waltham-massachusetts
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Irina Erenburg
Irina Erenburg is the founder, president and CEO of AVAVA, a Waltham, Massachusetts medical aesthetics company behind MIRIA, a new class of dermatology laser built on the company's proprietary Focal Point Technology. A biomedical scientist turned serial entrepreneur, she earned a PhD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and got her start negotiating high-value deals inside Boston's largest hospital network, where she helped shepherd startups including Zeltiq Aesthetics. She has co-founded R2 Dermatology and Soltego and, in 2024, raised $35 million to commercialize AVAVA's technology for treating skin of every tone.
James Kinsey
James Kinsey is the CEO of Humatics, a Waltham, Massachusetts company building microlocation technology that pinpoints the position of vehicles and machines to sub-millimeter precision. An engineer and scientist by training, he holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins and spent years on the scientific staff at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution developing GPS-denied navigation for deep-sea robots and manned submersibles. He joined Humatics as a founding officer in 2016, led its Milo software and systems work, delivered train-signalling projects for New York City's MTA, and founded the company's Mobility division before taking the top job.
Joel Schneider
Joel Schneider is the founder, president and CEO of Carbon Biosciences, a Waltham, Massachusetts biotech building gene therapies from parvovirus-derived vectors rather than the more common adeno-associated viruses. He launched the company out of stealth in 2022 with a $38 million Series A led by Agent Capital, pairing his operating background with the science of gene therapy pioneer Robert Kotin. Trained as a stem cell biologist with a Rutgers Ph.D. and a Harvard postdoc, Schneider was the first employee at Solid Biosciences before founding Carbon to push vectors that carry larger genetic payloads, target specific tissues such as the lung, and sidestep the pre-existing immunity that limits current gene therapies. Carbon's lead program targets cystic fibrosis.
Joseph Burke
Joseph Burke is the co-founder and CEO of Ottometric, a Waltham, Massachusetts software company that automates the validation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous-vehicle software. An engineer by training who entered the ADAS field in 2010 building radar and blind-spot detection for an airbag maker, Burke started Ottometric in 2019 to attack a brutal industry problem: validating a single vehicle model can cost automakers over $100 million and take more than a year. Ottometric's platform uses proprietary data-distillation technology to turn oceans of raw sensor data into structured safety insights, cutting validation cost and time by more than half. The company has raised roughly $14.9 million, including a $10 million Series A in April 2025.
Tom Large
Tom Large is the CEO and co-founder of Blue Oak Pharmaceuticals, a Waltham, Massachusetts startup hunting for the next generation of medicines for brain disorders. A neurobiologist by training, he spent two decades inside big pharma - leading neuroscience research at Eli Lilly and running preclinical research and translational medicine at Sunovion - before launching Blue Oak in 2016 to chase drugs with genuinely new mechanisms for bipolar depression, schizophrenia and treatment-resistant depression. His teams pioneered a target-agnostic approach to CNS drug discovery, and he later partnered with AI specialist Exscientia to design 'bispecific' small molecules that hit two targets at once.