chemistry
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Xiaoxi Wei’s second career in translation
Before she co-founded X-Therma, Xiaoxi Wei worked as a business translator. Her next assignment would take her from a chemistry doctorate to Berkeley Lab, a California production line, and an international company.
Kimon Angelides and the business at the end of the olive grove
After laboratories, startups and a beauty-box acquisition, Kimon Angelides is working with a different kind of asset: his family’s olive groves in Greece. His latest venture puts a long career in company building beside the slower demands of a harvest.
Stephen Thomas and the Art of the Next Pass
A chemist by training, Stephen Thomas has helped build companies that other companies buy. At Sera Medicines and Navigator Medicines, his career turns on what happens when the work passes to a new set of hands.
Alex M. Chen and the business of getting the small things right
A chemist leaves Merck, co-founds a company in Suzhou, and keeps widening its scope. Alex M. Chen’s route to Crystal Bio Solutions begins with an unusually close interest in how things fit together.
Pedro Pizarro and the trouble with a simple equation
A chemistry PhD became the head of Edison International by following problems beyond the laboratory. Now Pedro Pizarro has to reconcile California’s electric ambitions with the cost, safety and trust of the grid beneath them.
Dennis X. Hu and the problem of knowing enough
A chemist with a habit of helping other people learn turned his reading problem into Drug Hunter. The harder lesson was building a company that could pay for the explanation.
Gary Glick and the art of starting again
Before he built companies, Gary Glick built a life in chemistry. From Michigan classrooms to Scorpion and Odyssey, his career turns on a recurring question: who should be in the room when the next idea begins?
Volker Berl started with atoms. Then came companies.
Before founding New Age Ventures, Volker Berl helped turn chemistry into a board game. His route from Strasbourg laboratories to New York investing still runs through the practical business of putting things together.
Aetna Trombley Chose the Long Route to a New Kind of Biotech
She spent nine years helping build NGM, then left for science compelling enough to begin again. At Lycia Therapeutics, Aetna Trombley has made patience, partnerships and protein clearance into an operating strategy.
Zlatko Jončev
Zlatko Jončev is the co-founder and CEO of b-12 (b12 Labs), a Y Combinator S25 startup building AI agents that plan and run chemical synthesis for pharma and biotech. A former national chemistry olympiad champion turned organic chemist, he earned a PhD in Basel, trained as a medicinal chemist at Roche, and did his postdoc in EPFL's Lab of Artificial Chemical Intelligence, where he met co-founder Andres Bran. b-12 aims to shrink early-stage drug discovery from years to months by making molecules that are otherwise hard to make.
Ben Hernandez
Ben Hernandez is the founder and CEO of Numat, a Chicago deep-tech company that treats chemistry like software. Numat designs metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), nanoscale materials that capture, hold, and even destroy specific molecules with atomic precision. Trained as an engineer with a law degree and an MBA, and a former private equity investor, Hernandez turned a Northwestern lab idea into the world's first industrial-scale MOF manufacturing campus, powering safer hazardous-gas storage for the semiconductor industry through its ION-X product and pushing toward industrial decarbonization.
Adam Slavney
Adam Slavney is the co-founder and CEO of Pascal, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup commercializing solid-state refrigerants to replace the planet-warming gases inside air conditioners, heat pumps, refrigerators and data centers. A Stanford-trained chemist who studied perovskite solar cells before a Harvard postdoc in clean-energy economics, Slavney spun Pascal out of Harvard in 2023 around a class of barocaloric materials that respond to pressure two orders of magnitude more strongly than other solids. The company raised an $8M seed round in 2024 led by Engine Ventures, with Khosla Ventures participating, and later added a Series A to scale prototypes. Slavney's pitch is blunt: heating and cooling burn nearly 40% of the world's energy and the refrigerants doing it cause about 2% of global warming, and he wants to keep the cooling while deleting the climate cost.
Andrew Chadeayne
Andrew Chadeayne is the founder and CEO of CaaMTech, an Issaquah, Washington psychedelic pharmaceutical company building safer, patentable psychedelic-inspired medicines. A chemist (PhD, Cornell) and patent attorney (JD, George Washington) who began his career proving sugar is addictive through opioid pathways, he has filed more than 100 patent applications mapping the chemistry of psilocybin, tryptamines and other psychedelics. His strategy is to expand 'the universe of available compounds' rather than bet on a single molecule, giving researchers a toolbox of characterized psychedelics for mental health treatment.
Nick Talken
Nick Talken is the Co-Founder and CEO of Albert Invent, an Oakland-based AI platform that is transforming how chemists and materials scientists do research and development. A chemical engineer by training who learned to code, Talken spent years inside Henkel's global R&D organization before spinning out Albert Invent in 2022 with a team of co-founders who built the product from within. The company's platform - used by over 3,000 scientists across 142+ labs in 30+ countries at companies like Kenvue, Henkel, and Chemours - has raised over $52 million from top-tier investors including Coatue, Index Ventures, TCV, and J.P. Morgan Private Capital.
Chris Emerson
Chris Emerson, PhD, is the Founder, Chief Scientist, and CEO of LEVEL, California's #1 cannabis tablet brand. A US Navy veteran and Chinese interpreter turned small-molecule chemist, he abandoned a Stanford postdoc in 2012 to spend four months living in a tent on a Mendocino cannabis farm - and emerged with a founding thesis that would reshape how the industry thinks about getting high. Instead of chasing THC percentages, he built LEVEL around effects-driven cannabinoid formulations using precise ratios of acidic, neutral, and degradative compounds the plant alone can't deliver. Two US patents, multiple peer-reviewed publications, and an IRB-approved clinical trial later, LEVEL is the top-selling cannabis tablet brand in California, now operating in seven states.
Stig Hansen
Stig K. Hansen is a Danish-American biochemist and serial biotech founder who co-founded Kimia Therapeutics in 2023, a Berkeley-based precision chemistry company applying machine learning and automated synthesis to drug discovery. He previously co-founded and led Carmot Therapeutics for 15 years, inventing Chemotype Evolution technology that contributed to LUMAKRAS - the world's first FDA-approved KRAS G12C inhibitor for non-small cell lung cancer. Carmot was acquired by Roche for up to $3.1 billion in January 2024. At Kimia, Hansen is pioneering the ATLAS platform (AcTive Learning with Automated Synthesis and Screening), which integrates high-throughput chemistry, genome editing, and AI to map druggable chemical space at unprecedented scale. The company raised a $55 million Series A in December 2023 led by The Column Group and Dimension.