food-safety
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Milan Patel Bet His Third Startup on a Glass Chip - and a 120-Year-Old Problem
Before PathogenDx, Milan Patel built cars, ran an electronics company, learned finance at Intel and watched his first startup fail. His third venture turns tiny patterns on glass into same-shift answers for laboratories - a career assembled from engineering, money and the nerve to ship.
Matt Theurer Is Teaching AI to Read the Light We Cannot See
After helping build a billion-dollar enterprise cloud company, the engineer went back to first principles. His new bet is that the next useful layer of AI will not write prose - it will interpret matter.
Sasan Amini
Sasan Amini is the co-founder and CEO of Clear Labs, a San Carlos genomics company that turns next-generation DNA sequencing into a push-button diagnostic for food safety and infectious disease. An Iranian immigrant who left Tehran at 22, he earned a PhD in genomics at Princeton, worked in advanced research at Illumina, and in 2014 set out to make sequencing simple enough for any lab to run. When COVID-19 hit, Clear Labs pivoted its automated platform into SARS-CoV-2 surveillance and reached more than half of U.S. public health labs.
Jamie Strachan
Jamie Strachan is the CEO of Nabaco, a San Marcos, Texas agricultural-science company building natural, clay-based barrier coatings that extend the shelf life of fresh produce and cut food waste. A produce-industry executive with more than 20 years in the business, he previously ran Green Giant Fresh (Growers Express) and founded and chaired the leafy greens marketing effort in California. At Nabaco he is commercializing a patented, tasteless and odorless protection technology across pre-harvest, packaging, and post-harvest applications, including a distribution partnership with AgroFresh.
Christine Schindler
Christine Schindler is the co-founder and CEO of PathSpot, the maker of the HandScanner - a device that mounts beside a kitchen sink, scans a worker's just-washed hands with light, and flags invisible contamination in seconds. A Duke-trained biomedical engineer who first built low-cost medical tools near Mount Kilimanjaro, she prototyped PathSpot's algorithms in her apartment bathroom, sold her car to fund it, and grew the company into a food-safety operating system used across the restaurant industry. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, a Time Best Invention recognizee, and the founder of the nonprofit Girls Engineering Change.