harvard-gsd
(5)
Jutta Friedrichs
Jutta Friedrichs is a German-born designer and co-founder of Soofa, the Cambridge, MA company that makes solar-powered digital signs for city sidewalks. Before Soofa she ran the MÜ furniture studio in Shanghai, co-founded Xindao's in-house design team, won two Red Dot Awards, an iF Design Award and an Elle Decoration Award, and earned a Masters at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She mentors at the Harvard Innovation Lab and works at the seam of hardware, human-centered design, and the civic public realm.
Ivan Panushev
Ivan Panushev is the CEO and founder of TwinKnowledge, a New York startup building AI agents that read the mountains of paperwork behind every building - submittals, RFIs, specs, drawings - and flag the conflicts before they reach the field. A Harvard-trained Doctor of Design, he co-founded Horizontal Systems (acquired by Autodesk in 2011 to seed BIM 360), led construction and real estate technology at AWS, and helped write the National BIM Standard. In 2025 TwinKnowledge raised a $3.7M seed led by Camber Creek, with clients including the U.S. Space Force, Toll Brothers, SHoP Architects, and Sound Transit.
William Sankey
William Sankey is the co-founder, CEO and Head of Product of Northspyre, a cloud intelligence platform that has helped manage more than $175 billion in real estate development projects. A Yale- and Harvard-trained developer who once helped run the billion-dollar Madison Square Garden renovation, he taught himself to code on nights and weekends to kill the spreadsheet drudgery he saw everywhere in the industry. That side project became Northspyre, which he founded in 2017 and has since grown on more than $32 million in venture funding.
Vardhan Mehta
Vardhan Mehta is the co-founder and CEO of Acelab, the company behind Material Hub, an AI platform that helps architects discover, evaluate, and specify building products. A former architect who worked on U.S. embassy envelopes and projects at MIT and Yale, he traded the drafting table for a database after watching designers burn hours hunting through PDFs and spec sheets. Acelab now serves more than 20,000 architecture and design firms in North America, raised a $13.5M Series A in October 2025 led by Navitas Capital, and landed Mehta on Forbes 30 Under 30. His bet: AI can finally absorb the complexity of every material decision in the built environment.
Honghao Deng
Honghao Deng is the CEO and co-founder of Butlr, a San Francisco-based Physical AI company that uses anonymous thermal sensors to understand how spaces are occupied - without cameras or personal data. A Harvard GSD MDes graduate and MIT Media Lab researcher, Deng spun Butlr out of MIT in 2019 alongside co-founder Jiani Zeng. The company has raised over $105M in venture funding, deployed 30,000+ sensors across 22 countries, and processes 1 billion data points daily. Deng is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (2022), a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and the inventor of 'Illusory Material' - a multi-material 3D printing breakthrough named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Best Inventions of 2021.