Reza Javan

Today Reza Javan runs Telescope, a London company whose pitch is almost suspiciously simple: outbound sales on auto-pilot. Type what your perfect customer looks like in plain English, and an AI agent goes hunting through hundreds of millions of profiles, drafts the message, warms the inbox, and waits for the reply. The salespeople just close.

It is the kind of product you would expect from a career operator who has spent fifteen years inside CRM dashboards. Javan is not that. His earlier job title was Dr. Reza Rezaei Javan, and his earlier output was peer-reviewed genomics. The handle he still uses on X is @TheBioscientist. That is the tell.

The pivot nobody scripted

Before Telescope, Javan was at the bench. A BSc in Biomedical Science from Surrey. An MSc in Molecular Biology and the Pathology of Viruses from Imperial College London. Then a DPhil in Clinical Medicine at Oxford, where he sat inside the Nuffield Department of Medicine and pointed sequencing machines at Streptococcus pneumoniae - the bacterium behind pneumonia.

The work was not small. He combed through more than six thousand pneumococcal genomes and surfaced a large, previously uncatalogued repertoire of antimicrobial peptides. In a 2019 paper in Nature Communications, he and his colleagues mapped close to eight hundred prophages hiding inside Streptococcus genomes and showed one of them was tied to virulence. The throughline of all of it: take an enormous, messy biological dataset and find the signal that matters.

Swap "genomes" for "buyers" and you have described Telescope.

How a salesman got made

The pivot looks abrupt only from the outside. Between the lab and the startup, Javan sold. He was a genomics sales specialist consultant at Tecan and a regional account manager at Novogene Europe, carrying a bag and a quota across the south of the UK. So when he later built a tool to automate prospecting, he was not guessing at the pain. He had lived the part where you spend your morning hunting for the right person instead of talking to them.

In 2021 he joined Entrepreneur First's LD17 cohort - the talent program that pairs technical people and dares them to start a company from nothing. He came out of it co-founding Telescope with Olivier Ramier, the CTO who had previously built Mapedia.org. The following year Telescope landed in Sequoia Capital's Arc program and raised around a million dollars, with Soma Capital and Entrepreneur First alongside.

Right person, right product, right time

Telescope's founding line - find the right prospect for the right product at the right time - reads like a sales cliche until you remember who wrote it. Precision targeting across a vast population was Javan's actual day job, except the population used to be bacterial strains. Now the platform claims more than 900 million verified profiles, a sub-1% bounce rate, and a roster north of twenty thousand companies. The features stack up the way a scientist would build them: search, enrich, automate, warm, measure. No step skipped.

What makes the profile fun is the mismatch. SaaS founders tend to arrive from product, growth, or another startup. Javan arrived from a Google Scholar page full of words like "bacteriocin" and "molecular epidemiology." He once helped explain how bacteria signal and compete with each other. Outbound sales, if you squint, is the same puzzle: who is talking to whom, and how do you reach them before anyone else does.

He has not entirely shed the old world. The Oxford Union, the debating society that hosts presidents and prime ministers, once elected him to its committee - a small reminder that the man comfortable with sequence alignments was also comfortable in a room full of arguments. Today the arguments are about pipelines and reply rates, and the dataset is humans instead of haploid genomes. Same hunt. Different prey.