uc-davis
(7)
Matt Barnard
Matt Barnard is the cofounder and CEO of one.bio, a Sacramento biotechnology company turning plant fiber into odorless, tasteless nutrients that can be dosed into everyday food to reshape the gut microbiome. A seventh-generation Wisconsin farmer turned technology operator, he first became known as the cofounder and CEO of Plenty, the SoftBank-backed indoor vertical farming unicorn. He now applies the same obsession - control what people eat, control their health - to fiber science spun out of UC Davis.
Daniel Naim
Daniel Naim is the founder and CEO of Fennel, a mobile investing app that hands everyday retail investors the ESG data and shareholder-voting power that big institutions usually keep to themselves. A former dark-matter physicist who grew up in Beirut and earned a physics PhD at UC Davis, Naim left the lab in 2020 - watching California burn and Engine No. 1 win an Exxon board fight - convinced that capital markets, not particle detectors, were the most pressing problem he could work on. Fennel refuses payment for order flow, won't lend out users' shares, became a certified B Corp, and was named one of Fast Company's most innovative companies in personal finance.
Kathryn Cook
Kathryn Cook is the CEO and co-founder of NuCicer, a Davis, California agtech and food-tech company breeding chickpeas with up to 75% more protein than ordinary varieties. A former Boeing materials engineer and Facebook technical program manager, she left big tech to commercialize 35 years of her father's chickpea genetics research at UC Davis, applying machine learning and data analytics to plant breeding. NuCicer has raised roughly $23 million in total funding, planted across multiple US states, and aims to cut the cost of plant protein in half.
Alfred Chuang
Alfred Chuang is the General Partner of Race Capital, a San Francisco venture firm investing in Web2 and Web3 infrastructure. Before becoming a VC, he co-founded BEA Systems in 1995 and led it as CEO until Oracle bought it in 2008 for $8.6 billion. Andreessen Horowitz has called him the Silicon Valley CEO's CEO.
Rick Lewis
Rick Lewis is a General Partner at U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), a storied Silicon Valley venture firm based in Menlo Park. A two-time startup founder turned investor, he joined USVP in 2004 and was promoted to General Partner in 2012. He focuses on early-stage enterprise SaaS, cybersecurity, and consumer services, with a track record that includes exits to Airbnb, Viacom, Microsoft, Slack, PayPal, IBM, Oracle, and Nordstrom. Lewis holds degrees from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and Harvard Business School, and is a Kauffman Fellow (Class 10).
Steve Schultz
Steve Schultz is a General Partner at Diagram, a Montreal-based venture builder and fund focused on fintech, web3, and climate tech. With over two decades of experience spanning product management, startup operations, and venture investing, he has navigated every stage of the financial technology stack - from building Yahoo! Finance's product strategy to steering Check (a mobile payments startup) through a $360M acquisition by Intuit, to leading Amazon Web Services' landmark partnership with Y Combinator. Now based in Menlo Park, California, he anchors Diagram's US presence and brings a rare combination of operator instincts and investor pattern-recognition to early-stage founders.
Rob Reis
Rob Reis is the founder and President/CEO of Higher Ground LLC, a Palo Alto-based satellite telecommunications company building the world's most compact, affordable, and secure satellite communicator. With roots at Stanford and a career spanning pioneering ventures in laser turntables (Finial Technology), RFID tracking (Savi Technology), and innovation leadership at Texas Instruments, Reis brings decades of deep-tech entrepreneurship to a mission-critical problem: keeping people connected and safe anywhere on Earth, from the backcountry to the battlefield. His flagship product, the SatPaq, uses geostationary satellites with AES-256 encryption and spread spectrum signaling to deliver two-way messaging, voice, and GPS-backup - independent of cellular infrastructure.