richmond-california
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Kai Stephan Put Solar’s Most Overlooked Problem on the Roof
A childhood afloat, an MBA fund spent on a startup, and a waterproofing test involving a kiteboard: the Pegasus founder has built his career around the hardware nobody notices until it fails.
Parham Aghdasi
Parham Aghdasi is the founder and CEO of AICrete, a Richmond, California climate-tech company that uses artificial intelligence to optimize concrete recipes in real time, cutting both cost and carbon. A structural materials engineer with a PhD from UC Berkeley, he spent a decade developing concrete composites for earthquake-resistant structures and ultra-high-speed train tunnels before turning his attention to one of the planet's dirtiest materials. Born in Iran and barred from higher education for his Baha'i faith, he studied at an underground university, came to the US with $6,000, and built a company that has raised over $9 million to give concrete producers, in his words, 'sustainable concrete superpowers.'