earthquake-engineering
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Omar Issa
Omar Issa is the co-founder and CEO of ResiQuant, a San Francisco startup that uses structural engineering AI to read a building's hidden vulnerabilities and rebuild how property insurers underwrite catastrophe risk. A second-generation structural engineer raised in the Bay Area, he earned a PhD at Stanford's John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, specializing in machine learning for disaster recovery. After walking through the rubble of earthquakes from Ridgecrest to Turkey and the wreckage of Hurricane Ian, he and co-founder Francisco Galvis built ResiQuant to give underwriters the engineering-grade data they were missing, raising $4M in seed funding led by LDV Capital in 2025.
Andy Thompson
Andy Thompson is the cofounder and CEO of Safehub, a San Francisco company that puts low-cost sensors on buildings to deliver real-time, building-specific earthquake damage data. A structural and earthquake engineer trained at UC Berkeley, he spent 16 years at the global engineering firm Arup, where he built its Catastrophe Risk & Insurance practice and worked post-disaster in countries from Chile to Haiti to Japan. He cofounded Safehub in 2015 with catastrophe-risk veteran Doug Frazier, raised a $9M Series A in 2021, and has deployed sensors across thousands of buildings in dozens of countries, now powering sensor-triggered parametric earthquake insurance with partners like Liberty Mutual Reinsurance.
Ashraf Habibullah
Ashraf Habibullah is the founder, President, and CEO of Computers and Structures, Inc. (CSI), the Berkeley-based company behind ETABS and SAP2000 - structural engineering software used in 160+ countries to design buildings like Taipei 101 and One World Trade Center. A Pakistani-American engineer who once dreamed of being a rockstar, Habibullah has spent 50 years turning the structural engineering profession from slide rules to software, earning election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024. Equally passionate about ballet, photography, and the arts, he co-founded the Diablo Ballet and the Engineers' Alliance for the Arts, championing the idea that engineers need as much human skill as technical skill.