university-of-toronto
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Jimmy Ba and the Algorithms That Learned to Learn
Before he helped build xAI, Jimmy Ba helped solve two quieter problems inside modern AI: how a network takes its next step, and how it stays steady along the way.
Davina Chan Markets a Place You Have to Experience
At Hart House, the product is not one program or one room. Davina Chan's job is to make a century-old institution feel legible, useful and open to the next student walking through the door.
Tanya Kreinin Built a Brand Big Enough to Hold a University
At the University of Toronto, Tanya Kreinin's real product is not a slogan. It is a system that lets thousands of distinct voices sound like they belong to the same institution.
Rochan Sankar
Rochan Sankar is the founder and CEO of Enfabrica, a Silicon Valley startup building networking silicon to move data between the GPUs, CPUs and memory that power large-scale AI. A 26-year semiconductor veteran who ran Broadcom's data center Ethernet switching business before striking out on his own in 2019, he bet the company on a single idea: that AI's real bottleneck is not compute but the plumbing that feeds it. In September 2025, Nvidia paid more than $900 million to license Enfabrica's technology and bring Sankar and much of his team in-house.
PJ Patel
PJ Patel is Co-CEO and Senior Managing Director of Valuation Research Corporation (VRC), the New York-headquartered valuation firm that puts a number on the intangible - brands, goodwill, illiquid securities, complex derivatives. A CFA and Accredited Senior Appraiser, he leads VRC's global initiatives through the Valuation Research Group (VRG) network and is a frequent voice on ASC 805, 350/360 and 820 in accounting circles.
Eesha Sharma
Eesha Sharma is the founder and CEO of Lamar Health, a Y Combinator-backed (W21) startup that uses AI to automate the mountain of paperwork standing between patients and high-cost specialty drugs. A genetics PhD from the University of Toronto and former Stanford postdoc, she traded antisense-oligonucleotide research for the unglamorous fight against prior-authorization bureaucracy after watching a family member endure years of misdiagnosis. Lamar Health now serves specialty pharmacies, infusion clinics and hospitals, automating prior auths, document review and EHR connectivity for medications that average roughly $70,000 a year per patient.
Jiayue He
Jiayue 'Jenny' He is the Founder and CEO of Ergeon, a technology-enabled residential outdoor construction company that raised $40M in a Series B round in 2022. A Princeton Ph.D. and top-ranked University of Toronto engineering graduate, she spent seven years at McKinsey before pivoting to build one of the most operationally sophisticated home improvement startups in the U.S. - one that runs a distributed workforce across 40+ countries while delivering fence, artificial grass, deck, and concrete installations to tens of thousands of homeowners nationwide.
Tony Xia
Tony Xia is a computer vision engineer turned venture scout and startup founder who built his technical chops at DJI, AutoX, and Arraiy (acquired by Matterport) before co-founding Crema Social - a video-call-meets-food-delivery international dating platform that amassed over 1 million signups in 8 months. After graduating from a16z speedrun's Cohort 003, he became a Scout for a16z speedrun, backing pre-seed founders with $10K checks and a direct path into one of Silicon Valley's most competitive accelerators.