imperial-college-london
(7)
The Rice-Sized Sensor Trying to End the IVF Blood-Test Marathon
A fertility patient can give blood every other day for weeks and still miss the hormone surges that decide whether a cycle works. Impli wants to put a continuous read of that biology under the skin - or on it.
Usama Syed
Usama Syed is a board-certified dermatologist turned startup founder, and the co-founder and CEO of FutureClinic (YC F24), a platform that lets any licensed doctor open a chat-based digital clinic. Trained in medicine and business at Imperial College London, he moved from the UK to New York for a dermatology residency at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he became chief resident and later faculty. Alongside clinical work he built an audience of more than 300,000 followers as a science-first skincare creator, co-founded the education company Liberty Medics, and now runs a company describing itself as building digital clinics that are 99% AI and 1% doctor.
Yusuf Sherwani
Yusuf Sherwani is a London-born, New York-based medical doctor turned founder who runs Pelago (formerly Quit Genius), the digital clinic he co-founded in 2017 with two medical school classmates, Maroof Ahmed and Sarim Siddiqui. A Y Combinator alumnus and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he has raised more than $150 million from investors including Atomico, Kinnevik and Octopus Ventures to scale technology-driven, evidence-based care. Trained at Imperial College London with an MD and a BSc in management, he co-authored roughly a dozen peer-reviewed studies before pivoting fully into building. He is also an active angel investor backing early-stage founders and writes about healthcare, technology and finance on his personal blog.
Max Cao
Max Cao is the co-founder and CEO of Jacobi Robotics, an Emeryville, California startup building AI-first software that programs industrial robot arms up to 20x faster. A mechanical engineer trained at Imperial College London and UC Berkeley's BAIR Lab under Ken Goldberg, and a former McKinsey consultant, Cao left academia to attack a problem most people never see: the way robots are programmed has barely changed since the 1980s. Jacobi's motion-planning technology cuts deployment from a month to under a day, claims 1000x less compute, and handles the singularities that freeze robot arms mid-task. The company launched publicly in July 2024 with a $5M seed round led by Moxxie Ventures.
Chris Parsonson
Chris Parsonson is the co-founder and CEO of Solve Intelligence, an AI platform for patent professionals that he started in 2023 after finishing a machine learning PhD at UCL. He built the company alongside his brother Angus and fellow UCL researcher Sanj Ahilan, ran it profitably to $10M+ in revenue with a single salesperson, and raised over $55M from Thomson Reuters, Microsoft, Y Combinator and 20VC. His work turns deep optimisation research into software that drafts and analyses patents for 400+ IP teams across six continents.
Richard Law
Richard Law is the Chief Business Officer of HAYA Therapeutics, the Lausanne- and San Diego-based biotech decoding the 'dark genome' to build RNA-guided medicines that reprogram disease-driving cell states. A computational chemist turned dealmaker with a Oxford PhD in molecular biophysics and an Imperial MBA, he spent over a decade at Evotec, then steered Exscientia through its 2021 Nasdaq IPO, marquee pharma partnerships, and 2024 merger with Recursion before joining HAYA in March 2025 to drive its partnering strategy and growth.
Ege Akpinar
Ege Akpinar is the founder and CEO of Pointr, the indoor location company behind Deep Location, a platform that gives buildings the kind of accurate blue-dot navigation people take for granted outdoors. He started it in 2013 as a Harrods consulting side project, turned it into a venue-mapping engine used by Fortune 100 companies, hospitals, airports and CES, and built an AI mapping system that compresses days of manual map-drawing into minutes.