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Ken Lane and the art of building what comes next
He trained to build structures. A career across five countries taught Ken Lane to build chemical businesses. At Olin, that experience now meets a proposed merger with Huntsman and the demanding arithmetic of industrial life.
Jay Bhatia
Jay Bhatia is the founder and CEO of Agilis Commerce (Agilis Chemicals), a Newark, New Jersey software company that builds cloud-based, branded e-commerce and AI-enabled customer engagement platforms purpose-built for the chemical industry. A chemical engineer and MBA with more than two decades at global players like BASF and Shell Chemicals, he launched Agilis in 2016-2017 to bring the digital tools of modern commerce to an industry long defined by manual, relationship-heavy processes. Under his leadership, Agilis has raised roughly $3.65M and rolled out its Alchemist AI solutions with pilot customers including Evonik.
Rick Luebbe
Rick Luebbe is the CEO and co-founder of Group14 Technologies, the Woodinville, Washington company behind SCC55, a silicon-carbon battery material that boosts energy density up to 50% and enables extreme fast charging. A former Army aviation officer who flew scout helicopters in Desert Storm and later commanded an Apache attack company, he traded the cockpit for a Stanford MBA and three startups. After building B2B integrator Hubspan and selling battery-materials pioneer EnerG2 to BASF in 2016, he spun out Group14 in 2015 with co-founder Rick Costantino. The company has raised more than $1 billion, including a $463M Series D, and is building the world's largest factory for advanced silicon battery materials. His mission, stated plainly: electrify everything.