chief-data-officer
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Ian Kalin
Ian Kalin is the CEO and co-founder of TurbineOne, a San Francisco defense-technology company building the Frontline Perception System - machine learning that runs on the sensor at the tactical edge, without the cloud, so warfighters can spot threats in real time. A Georgetown-trained politics major turned Navy nuclear engineer and counter-terrorism officer, Kalin later became the first Chief Data Officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and a Presidential Innovation Fellow before building the product he says he wishes he'd had while serving. TurbineOne has raised more than $55M, holds 20+ Department of Defense contracts, and works across the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps in the Indo-Pacific.
Qian Liu
Qian Liu is a fintech operator and data scientist who helped build the robo investing movement from the inside. A computer scientist by training - PhD in machine learning from Penn, BS from Tsinghua - she was an early member of the Wealthfront founding team and its Director of Research, then Head of Data at GoFundMe, then Chief Data Officer at Guideline, the small-business 401(k) platform. When Gusto acquired Guideline, she moved into a leadership role at Gusto, where the brokerage entity sits inside its HR, payroll and benefits platform serving small and medium businesses. In 2024 she co-authored 'The Little Book of Robo Investing' with Elizabeth MacBride, turning a decade of building automated investing products into a plain-spoken guide for ordinary savers.
Robert Huntsman
Robert Huntsman is the Chief Data Officer at iCapital, the platform that powers much of the world's alternative-investment marketplace. He runs the teams, technology, and governance that let the firm ingest, protect, and analyze data across private equity, hedge funds, and private credit. A Stanford-trained quantitative economist with CFA and FRM credentials, he previously ran a 150-plus-person data science group at Prudential Financial. His current obsession: pointing large language models at messy, unstructured fund documents so private markets can finally move at the speed of public ones.
Fawad Butt
Fawad Butt is the co-founder and CEO of Penguin AI, a Palo Alto-based healthcare AI platform company that raised $29.7M in Series A funding in September 2025. A former Chief Data Officer at Kaiser Permanente, UnitedHealthcare, and Optum, Butt spent years on the buyer side spending hundreds of millions on generic tech before deciding to build the solution healthcare actually needed. Penguin AI targets the $1 trillion annual administrative burden in US healthcare with purpose-built agentic AI, small language models, and digital workers that compress prior authorization reviews from 30 minutes to under two, positioning itself as 'the Epic of the healthcare back office.'