stem-education
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From Smart Sprinklers to Insider Risk, Adarsh Ambati Follows the Signal
Before Candor began stitching together the clues behind insider risk, its founder spent years studying another kind of waste: sprinklers watering California lawns at the wrong time. The domains changed. His habit of following overlooked signals did not.
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.
Aditya Vishwanath
Aditya Vishwanath is the co-founder and CEO of Inspirit, a Palo Alto edtech company that brings virtual and augmented reality into middle and high school STEM classrooms. A Georgia Tech computer scientist turned Stanford learning-sciences PhD, he built Inspirit to be the bridge between cutting-edge academic research and the everyday teacher. Before Inspirit he co-founded MakerGhat, a network of makerspaces for youth in low-income Mumbai neighborhoods. He is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, Schmidt Futures Fellow, Ashoka Fellow, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in education.
Nhon Ma
Nhon Ma is the CEO and co-founder of Numerade, a Los Angeles-based education technology company building AI-powered STEM tutoring at scale. The son of Vietnamese refugees who grew up in south-central LA, he turned a full-scholarship private-school education and a two-tour stint at Google into a mission to close the educational opportunity gap. Numerade hosts one of the largest STEM video libraries online and an AI tutor named Ace, and raised a $26M Series A at a roughly $100M valuation.
Alexander Patterson
Alexander Patterson is the founder and CEO of BEAT THE BOMB, the immersive social video game where teams in hazmat suits race through networked game rooms and either disarm a bomb or get blasted with paint, slime, or foam. A former tax lawyer turned Tough Mudder marketing chief, he built BEAT THE BOMB into a multi-city experiential entertainment brand that has hosted corporate teams from Google, Citi, Bloomberg, and Amazon, raising $22 million to expand across the United States.
Dale Dougherty
Dale Dougherty is the founder of Make: magazine and Maker Faire, and widely credited as the father of the Maker Movement. A co-founder of O'Reilly Media, he launched the internet's first commercial web portal (GNN) in 1993, helped popularize the term 'Web 2.0' in 2004, and coined the word 'makers' to describe hands-on creators and tinkerers. Today he leads Make: Community LLC, an organization that inspires millions through DIY technology, education, and events spanning 40+ countries.
Anurupa Ganguly
Anurupa Ganguly is the founder and CEO of Prisms, a spatial learning platform that uses virtual reality to teach core math and science to middle and high school students. A former math and physics teacher with degrees from MIT and Boston University, she built Prisms after a decade-plus in education leadership at Boston Public Schools and the NYC Department of Education. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz with $18.4M raised, Prisms now reaches 300,000+ students across 300+ school districts in 35 states, delivering measurable gains in algebra and science comprehension through embodied, problem-driven VR experiences.
Alice Brooks
Alice Brooks is a Partner at Khosla Ventures investing in deep tech and sustainability - agtech, climate tech, robotics, food & beverage, manufacturing, and education from seed through Series B. Before venture, she co-founded Roominate, the STEM construction toy that landed Time's #1 toy of 2014 and a $500K Shark Tank deal from Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner. A mechanical engineer turned investor, she holds degrees from MIT, Stanford, and Harvard and has led hardware teams at Nest and startup operations across the US and Asia.
Freada Kapor Klein
Freada Kapor Klein, Ph.D. is a founding partner at Kapor Capital, a social-impact venture firm that has invested in 200+ startups founded by underrepresented entrepreneurs while outperforming 75% of peer VC firms by financial returns. Long before #MeToo, she co-founded the first U.S. organization dedicated to combating workplace sexual harassment (1976), earned a Ph.D. studying harassment in federal employment, and built diversity programs at Lotus Development Corporation. She co-founded SMASH (Summer Math and Science Honors Academy), the Level Playing Field Institute, Project Include, and the DAIR Institute, and co-authored 'Closing the Equity Gap' (HarperCollins, 2023). Former NAACP National Board member and Obama Foundation Tech Policy Council member, she has spent five decades dismantling the belief that fairness and financial return are mutually exclusive.
Robert Noyce
Robert Norton Noyce co-invented the monolithic integrated circuit in 1959 - the foundational technology behind every modern chip - and then co-founded Intel in 1968, where he also invented Silicon Valley's flat, equity-sharing management culture. Nicknamed 'The Mayor of Silicon Valley' and 'Rapid Robert,' he was a physicist, pilot, hang-glider, and former pig thief who transformed both how the world computes and how technology companies are run.