structural-engineering
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Jaynee Jhaveri Built Stadiums. Now She Builds the Case for AI.
A structural engineer learned that the most important decisions happen before the drawings begin. An MBA and a move west brought her to C3 AI, where the load-bearing material is now language.
Dave Lewis Changed Industries Without Changing His Playbook
A software sales career led Dave Lewis to co-own a decades-old tower engineering firm. His job now is to connect technical rigor with the relationships and operating discipline that let infrastructure businesses grow.
Ali Khaloo
Ali Khaloo is a structural engineer turned AI founder who builds software that reads the health of bridges, dams, runways and cooling towers the way a doctor reads an X-ray. As CEO and founder of Aren, the New York company he spun out of Cornell Tech's Runway Startup program, he fuses computer vision, machine learning and civil engineering into an AI-powered digital twin platform that turns drone images, laser scans and sensor data into 3D condition maps and predictive maintenance plans. He holds a PhD in structural engineering, has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed papers cited over 1,000 times, and owns several patents for AI analysis of large infrastructure systems.
Allan Brik
Allan Brik is the CEO and managing founder of Everysk, a New York fintech building intelligent automation and risk workflows for capital markets. A structural engineer turned quant turned operator, he spent three decades managing risk at Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and the $14 billion hedge fund allocator Arden Asset Management before founding Everysk in 2013. He holds a PhD in Computer Aided Engineering from MIT and argues that cloud computing, open APIs, and agentic AI are quietly dismantling the spreadsheets and data silos that have governed investment management for decades.
Ari Baranian
Ari Baranian is the co-founder and CEO of Pirros (YC W23), a Los Angeles startup building a detail management platform for architects and structural engineers. A structural engineer turned software builder, he created Pirros to solve a problem he lived daily at his old firm: engineers constantly recreating the same construction details from scratch. Pirros integrates with Revit, automatically extracts and catalogs details with their metadata, and makes a firm's institutional knowledge searchable and reusable. The company is profitable, reached roughly $6M ARR with 300+ firms on the platform, and closed a Series A reported around $15-17M in 2025.
Omar Issa
Omar Issa is the co-founder and CEO of ResiQuant, a San Francisco startup that uses structural engineering AI to read a building's hidden vulnerabilities and rebuild how property insurers underwrite catastrophe risk. A second-generation structural engineer raised in the Bay Area, he earned a PhD at Stanford's John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, specializing in machine learning for disaster recovery. After walking through the rubble of earthquakes from Ridgecrest to Turkey and the wreckage of Hurricane Ian, he and co-founder Francisco Galvis built ResiQuant to give underwriters the engineering-grade data they were missing, raising $4M in seed funding led by LDV Capital in 2025.
Andy Thompson
Andy Thompson is the cofounder and CEO of Safehub, a San Francisco company that puts low-cost sensors on buildings to deliver real-time, building-specific earthquake damage data. A structural and earthquake engineer trained at UC Berkeley, he spent 16 years at the global engineering firm Arup, where he built its Catastrophe Risk & Insurance practice and worked post-disaster in countries from Chile to Haiti to Japan. He cofounded Safehub in 2015 with catastrophe-risk veteran Doug Frazier, raised a $9M Series A in 2021, and has deployed sensors across thousands of buildings in dozens of countries, now powering sensor-triggered parametric earthquake insurance with partners like Liberty Mutual Reinsurance.
Raef Sully
Raef Sully is the CEO of Lilac Solutions, an Oakland-based company pioneering direct lithium extraction (DLE) technology using ceramic ion exchange beads. A structural engineer turned management consultant turned industrial executive, Sully brings 30+ years spanning tall buildings, the Australian Army Reserve, Bain & Company, and a decade running Nutrien's $10 billion nitrogen and phosphate division. He joined Lilac as COO in mid-2023 and ascended to CEO in February 2024 - the same month the company closed a $145 million Series C. Under his leadership, Lilac has achieved 87% lithium recovery at the Great Salt Lake, unveiled Gen 5 technology with 20x higher production rates, and signed a binding 10-year offtake agreement with Traxys North America targeting 50,000 tonnes of lithium product.
Ashraf Habibullah
Ashraf Habibullah is the founder, President, and CEO of Computers and Structures, Inc. (CSI), the Berkeley-based company behind ETABS and SAP2000 - structural engineering software used in 160+ countries to design buildings like Taipei 101 and One World Trade Center. A Pakistani-American engineer who once dreamed of being a rockstar, Habibullah has spent 50 years turning the structural engineering profession from slide rules to software, earning election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024. Equally passionate about ballet, photography, and the arts, he co-founded the Diablo Ballet and the Engineers' Alliance for the Arts, championing the idea that engineers need as much human skill as technical skill.
Azlan Ezaddin
Azlan Ezaddin is the President and CEO of PASE (Peoples Associates Structural Engineers), a Silicon Valley structural engineering firm he has led for 35 years. A licensed Structural Engineer in six U.S. states with P.E. credentials across 28 states and four Canadian provinces, Ezaddin holds a Master's degree from Stanford University and is widely regarded as a foremost authority on mission-critical data center structural design - having engineered facilities for Meta across three continents. In a striking contrast to load-bearing calculations, he co-founded CriticalDance in 1999, an international nonprofit arts publication, and writes about ballet with the same analytical precision he brings to seismic codes.
Jake Olsen
Jake Olsen, P.E. is the CEO of Stratus, the leading cloud software platform for MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) contractors, helping hundreds of firms digitize workflows from BIM design through fabrication to field installation. A serial entrepreneur with over 20 years in construction technology, Olsen previously co-founded DADO - a construction document management startup that was acquired by Stanley Black & Decker - and also built Hangerworks, DEWALT Design Assist, and Powercalc Anchor Design. He steered Stratus to a $32 million Series B funding round in January 2025 led by Radian Capital, positioning the company as the connective tissue between the design table, fabrication shop, and job site in the evolving era of data-driven MEP contracting.
Forest Flager
Forest Flager is the CEO and co-founder of Parspec, an AI-native software platform modernizing the construction supply chain. A Stanford PhD in computational design optimization, Flager spent years in academia and at SoftBank-backed Katerra before launching Parspec in 2021 with co-founder Pratyush Havelia. The company has raised $31.5M (including a $20M Series A in July 2025 led by Threshold Ventures), grown revenue 4x in 12 months, and counts four of the five largest U.S. electrical distributors - representing $70 billion in global annual sales - among its customers. Parspec automates product selection, quoting, and submittal generation, cutting submittal creation time by 55-80%.