holds a master’s in biological sciences from Leiden University in the Netherlands. 

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