Tagged: harvard
29 results
Sofie Qiao
Sofie Qiao, Ph.D. is a chemist-turned-biotech-founder who has built a career at the intersection of hard science and dealmaking. Trained in organic chemistry at Harvard and MIT, she founded LEAD Therapeutics (acquired by BioMarin in 2010, source of the PARP inhibitor Talazoparib now sold by Pfizer), ran WuXi Ventures, and then founded and led Vivace Therapeutics from 2015 to 2026, raising more than $100 million to advance first-in-class small molecules targeting the Hippo/YAP-TEAD pathway in cancer. She now leads Virtuoso Therapeutics, another company she founded.
Feng Xuan
Feng Xuan is a Boston-based scientist-entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Spear Bio, a biotechnology company building ultra-sensitive immunoassays for protein research and early disease diagnostics. He invented the company's core SPEAR (Successive Proximity Extension Amplification Reaction) technology as a Technology Development Fellow at Harvard's Wyss Institute, translating a decade of research in molecular and immuno-diagnostics into a platform that can measure minute quantities of protein biomarkers from sub-microliter samples. Under his leadership, Spear Bio raised an oversubscribed $45 million Series A in 2024 and earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for a blood-based pTau 217 test aimed at early Alzheimer's disease detection.
Fez Zafar
Fez Zafar is Chief of Staff at Mercor, the AI talent marketplace that vets, matches, and pays experts powering frontier AI labs. A 2024 Harvard graduate who was elected First Marshal of his class, he helped scale Mercor through one of the fastest revenue ramps on record and now leads hiring and cross-functional operations across its San Francisco and New York teams. Before Mercor he was an analyst at Village Global, a research assistant to economist Larry Summers, and a campus builder known for comedy, community events, and a student interview podcast.
Gage Caligaris
Gage Caligaris is the founder and CEO of Ledgebrook, a tech-enabled managing general agent (MGA) modernizing the Excess and Surplus (E&S) specialty insurance market. A Harvard-trained applied mathematician and former Barclays commodity derivatives trader, he spent eight-plus years as an actuary at Liberty Mutual, where he became the fastest person ever to pass the Casualty Actuarial exams and later scaled a new-mobility products line from under $50M to over $450M in gross written premium. He founded Ledgebrook in 2022 to pair modern engineering with deep insurance expertise, reaching a $100M run rate in under two years and raising an oversubscribed $65M Series C in 2025. In 2026 he was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year New England Award winner.
Joanna Stanicka
Joanna Stanicka is the co-founder, president and CEO of Axonis Therapeutics, a Boston clinical-stage biotech developing first-in-class oral medicines that target the brain chloride transporter KCC2 to treat epilepsy, neuropathic pain and spinal cord injury. A Harvard-trained neuroscientist who began her career in cancer biology in Ireland, she moved from the bench to the boardroom, taking Axonis from a Boston Children's Hospital discovery to a company that raised a $115 million Series A in 2024 and pushed its lead drug, AXN-027, into first-in-human trials.
Mylene Yao
Mylene Yao is co-founder, director, and CEO of Univfy, a Los Altos-based healthcare AI company that builds personalized IVF success prediction models. A board-certified OB/GYN trained at the University of Toronto, McGill, and Harvard, she was a Stanford faculty member running an NIH-funded embryo development lab before spinning her prediction research out with statistician Wing H. Wong. Univfy's models tell patients their individual odds of having a baby with IVF, and pair the prediction with financing so more people can actually pursue treatment.
Sara Providence
Sara Providence is Vice President and Chief of Staff to the CEO at SeatGeek, the New York-based ticketing marketplace. She arrived from McKinsey & Company in 2023, bringing an unusual triple-degree background - a BA from Harvard, a JD from Columbia Law, and an MBA from Columbia Business School - to the corner office of a company whose product is essentially the trust that a stranger's PDF will get you into a stadium.
Ariel Quinones
Ariel Quinones is the co-founder and co-CEO of Ironhack, a global tech bootcamp he launched in Madrid in 2013 with Gonzalo Manrique after the two met at Wharton. Raised in a Puerto Rican family of educators, he spotted a mismatch he could not unsee: youth unemployment above 50% in Spain sitting beside hundreds of thousands of unfilled tech jobs. Ironhack was his answer - short, intensive, outcomes-obsessed training that has since graduated thousands of career-changers across campuses in Europe, the Americas, and beyond. He now leads from Miami, preaching a gospel of ruthless focus on student outcomes and over-delivering on what people expect.
Caitlyn Pang
Caitlyn Pang is Director, Office of the CEO at InstaLILY AI, the New York startup building vertical AI teammates for the physical goods economy. A behind-the-scenes operator who works as a fractional Chief of Staff and COO, she is the person founders lean on to keep teams aligned and turn chaos into a plan. She sharpened that instinct through crisis years at the global nonprofit Mercy Corps, where she stepped up to support the CEO and cover the global board, and it traces back to her days reporting for The Harvard Crimson.
Eric Glyman
Eric Glyman is the co-founder and CEO of Ramp, the New York fintech that turned the corporate credit card upside down by rewarding companies for spending less, not more. A Las Vegas native and Harvard economics graduate, he first built the price-tracking app Paribus, sold it to Capital One in 2016, then launched Ramp in 2019 with Karim Atiyeh and Gene Lee. In under seven years he grew Ramp to more than 40,000 business customers and a $32 billion valuation, championing a vision of AI-run 'self-driving money' where finance work happens in the background without anyone asking.
Rachel Seevers
Rachel Seevers is a Strategy Associate in the Office of the CEO at The Nuclear Company, America's nuclear infrastructure platform. A Lexington, Kentucky native, she made her name as a teenage inventor - winning the $50,000 Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award in 2019 for a jellyfish-inspired underwater propulsion device that improved efficiency by up to 37 percent, after earlier building the patent-pending 'Virtual Winglet' aircraft wing over 7,000 hours of work. She studied mechanical engineering and education at Harvard, cut her professional teeth as a Deloitte analyst, and founded STEM programs to bring girls and underserved kids into science. Now she brings that biomimic's eye for efficiency to the hard problem of building nuclear fleets on time and on budget.
Jane Chen
Jane Chen is the founder and CEO of Letterly, an AI-assisted, human-in-the-loop writing platform that has helped more than 3,000 students across 30 states and seven countries write, revise, and publish their own work. A New York-born daughter of Chinese immigrants who returned from Shanghai unable to speak English, she studied history at Harvard, spent a decade on Wall Street as an investment banker and hedge fund analyst, then walked away from finance to rebuild how kids learn to write - starting with 30 students at a community center and growing into a seed-funded company with nearly 13,000 published student articles.
Jenna Parker
Jenna Parker is a former world-ranked professional triathlete turned actress, writer and health-tech operator. A Harvard psychology graduate who once ranked No. 1 in the USA and No. 17 in the world, she won the 2013 New York City Triathlon, represented the U.S. at the 2012 Olympic Trials, then reinvented herself in front of the camera and, later, inside the startup room. Today she works in New York's health-technology scene, having served as Chief of Staff at Healthie and been listed as chief executive at fertility-focused startup Dandi Fertility, bringing an endurance athlete's discipline to building companies.
Kais Khimji
Kais Khimji is the co-founder and CEO of Blockit AI, an autonomous calendar-scheduling agent that negotiates meeting times over email and Slack. A former six-year partner at Sequoia Capital and Harvard alum, he revived a student-era idea about why calendars don't talk to each other, raised a $5M seed led by Pat Grady at Sequoia, and now serves more than 200 companies including Brex, Together.ai, Rogo, a16z, Accel, and Index.
Josh Daneshforooz
Josh Daneshforooz is the co-founder and CEO of Lango, an Austin-based, AI-enabled language services company that has scaled by acquiring seven businesses across the United States. Raised by an Iranian Muslim father and an American Christian mother, he trained as a theologian at Harvard, served as a Harvard Leadership Fellow, and pivoted from interfaith peacemaking and leadership consulting to building software that knits interpretation, translation and human expertise into a single workflow for over 1,000 customers.
Karl Ruping
Karl Ruping is the founder and CEO of Tiba Biotech, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company developing biodegradable nanoparticle delivery systems for RNA vaccines and therapeutics. He also runs incTANK Ventures, a seed fund spun out of MIT and Boston-area research labs, and sits at Harvard's Asia Center as an associate working on international patent policy. Lawyer, computational scientist, financier, and operator wrapped into one resume.
Katrin Kaurov
Katrin Kaurov is the Estonian co-founder and CEO of Frich, a New York based social finance app that lets Gen Z anonymously compare how their peers spend, save and invest. A former international model who worked across 20+ countries before age 18, she went on to Harvard's entrepreneurship program and built Frich with co-founder Aleksandra Medina out of a shared NYC apartment.
Kris Poulson
Kris Poulson is the CEO of FarmQA, a Fargo-based digital agronomy platform that helps growers and crop advisors manage scouting, soil sampling, and prescription writing. He co-founded Sentera (acquired by John Deere in 2025), where he helped drive 1800% revenue growth and an expansion into 50+ countries. He grew up on a family farm near Casselton, North Dakota, and chairs the NDSU Agricultural Economics Advisory Board.
Akira Robinson
Akira Robinson is a biotech and pharmaceutical commercialization leader with roughly two decades of experience turning early-stage science into market-ready medicine. He is a Partner and Chief Experience Officer at the life-sciences consultancy Scimitar Inc. and serves as interim Chief Commercial Officer at Nucleus RadioPharma. He built and scaled the launch practice at EVERSANA to more than 20 consultants, and has stepped into interim CCO and COO seats across the industry. With a Harvard biochemistry degree, a Johns Hopkins biotech master's, and a stint as a Wall Street biotech equity analyst, he blends scientific fluency with commercial operating chops, lately focused on radiopharmaceutical therapies and AI-driven commercialization.
Leonard Tang
Leonard Tang is the co-founder and CEO of Haize Labs, a New York AI safety startup that stress-tests frontier language models by automatically jailbreaking them before they reach the public. A Harvard math and computer science graduate who turned down a Stanford PhD, Tang built Haize into a venture that frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic pay to break their models on purpose. By 2024 the company had raised a $12.5M seed led by General Catalyst at a $100M valuation, roughly eight months after founding, and Tang landed on Forbes' 2025 30 Under 30 list for AI.
Abdul Jamjoom
Abdul Jamjoom is the co-founder and CEO of Arini, a San Francisco startup building an AI receptionist that answers phones, books appointments, and handles patient communication for dental practices around the clock. A Harvard computer science graduate and former search and applied-AI engineer at the enterprise messaging company Threads, he teamed up with his high-school friend Rami Rustom - the pair met in Jordan - to attack a market they found by literally walking into dental offices and watching front desks melt down. Backed by Y Combinator (W24), Arini turns the $7B-a-year dental front-desk problem into software that, in Jamjoom's words, just gets the job done.
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.
Alex Cooper
Alex Cooper is the co-founder and co-CEO of Pathways, a New York climate-AI company building the data layer for sustainable manufacturing. Pathways automates the creation of real-time Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for building-material producers - turning a slow, costly, manual six-to-twelve-month process into something that takes weeks. A decade scaling consumer and data startups (Uber, Clutter, Two Chairs) left Cooper convinced that the manufacturers responsible for roughly 40% of global CO2 deserved software as good as the apps on everyone's phone. He teamed up with Harvard classmate Leise Sandeman in 2022 to prove it.
Alex Leonardi
Alex Leonardi is the co-founder and CEO of VectorShift, a New York no-code AI automation platform that lets teams build enterprise-grade LLM applications, search engines, chatbots and workflows by dragging and dropping instead of coding. A Harvard statistics-and-computer-science graduate who built generative AI capabilities at Blackstone, he launched VectorShift in 2023 through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch and raised a $3M seed in February 2024. The company has since sharpened its focus into an AI operating system for private market investors.
Amanda Nguyen
Amanda Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American civil rights activist, author, and commercial astronaut who founded the nonprofit Rise after surviving sexual assault as a Harvard senior. She drafted the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act, which passed Congress unanimously in 2016, and has helped pass dozens of laws protecting survivors. Nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize and named a 2022 Time Woman of the Year, she became the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman in space aboard Blue Origin's NS-31 flight on April 14, 2025, fulfilling an astronaut dream she set aside for a decade to fight for survivors.
Amber Nigam
Amber Nigam is the co-founder and CEO of basys.ai, a Harvard-born healthcare AI company teaching software to navigate one of medicine's most despised rituals: prior authorization. Trained on more than 10 million patient records and claims, basys.ai's engine encodes payer policy and automates up to 90% of authorization requests, aiming to give clinicians their time back and patients faster answers. A Harvard Health Data Science graduate, three-time patent inventor, and published researcher at venues like NeurIPS and ACL, Nigam came to Boston from Bareilly, India, after first building an ed-tech startup, kydots.ai. He has spoken at TEDx, Mayo Clinic, Harvard, and MIT, and has been named to multiple 40 Under 40 lists.
Ana-Maria Constantin
Ana-Maria Constantin is the CEO and co-founder of Cascade AI, a Bellevue-based startup building agentic AI that automates the grind of HR and back-office operations. A Harvard dual major in computer science and astrophysics who left Romania after high school, she spent five-plus years as a software engineer at Microsoft writing code that touched millions of users on Azure before deciding HR - the function that touches more lives than any other in a company - was the perfect place to point machine learning. She raised a $5.45M-plus seed round led by Google's Gradient Ventures with AlleyCorp, was named GeekWire's Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2024, and recognized as a 2025 Google Cloud Partner All-Star.
Anneli Tostar
Anneli Tostar is the CEO and co-founder of Tangible, a San Francisco software company that helps real estate developers measure, manage, and cut the embodied carbon locked inside the materials they build with. An Oregon-born, Swedish-heritage urbanist who studied anthropology and environmental policy at Harvard and sustainable urban planning at KTH Stockholm, she spent years inside the commercial real estate sustainability world in the UK and US before deciding the industry's spreadsheet-and-Google-search approach to low-carbon materials needed a real platform. She co-founded Tangible with Nicole Granath in late 2021, raised $8.8M, and is on a mission to make choosing low-carbon materials, in her words, stupidly easy.
August Chen
August Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Hazel, a Y Combinator-backed startup building AI-native procurement software for U.S. federal, state, and local government. A Harvard mechanical engineering and computer science graduate who built wildfire-prevention software at Palantir, Chen now aims his company at the $2.7 trillion public procurement market, helping overworked civil servants draft compliant solicitations in five minutes instead of five months. Hazel counts customers from K-12 school districts to the U.S. Navy and, in 2025, signed the City of Dallas as the first major Texas city to adopt AI for procurement.