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Brandon Henning Built a Career in the Quiet Machinery Behind Modern Labs
From factory-floor systems to AI-assisted research, Brandon Henning has spent three decades making regulated work easier to trace, manage, and improve.
Steve Albarran
Steve Albarran is the co-founder and CEO of Confident Cannabis (now Confident LIMS), the laboratory information management software that quietly runs testing for more than 60% of the legal cannabis industry in the United States. A Mexico City native from a family of business owners, he traded a New York finance career - M&A banking at Lehman Brothers and Sawaya Partners, then his own growth-equity firm Left Lane Capital - for Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he met his co-founding team. Motivated partly by a wish to move money away from Mexican cartels and toward legal, ethical operators, he built the data backbone that lets labs, growers and buyers trust what is in a cannabis product. He is a member of the National Cannabis Laboratory Council.
Nick Talken
Nick Talken is the Co-Founder and CEO of Albert Invent, an Oakland-based AI platform that is transforming how chemists and materials scientists do research and development. A chemical engineer by training who learned to code, Talken spent years inside Henkel's global R&D organization before spinning out Albert Invent in 2022 with a team of co-founders who built the product from within. The company's platform - used by over 3,000 scientists across 142+ labs in 30+ countries at companies like Kenvue, Henkel, and Chemours - has raised over $52 million from top-tier investors including Coatue, Index Ventures, TCV, and J.P. Morgan Private Capital.
Sasha Novakovich
Sasha Novakovich is the Founder and CEO of Alchemy Cloud, a San Francisco-based enterprise SaaS company bringing AI-powered lab management and product development software to the specialty chemicals and applied sciences industries. Born in Russia and raised in Los Angeles after immigrating at age five, she built her first company in 1999, sold it to CNET, spent years as an angel investor backing female-led startups, and then spotted a glaring gap - brilliant chemists stuck doing brilliantly manual work with spreadsheets. Alchemy is her answer: a connected lab platform that merges ELN, LIMS, DOE, and AI into one system to help companies like those in beauty, food, building materials, and industrial chemicals bring better products to market faster.