cohort_members_uk_paris.py

cohort_data = {
    
"Sixtine THEOBALD-BROSSEAU [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceSales & MarketingHealthcareSportsMobilityGeneralistLending and Investments
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I would say that so far, my career is the most impressive thing I have built. I have gone from an Account Executive to a Director in less than 3 years, whilst buying flats, refurbishing them and renting them as a 'side' job. Once I start something, I tend to go 'all in'!
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for someone that has skills I do not possess. The whole point of finding a co-founder is to find the right balance between different personalities as well as a complementary qualities.
Give a brief summary of your background
I have a very general background - I studied at the London School of Economics and Sciences Po, then worked at the French Ministry of Defence before finding myself working in the cyber-defence field for the past 5 years, first as an AE and then at Director level. I am a very dynamic, curious and hard-working individual that will find any topic worthy of interest!
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I am mostly interested in meeting the right individual to work with, the one individual that will complement my skill set. Together, we can decide on what topic we want to work on and create our company together. I find that most often than not, meeting the right person can spark my interest rather than a specific topic. As previously mentioned, I can find any field worthy of interest and I will learn everything I need to know in order to create a successful company. Hard work always pays off!
"""
,

"Paul Boeffard [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Climate
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I've created Leavit, a think tank dedicated to finding ways to offer financial support to oil-producing nations affected by the resource curse. The aim is to harness Climate Finance (Carbon Markets, Debt-for-climate swaps, JETPs) to incentivize and compensate countries to preserve carbon in the ground and transition towards low-carbon economies. 

I've already been published in carbon markets specialized media and have gathered a community of climate and O&G experts around this initiative

https://www.leavit.info/
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Passion and commitment
Give a brief summary of your background
I am French engineer (Centrale Paris) with 5 years of experience in Climate Investments and Public Finance, previously working at Caisse Des Dépôts (French National Bank)

I write technical articles about Climate Change for specialized media (Socialter) and also working on a novel

I do a lot of sports
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I am looking for Giga Tons scale climate solutions. 

Capturing CO2 (and all other mitigation actions) are vain if fossil fuel valves are not actively shut down
"""
,

"Cyprien Courtot [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceHealthcareBiotech - SoftwareEnergyClimateAerospaceData Science & AnalyticsMachine LearningFinancial Services
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I led the creation of an AI for satellite constellation scheduling that surpassed expert algorithms in some cases by over 55%. Delivering the project within three months to a major aerospace customer. Our solution significantly outperformed industry standards, leading to potential project expansion and new collaborations.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I seek a co-founder who possesses a strong market insight and shares common interests and values. Bonus points for someone driven and passionate.
Give a brief summary of your background
I am an AI specialist and have worked at InstaDeep, Barclays, EY, and BlackRock.
I've worked extensively with deep reinforcement learning agents and LLMs, notably:
- Aerospace: satellite constellation planning,
- Biology: multi-modal LLMs pre-training and protein design,
- E-commerce: dynamic pricing,
- Insurance: automated claims management.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I want to work on solving an ambitious and exciting project. 
I'm very keen to work on something that is related to: 
- Healthcare: from biology to the healthcare system.
- Climatetech: energy networks, markets, nuke and materials in particular.
- New space: it's getting crowded up there.
- AI: making AI agents be used in more industries.
"""
,

"Shaofeng Yannick Sun [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningEnergyClimateSAAS
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I've led is the development of an AI prediction system designed to forecast various stages of kidney cancer up to five years in advance. This system, intended for use in hospital (APHP and IGR) settings , integrates diverse data modalities to provide accurate prognoses for patients, demonstrating the potential of AI in enhancing patient care. I also led the product design and development phases by conducting interviews with users and observing doctors in hospital.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I'm looking for a co-founder with an interest in business, problem-solving skills, rational thinking, and a technical interest.
In the relationship with the co-founder, I seek someone who is resilient, open-minded, and communicates openly and transparently.

Last but not least, I want someone with whom I can have fun along the bumpy road :)
Give a brief summary of your background
I have a Master of Data Science degree with a specialization in genomics and possess a profound passion for problem-solving and product development. Over the past 18 months, I co-led a startup project at CEA and Inria at the intersection of AI and healthcare. My work focuses on improving the accuracy of outcome predictions for patients, emphasizing preventive measures.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I've recently changed my area of interest to tackle the climate challenges we face. After immersing myself in recycling, I'm now focusing on energy, smart grid optimisation and green hydrogen (storage, conversion, transport, etc.), with AI. I'm also open to other proposals!
"""
,

"Morgan Wirtz [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceFinancial ServicesE-Commerce & RetailInsurancePaymentsDesignUser Interface DesignMarketplacesProcurementHealthcare
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Founder of a digital bank (RISE):
- Raised EUR 3M
- 1k paying bank accounts opening/month in Belgium

We ended up closing the business last year as we didn’t get to PMF.
It taught me everything first business can teach you (PMF, team, etc.) 


Founder of a B2B marketplace for architects to source materials (in July 2023):
- Signed first 15 clients without company incorporated or product live on the market
- Sold the company to a US competitor that wanted to launch in EU
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Ideally looking for a tech profile as I am a product/business profile.

Beyond skills, I'm looking for:
- First principle thinker
- Fully committed & hands-on
- Cares about building a great product
Give a brief summary of your background
I'm a product founder who loves exceptional product experiences and will always ensure to stay close to the problem/customer. 

Notable founding experience: RISE, a digital bank with EUR 3M funding and opening 1K paying bank accounts/month. Though we didn't reach product-market fit and closed the company last year, I've learned valuable lessons. 

Now, I'm eager to apply what I have learned to create something significant.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Looking at theses where a problem can be solved with a great product experience.

1. Vertical AI software
Interested in the application layer of AI: how can it be applied to solve a specific worker's problem.

Relevant article: https://www.digitalnative.tech?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web&r=9gtz4
TL; DR predicts vertical AI will follow a successful playbook similar to vertical saas in transforming specific industries.

I’m particularly interested in AI in hospitals (EHR) and AI to augment enterprise productivity.


2. Categories that look crowded but aren’t

Interview with Elad Gil: https://firstround.com/review/future-founders-heres-how-to-spot-and-build-in-nonobvious-markets/
TL; DR some spaces might look crowded from the outside, but when you zoom, there is still white space, a problem that is not well solved.


3. B2B marketplaces

Article: https://www.digitalnative.tech?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web&r=9gtz4
TL; DR only about 5-10% of B2B transactions happen online. So if there are B2B spaces with high fragmentation on the offering and high frequency of transactions on the demand, it is a good case to build a B2B marketplace.
"""
,

"Olivier Lippens [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Management ConsultingEngineeringMaterials ScienceNatural ResourcesClimateProcurementIndustrial TechArtificial IntelligenceMachine LearningBiotechnologyAerospaceAgriculture & FarmingChemicalsDeep Tech
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
In just 1 year, I founded 2 companies from scratch in new countries and markets, having to build a local network and team without local language proficiency. Additionally, one was operating in a war zone and one in the 2nd poorest country in the world:
- Healthcare education company in Burundi allowing the local Red Cross to become independent from foreign funding and scale-up healthcare activities
- Supply chain and distribution company in Mozambique to provide basic need products to refugee camps while making the operations profit neutral through side revenue streams
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I’m looking for a strong tech-enabled co-founder to form a strong team with the following characteristics:
- A productive team that creates daily significant progress, is motivated by solving challenges, meets set deadlines and dares to take difficult decisions
- Aligned burning ambition to build a scaled, profitable and impactful business for the next 5-10 years with this entrepreneurial journey as priority number one
- A deep passion for creating solutions for hair-on-fire problems
Give a brief summary of your background
Engineer by education, strategy consulting & founder by experience. 

I’m a former Senior Associate at Bain&Company, a top tier strategy consultancy firm, where I focused on:
- Advising Investment Funds on +€500M deals through discovering in 2-3 weeks what the pro’s/con’s of a company are and their future value creation potential is
- Determining the sustainability strategy of Global 500 companies
- Worked on +20 projects in Mining, Chemicals, Argi, Battery, Materials, Consumer products (proteins, supplements, biking),…
Previous experience as:
- Founder-in-Residence for Red Cross (founder of healthcare company in Burundi & distribution company in war zone in Mozambique)
- Founder of water filter company targeting rural East African Communities - sold to local manufacturer and currently reaching ~200k people
- Graduated with 2 master degrees, one in Civil Engineer (Logistics and Materials) and one in Water Resource Engineer from KU Leuven and University of Queensland, allowing me to thoroughly understand and actively ideate around deep tech
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I’m passionate about climate, water, bioplastics and AI-enabled efficiency solutions but above all, I am very open to discover and brainstorm around different scalable deep tech solutions and markets. My experience as strategy consultant gives me the skill to get to know a market and its potential fast as well as to accelerate ideas and tech through finding the right customer segments, developing profitable business models and set up an efficient organisation.

I recently discovered the bioplastics market, more specifically PHA, with a team. Happy to discuss findings in the market esp. with experts in gene-engineering
"""
,

"Majdoline Wahbi [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Financial ServicesArtificial IntelligenceCommerce & ShoppingSales & MarketingEnterprise SolutionsMachine LearningComputer VisionSpeech RecognitionHealthcareE-Commerce & RetailData & AnalyticsCommunity & LifestyleSportsLending and InvestmentsEnergyMarketplacesProcurementFinTechClimateSAASNatural Language ProcessingReal Estate
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
When I joined Clone, we had a team of just 30 employees based in France. Fast forward a year and a half later, and we had expanded to over 300 employees across five countries. I am one of the few people in France who have experienced such impressive growth from the inside, as a C-level. 

During my time there I played a pivotal role in managing the rapid growth and chaos that comes with scaling at such an intense pace. I have a knack for structuring companies, ensuring flawless execution of plans, and keeping investors engaged and enthusiastic in a high-pressure environment (all these things that CTOs generally hate ;)) .

I had the opportunity to be a jack of all trades; from launching new brands to developing our first SaaS roadmap, recruiting C-level executives, orchestrating reorganizations, managing investor boards & reporting, drafting the BP, crafting international playbooks, managing employee & salary reviews, designing the B2B marketing strategy, etc.

This experience was like my own mini-CEO MBA, preparing me for my next step into entrepreneurship. It was incredibly tough and challenging but I have seen so many things in such a short time that I’m just ready to use my tools, network, and experience for my project.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I'm on the hunt for my partner in crime – someone who's truly passionate about their domain, always ready to speak up and push boundaries to make us both - and one day the team - better.
We'll be spending a ton of time together, so I need someone who also knows how to make things fun and shares my values/ ethics. After all, startup building should feel like a game – let's dive in and play together!
Give a brief summary of your background
Hey there! I've worn a few different hats in my career journey – from VC in leading firms to Chief of Staff at last year's hottest foodtech startup (200M€ raised, 600% growth in 6 months). 
It all started at…  Entrepreneur First, where I developed a passion for nurturing founders and their ventures, as a part of the first French team working for EF. Along the way, and with a later role at XAnge, I've had the privilege of supporting and funding hundreds of entrepreneurs across Healthcare, Proptech, HR Tech, Edtech, AI, B2C, and many other sectors. Some of these startups you probably know, and I always like to chat about them if you’re interested :)

My educational background is quite generalist/finance-oriented with a tech focus, having graduated from Sciences Po Paris and Telecom ParisTech. After soaking up insights from the investor, incubator, and scaleup scenes, I'm itching to switch gears and dive into the entrepreneurial side of things.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I think of it more in addressing specific problems rather than focusing on sectors, and I am particularly obsessed with two key challenges:

1. Support SMBs in Competing in a Rapidly Evolving Economy:
Problem Statement: Many SMBs, especially in industries like restaurants, are still transitioning to digitalization and will quickly need to leap into the AI economy.
Why: SMBs form the backbone of our economy, representing ⅔ n of Europe’s GDP. Yet, they need support to compete with tech companies and stay relevant and efficient. 
How: Multiple approaches are possible, such as AI training at scale, making the use of large language models more accessible, and developing verticalized software tailored for specific industries or customer segments.
Potential Ideas:
B2B marketplaces specifically designed for the restaurant industry.
Platforms offering AI training at scale for SMBs (AI LMS).
Verticalized AI software solutions optimized for specific SMB sectors.

2. Support SMBs in Transitioning to a Cleaner Economy:
Problem Statement: SMBs face challenges in transitioning to a cleaner and more sustainable business model.
Why: Aligning SMBs with sustainable practices is crucial for long-term economic and environmental health. + They need to comply with new requirements from financial institutions.
How: Solutions could involve providing tools, technologies, and resources for SMBs to adopt cleaner and more sustainable processes.
Potential Ideas:
B2B marketplace for more sustainable materials

As I have analyzed many different industries, I am however very open to exploring other topics. I get very excited by people who are obsessed with their technology, so I can’t wait to hear about your different domains of expertise.
"""
,

"Glen Carter [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceManagement ConsultingHealthcareData & AnalyticsNon-AI Advanced SoftwareBiotech - SoftwareBiotechnologyLife SciencePharmaceuticalsPhysicsConsumer ElectronicsAdvanced RoboticsData Science & AnalyticsDeep TechNanotechnologyBiotech-HardwareMaterials ScienceChemicals
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I co-developed qPCR kits for COVID-19 and respiratory viruses during my PhD. This project involved leveraging cutting-edge technology to create a faster and more accurate diagnostic tool with the potential to improve healthcare outcomes. I also developed new ways of analysing the signals to increase the amount of targets we can detect and finally I discovered a new way of using molecular probes to detect short sequences of DNA and distinguish mutations in the sequences from each other.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Due to my dual background, I'm confortable wearing either the CTO or CEO hats. In a co-founder, I would be looking for someone to share my curiosities, high ambition and absolute dedication to mission. That means questioning everything that doesn't make sense and taking initiative to find information and solve problems while cooperating. Let's go all the way 🚀
Give a brief summary of your background
Hey, 

I'm Glen, a PhD in Physical Chemistry from École Normale Supérieure and MBA form the College des Ingénieurs. Passionate about the bio / health / data / tech intersections. 

I've worn many hats already, from research scientist to data consultant, in both startups and large multinationals. I learn very fast with extreme curiosity and connecting ideas. Even if we don't work on the same projects, I'd be happy to brainstorm with anyone whenever :) 

Excited to learn and collaborate with you all!
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I'm particularly interested in contributing to the advancement of personalised diagnostics and wearable tech. By leveraging AI and user health data, I believe we can develop solutions that empower individuals to proactively manage their health.
"""
,

"Emmanuel Federbusch [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceBiotech - SoftwareMachine LearningSAASInsurance
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
The hardest thing I have done was managing the operational organisation at the latest bootstrapped startup I joined. I was first PM  and the cofounders had basically no idea about how to organise the processes of discovery - delivery pipeline besides what they were doing when they were alone. I had to change the processes of organisation several time while it went from $125K ARR to $2M ARR. Being bootstrapped meant risks and stakes were far higher, and it was vital to be paranoid about everything: the development cycle, the customer support, the long term plan, etc..
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for someone who have the ability to cope under high stressful situations. I want to pursue ambitious goals, which means higher risks and thus higher pressure. I find the psychological factor to be more important than others. You can be the most intelligent person in the world, it means nothing if you implodes by day 3.
Give a brief summary of your background
- Studied Clematis modelisation at the Italian CNR using Machine Learning
- Worked in Singapore for an Oil&Gas predictive maintenance startup. I managed the data of 6 FPSOs
- I then joined IBM to work on automatic log analysis using machine learning model, to help find issues in the migration a client to IBM cloud in the context of a multi-billion dollar contract
- I worked until recently at an insurtech startup which enables reinsurers to get their exposures in hours instead of weeks.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I am mainly interested by proptech or biotech. Infrastructure maintenance is one of the biggest issues in developed societies and has been a slowly moving field for a while. AI might be able to finally crack it. In biotech, recent advances in modeling genomic information will surely implies dramatic changes in our current way of life. A lot of problems people encounters could be solved by genomic engineering. Think Novo Nordic x 10.
"""
,

"Michele Baldo [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningEngineeringBlockchainLife ScienceMusic & AudioNatural Language ProcessingDevToolsDeveloper and/or Dev Ops ToolsSemiconductorDAOsDecentralised FinanceDeep Tech
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I worked on the extreme scale team in TII I had the opportunity to assist and work in the Falcon project and the Noor project. My main focus was to develop reliable evaluation for understanding the scaling laws and assessing different hyper parameters mixtures. Then I moved on the alignment part of the project, so using reinforcement learning with human feedback and direct preference optimization to build chat friendly models. I also worked to optimize the RLHF algorithm on GPU clusters, and build efficient distributed fine-tuning training. Another big project I did was during my master thesis. I replicated a Neuroscience experiment done on rodents to study spatial neural representations on Artificial Agents in a virtual environment. I then open sourced on my GitHub the code to build several virtual environments and evolve the artificial agents for the computational neuroscientist community.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Open minded, passionate, out of the ordinary, research interests but with strong engineering skills, first principle thinker, craving for building something that will have a huge impact in the world adding a lot of value for the people, a lot of experience, with strong technical background on Artificial Intelligence. Distributed computing or HPC experience is a plus. Entrepreneurial and creative mind!
Give a brief summary of your background
I worked as an Artificial Intelligence Engineer in Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi, in the Extreme Scale LLM Team. I worked on several aspects of Large Language Models, we built Falcon 180B and Noor to name a few. My focus was on evaluation, building reliable and efficient distributed code, managing the model's checkpoints for inference, and fine-tuning for alignment (reinforcement learning with human feedback and direct preference optimization). I also worked on air quality forecasts using GNN AI models, focusing on the data collection and pipeline. I did my Bachelor's in Computer Science and my Master's in Cognitive Neuroscience. I focused my studies and career on AI and in particular I have a strong drive to build AGI and neuro-inspired AI. During my university period I also tried and been involved in some entrepreneurial endeavours and I'm now ready to shoot for the moon for a new one!
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I've joined EF to have the opportunity to build something beyond the ordinary. I'm here to build the basic layer for training and interacting with AI models. Not just a unicorn, but one of the world leader companies in AI in the next decade. In particular the focus will be on AI tools and platforms for developers and integration for startup and final users. Big focus on facilitating the advent of AGI and mass usage of AI owned by a vast and diversified startup ecosystem.
"""
,

"Pablo [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Data Science & AnalyticsArtificial IntelligenceClimateMachine LearningSpeech RecognitionData & AnalyticsEngineeringSports
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Being in charge of Ai in a startup with an Ai-centric product, I built an infrastructure able to continuously process thousands of recording meetings every minute, from speech-to-text to full insights extraction. 
But maybe more importantly, I actively worked on product vision to turn the fast-paced and SOTA evolutions to bring new ways to interact with knowledge for over 15k users.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for someone who will share my willingness to have a big positive impact. 
I'd see myself more in a CEO role working in a tech company, but am of course open to discussion :)
And since I expect the adventure to be intense, I would really want to share it with someone whose energy will not only make us go further, but also enjoy the ride 🎢
Give a brief summary of your background
I have a double degree in Engineering (Computer Science / Data Science) and Business (MiM / Data Analytics). 
I've since been building AI and Analytics strategies and infrastructures as early employee in startups. 
My last role was as Head of Data at Modjo, in charge of Data Science and Data Analytics teams, and tackling product challenges to leverage AI to build a strong product.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Unf*cking the world! I want to be proud of the impact my cofonder and I have, and I could see that happening in:
- Climate tech
- Healthcare
- Social networks
"""
,

"Louise-Marie Rakotoarison [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningHealthcareBiotechnologyLife ScienceMusic & AudioDeep TechChemicalsPharmaceuticals
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
During my PhD, I developed a system that enabled the observation of protein interactions through a protein engineering technique that I co-developed. This system was utilized as a biomarker for epigenetic modifications that can be responsible for cancer. This led to the development of similar systems with different properties, which are now being studied at the Curie Institute as therapeutic tools.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for someone who is passionate, curious, creative with high ambition, and who wants to make an impact in Healthcare. Ideally, someone with skills in AI, and if it's AI applied to biology, that's even better. Let's do this !
Give a brief summary of your background
After studying physical chemistry and life sciences for 5 years at the École Normale Supérieure, I did a PhD in Chemistry Biology at Sorbonne University where my main focus was on protein engineering. I am currently pursuing an MBA at HEC Paris, which enables me to complement my scientific profile with business skills, allowing me to bridge the gap between the two fields.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I would like to have an impact in healthcare, particularly in personalized medicine and diagnostics. I believe that the solutions of tomorrow will need to utilize the full potential of AI, and for this reason, I am very interested in AI-driven biotech.
"""
,

"Quentin Blache [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
HealthcareBiotechnologyLife SciencePharmaceuticalsFoodClimate
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
The most impressive thing I have accomplished so far is creating and developing a kit to detect 32 mutations associated with breast cancer. To achieve this, I invented a new technology because the current method was very limited. I am currently in the process of patenting this innovation. This kit marks a substantial advancement in the field of healthcare and diagnostics, with the potential to revolutionize the detection of breast cancer.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for a co-founder who shares my passion for science and is open to exploring unconventional ideas. Obviously, someone with experience in business development would be a great asset. It is important to me that we can collaborate effectively and enjoy working together, even sharing some good laughs along the way. A sense of humor can make the journey in the world of science and business all the more enjoyable and productive.
Give a brief summary of your background
I have a PhD in Basic Infectiology and Molecular Biology, thus I possess a strong foundation in molecular and cellular biology, along with expertise in gene therapy, microbiology, and the agrofood industry. My post-doctoral career is centered around harnessing biology to tackle contemporary challenges, particularly in the field of healthcare, whether it's for cancer detection or treatment.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
My specific interests lie in areas related to food, health, and addressing environmental issues like pollution.
I am keen to work on projects and research that contribute to improving food sustainability, enhancing public health, and finding innovative solutions to combat pollution and its impacts.
"""
,

"Théo Hoenen [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
EnergyClimateHardwareDeep Tech
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I built my first company, HyLight, from scratch. HyLight is a startup that builds and operates hydrogen airships to monitor energy infrastructures. We built 6 different flying prototypes, signed the 2 largest energy network operator in Europe, did the Y combinator and raised over 2M €.

More on that :
- Trailer : https://youtu.be/T9wCQgj9KB0?si=UUUQWxHFMclI-d7M
- Press article : https://www.lesechos.fr/start-up/deals/hylight-la-pepite-francaise-qui-concoit-des-dirigeables-a-hydrogene-1883331
- TEDx : https://youtu.be/XGNTkmkcTMI?si=J6t6LRrA0nzAzfqP
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for someone with a deep knowledge of a technology capable of dacarbonizing massively. In short, I’m looking for a partner with objectives that align with mine but with complementary expertises.
Give a brief summary of your background
Hello, I’m Théo. I am an engineer but I consider myself first and foremost an entrepreneur. I started my first business at the age of 20 whilst perusing my degree. I will touch more on that in the Most impressive things section. My objective is to contribute significantly to the decarbonization of our society and I’ve always seen entrepreneurship as the way to do that. I am skilled in business fundraising and management, and I have a great understanding of the technical and scientific aspects of product development (deep tech and hardware). I am very excited to meet you all and build businesses for a greener future.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I’m interested in working on any projet that has the potential to massively decarbonize our society. Recently, I’ve looked into…
- Green hydrogen production
- Nuclear technologies
- Carbon capture technologies 
- Methane detection sensor technologies

If you work on those topics or any other subject that that has the potential to decarbonize on a Giga T scale, hit me up! 👋
"""
,

"Gauthier Marchand [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Deep TechSales & MarketingEnterprise SolutionsArtificial IntelligenceFinancial Services
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I made my first move in entrepreneurship in 2016, but soon struggled to spot compelling market opportunities. I realized back then that (i) this need to identify emerging market opportunities was shared by many players (entrepreneurs, resellers, etc.) yet there were few solutions available on the market, and (ii) the new AI algorithms were enabling effective solutions to emerge. This led me to launch a dedicated AI-backed project aimed at providing insights on emerging trends, and to manage the full creation process: customer discovery, product design, hiring, marketing, sales. It became fully profitable in 2018, and I took a leave from my master to manage the day-to-day business activities and scale the business
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Someone with a strong technical edge. Someone hard-working, dedicated, reliable, and ideally fun to work with :)
Give a brief summary of your background
I’m a former Investment Banker having advised 10+ Tech/Deeptech companies on their fundraising & growth opportunities, mainly deals ranging from €5m up to €700m. Before that, I got several operational experiences in Seed/Series A startups and launched multiple solo-businesses, some of which I successfully scaled up to profitability (incl. projects with high-end technology and complex go-to-market).
Graduate from a dual master’s degree in finance (Corporate Finance) and in engineering (Data science)
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I’m open regarding the domain / technology. I have strong expertise in launching and scaling AI projects, and can use my business acumen and entrepreneurial know-how in many different industries / fields. I would like to build a successful and impactful company, and want to be very ambitious for my next project - if you are too, I’d love to talk to you!
"""
,

"David Fong [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Music & AudioSpeech RecognitionMachine LearningMedia and EntertainmentContent & PublishingMarketplacesIndustrial TechConsumer ElectronicsEducationGovernment and Military
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
As DAACI's sole product manager, we initially faced the problem of having many IP assets, experimental prototypes and sales leads, but a lack of focus. To identify the problem for us to solve, I conducted product and user discovery by evaluating the feasibility of potential prototypes and learning everything about our potential customer segments. We agreed upon a product roadmap for a series of software plugins automating the generation of specific musical elements within a music creator's environment. For the first product, a drum part generator, I led the definition and prioritisation of dozens of features which were implemented by the tech team over more than ten two-week sprints. Following several rounds of closed beta testing, the product has been launched as a paid open beta https://daaci.com/natural-drums/
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Defined in EF terms:
- Either a) Primary tech edge with expertise and interest in solving problems in information engineering or b) Primary catalyst talker edge who can catalyse my tech and/or market edge
- Overlapping beliefs
- Ability to be nimble, creative and results-driven in testing hunches
Give a brief summary of your background
- First Class undergraduate degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Imperial College, focusing on signal processing and machine learning and building a machine listening system for dissertation.
- Goldman Sachs as a credit derivatives trader for a short period of 6 months.
- AI Music, one of the first startups applying AI methods to generating and analysing music acquired by Apple in 2022, as a part-time business analyst and then full-time as a research engineer for 1.25 years.
- Abbey Road Red, Europe's first music technology incubator owned by UMG, as its programme manager and product owner for 2.5 years.
- DAACI, a spin out from PhD research at QMUL's C4DM building generative music tools, as its sole product manager and user researcher for 1.5 years.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
- Content editing platforms to enhance and/or edit the individual sound elements in audio or multimedia content
- Creator tools for an underserved type of creator offering useful AI-enabled capabilities and novel economic models
- Ecosystems for AI dataset creation, preprocessing and distribution, particularly those containing a corpus of creative and potentially protected works
- Using my tech edge in machine listening and multimedia data preprocessing to address a problem faced by a market outside of media and entertainment e.g. climate, health, industrials
- Leveraging someone's tech edge to address challenges faced by markets I am familiar with or markets in which similar principles and non-obvious insights may apply
"""
,

"Ismail Hajji [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
HealthcareBiotechnologyPhysicsEngineeringLife SciencePharmaceuticalsBiotech-HardwarePrivacy & SecurityGovernment and MilitaryMaterials ScienceSports
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
A PCR machine that runs with 240x less reagent, 6x faster and 5x higher sensitivity than current commercial technologies.
As a great source of 'impressive' ideas, I enjoy reverse-engineering and DIY spirit in general, from everyday life objects to more advanced technologies.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for a highly motivated co-founder with a strong interest in the biotech field. Ambitious and pragmatic.
Give a brief summary of your background
I am a Physics Engineer who turned to Biology.
Physics engineer by training, I did a PhD in developing diagnosis tools with Cancer related applications. And a Postdoc on a new approach to guide stem cells fates.
My tool range goes from mathematical modeling to sequencing and molecular biology. I have a strong experience in building devices and programming for solving Diagnosis Challenges or answering Fundamental Biology questions.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
The company that will make the next generation biomedical devices.
I am looking forward to having cross-disciplinary approaches with founders from other fields.
"""
,

"Davide Cifarelli [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningNatural Language ProcessingDeveloper and/or Dev Ops ToolsUser Interface DesignDevToolsHardware
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I have build a coding assistant for vscode that is used by more than 35k developers, all by myself.
The model behind it is a small open-source code LLM, fine-tuned with lora adapters. Under the hood I have build a mixture of experts of lora fine-tuned models that out perform gpt3.5 and gpt4 on multiple coding languages.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I'm looking for someone that first of all share my values and company culture vision. At the same time I would like to work with someone highly technically capable and deeply involved in the field of LLM/Gen. AI.
Give a brief summary of your background
I have an academic background in computer engineering and artificial intelligence for the university of Genoa in Italy.
While pursuing my degree I have built my first startup, an edtech gaming company driving it to more than 100k ARR and >100k unique users on our games.
After this experience I have worked as Generative AI consultant for multibillion dollar companies in Italy and then I built an AI coding assistant company with more than 5k users using it on a weekly basis backed by Techstars and Nvidia Inception.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I worked with language models for the past 3 years and so I feel more confident working on LLM based products. I have deep market knowledge and insights on AI developer tools. At the same time I'm open to experiment LLM applications for various deep tech sectors with a knee interest on semiconductors design.
"""
,

"Eduardo Dadalto [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""RoleCTOLinkedInwww.linkedin.com/in/[email protected] Linkhttps://calendly.com/edadaltocg
Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceNatural Language ProcessingComputer VisionWeb DevelopmentAerospace
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I’ve co-authored a few state-of-the-art algorithms for assessing predictive uncertainty and detecting anomalies in AI algorithms that appeared in top venue conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, etc.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I’m looking for a co-founder with strong business and product skills, passionated about the impact AI can have in the future, who is self-driven, creative, and curious.
Give a brief summary of your background
My background is on computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP). I hold a PhD in computer science and AI reliability.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I’m mostly interested in working on impactful industries, building a business with AI at its core and reimagining the future.
"""
,

"Jeremy Toledano [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningInsuranceClimateProperty/Real Estate
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Data is key to AI, and data acquisition costs amount to millions of dollars per year for large companies. I led the design and implementation of a tool to quantify the potential value of a data source acquisition by evaluating its predictive power, allowing stakeholders to make data-driven decisions and contributing to optimizing profits.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for a technical co-founder with deep expertise in AI, who shares my passion for the technology and my objective of maximizing its impact. The qualities I am looking for in a partner are humility, intellectual curiosity, and willingness to collaborate.
Give a brief summary of your background
I am passionate about making AI impactful and have worked in the field for the past 6 years. I have led teams to successfully implement AI in several industries, and have a strong market edge in the insurance space, particularly in the US market.
I spent the last 3 years in Tel Aviv where I led the local Data Science team for Hippo Insurance. Prior to this, I spent 3 years in Boston where I was the first employee of Interpretable AI and got my MBAn at MIT. Before the US, I lived in Paris where I studied at École Centrale Paris.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I would like to put my knowledge of the insurance space to good use. In particular, I am interested in the impact that climate change will have on insurance and its neighboring industries (incl. real-estate and reinsurance) in the next few years.
Still, I am open to other industries that I have experience in (incl. finance, manufacturing, and healthcare) and where AI could have a sizable impact.
"""
,

"Nils [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
RoboticsAdvanced RoboticsArtificial IntelligenceCommerce & ShoppingMarketplacesMarketing SolutionsCommunity & LifestyleMediaLogisticsAdvertising
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I am the CEO of Kayba, a commerce infrastructure for online communities. 
We build dropship Marketplaces for top content creators and B2B communities with the best brands.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I'm looking for technical partners with strong technical skills in Data Sciences and Robotics.
Give a brief summary of your background
I'm the CEO of Kayba - a commerce infrastructure for online communities.
I co-founded the fashion brand AGENT 33.
I contributed to funding the Paris Blockchain Week Summit.
I hold a Master's Degree from Sciences Po in Finance & Strategy, and a Bachelor's from La Sorbonne and NTU Singapore.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Looking for building in AI and Robotics.
Also open to LiveSciences.
"""
,

"Nicolas Bourliatoux [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
LogisticsRoboticsIOTPhysicsEngineeringTransportationEnergyAdvanced RoboticsAerospaceBattery TechnologiesHardwareAdvanced AerospaceDeep TechClimateEVMobilityIndustrial Tech
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I think that starting a startup while still being a student is already quite an accomplishment, regardless of how it ends.
My hustle factor is doing what I am not 'supposed' to do, and doing it right.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Looking for a techie that will be able to build from scratch and come up with fun ideas to solve a problem!
Give a brief summary of your background
I am a French Aerospace Engineer from ISAE-SUPAERO in Toulouse. I've done several experiences in both startup and large companies (ArianeGroup), and my end-of-study internship as a management consultant at Bain & Company.
I recently co-founded my deeptech startup Iris Lab with Bastien Fabre (also in the EF cohort). We joined EF to find our CTO, who will help us develop our wireless power transfer solution for robotics.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
We will be working on designing our system to fit what we learn from our prospects, and start building our prototype from this!
"""
,

"Arthur Vervaet [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningData & AnalyticsDeep Tech
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Creating a log-based Anomaly Detection platform capable of handling the workload of a cloud platform—processing millions of events per second. 
It involved proposing a novel log mining algorithm that outperform the state-of-the-art in accuracy and speed, along with developing an explainable deep learning architecture for generating alert reports. I successfully deployed my prototype at an industrial scale, monitoring the European cloud region of Dassault Systèmes.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am seeking a co-founder who possesses experience and passion for a specialized field, particularly in areas such as health or technology. More importantly, I am in search of someone who harbors a profound understanding of product development and financial strategy.
Give a brief summary of your background
I hold an engineering degree as well as a Ph.D. in computer science from Sorbonne Université, specializing in Deep Learning (AI) applied to cloud computing problems.

Maintaining an engineering-first mindset, I am passionate about tackling challenges concerning system architecture, scalability, and efficiency.

My professional experience spans across renowned corporations such as BNP Paribas and Dassault Systèmes, as well as startups where I served as the inaugural employee, notably at GitGuardian and Cognitive Matchbox.

I am now thrilled to don the mantle of a co-founder !
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I am intrigued by projects that leverage advancements in computer science, particularly within the realm of artificial intelligence, to revolutionize various fields of activity. 

My interests align particularly with ventures in the technology for health or technology for tech sectors.

I remain open-minded and receptive to exploring opportunities in other fields as well.
"""
,

"Bastien Fabre [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
AerospaceArtificial IntelligenceMachine LearningLogisticsSportsEngineeringEnergyDeep TechFinancial Services
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I have co-founded a deep tech company working on wireless power transfer for robots. We already financed the R&D in a leading European Lab in Part-Saclay thanks to an institutional investor, we have developed the first prototype during our studies and we are now building partnerships to finance and co-develop the next POC. We also joined the best French deep tech incubator in Paris.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for a technical co-founder with a deep interest in deep tech through hardware experience and curiosity around software development and AI.
Give a brief summary of your background
I am an aerospace engineer specialized in aerospace propulsion from Supaero with a double degree in Finance. I have experience in artificial intelligence and I co-founded a deep tech energy company with an other student of Supaero working on wireless power transfert for autonomous systems.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I am interested in working on deep tech technologies applied on energy, aerospace and climate tech.
"""
,

"Marc Davoust [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Financial ServicesArtificial IntelligenceEnterprise SolutionsEnergyMarketplacesFinTechSAAS
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
🚴 800km in 62 hours when I was 15
or
💻 I have created from scratch an innovation department at Agicap
In particular, in 4 months, we built with a colleague a feature that is worth 2M€ ARR/ year
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
- doer
- humble
- ambitious
- team worker
Give a brief summary of your background
Engineering studies at Polytechnique / Mines de Paris

At Polytechnique, I won the prize of best internship for my scientific work on how to significantly lower the cost of AB tests.

I really enjoyed being the president of Raid de l’X organization (sport)

I love geek spirit, winning the BPI climate hackathon.

I joined Agicap in 2021, a startup that has became one of the most impressive SaaS B2B french scale ups, working on various subjects related to business, tech, product, etc.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
- I’m driven by optimization spirit
- I love fluent products that scale
- I’m excited on IA capabilities (I’ve built last night a copilot-like browser extension to answer emails), convinced the future of AI products is specialization
"""
,

"Mayank Garg [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Materials ScienceNanotechnologyIOTEVEnergy
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I pursued my master's thesis as a startup, where I was part of the TUM Entrepreneurial Masterclass. Here, I built biocompatible batteries for medical implants, brain-computer interfaces and wearable devices.
The manufacturing cycle of one battery cell was around 3-4 weeks in my research group, subject to complex manufacturing processes, and materials chemistry. To decrease my time and cost of experimentation, I chose a substantially faster and easier method of production, which decreased the time taken to make a full battery cell to mere 2 days. Additionally, I made sure that non-toxic materials are mostly used, such that 80% of the synthesis could be done without supervised lab facilities, or expensive glove box setup. This boosted my experimentation cycles leading to faster and lean prototyping. 

I validated the problem from industry leaders including neuralink, IMEC, Nuuvon, LitronikMST, etc. and developed a complete Techno-Economic Anaysis (TEA) of my tech.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
CEO wanted who understands markets and is great with business development. Additionally, would like to explore building with a technical founder from AI background, to combine their expertise in AI with my expertise in Materials Science, and apply it to the energy sector. 

Overall, focus is on solving hard, urgent problems together, while retaining the spirit to build (e/acc). And yes, someone who knows how to have fun along the way. 
Let's seek some discomfort together, and build something massive.
Give a brief summary of your background
I come from New Delhi, India and hold a master's degree in Applied and Engineering Physics at the Technical University of Munich. I came to Germany 2 years ago to follow the path of my heroes in science: the great 20th Century German Scientists, who shaped modern physics. At my core, I wanted an approximate understanding of how various technologies work, with particular interest in climate-tech, inspired from Bill Gates' book 'How to Avoid a Climate Disaster' where he describes innovating towards the net-zero energy transition as one of the greatest innovation opportunities of our time.

I have worked on multiple climate-tech projects including carbon removal, gas sensing, clean cooking via biogas, with finally cofounding a battery startup to commercialize a breakthrough solid state battery technology from MIT. Also hold experience working in a climate tech VC.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I want to build an impactful climate-tech, deep-tech startup using my skills in materials science and nanotechnology. The current energy transition is in a way a materials transition, and I would like to develop solutions by minimizing the need for critical materials. Additionally, there is opportunity in finding high throughput methods for accelerating the time of experimentation and deployment of technology, using robotics and AI. 

I am looking for someone who can help me build a solution with a sense of urgency. Not looking for long years of research, want to reach from TRL 2-9 quickly, while derisking the technology development, scaling, market and regulatory landscape.
"""
,

"Timothée Colinet [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
MediaSales & MarketingE-Commerce & RetailDesignMusic & AudioJournalismMarketplacesDecentralised Finance
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Coming from a business world, I surprised myself by making an app that combines three AI tools to produce videos with avatars that answer questions you type in. This was a big step into tech for me and really boosted my coding skills. On top of that, helping my last company grow its revenue by 25 times is something I'm really proud of too
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I'm seeking a co-founder with strong technical skills in AI and software development, who also aligns with my values and vision. It's important to find someone mutually inspiring, capable of pushing both of us out of our comfort zones and driving us to excel daily.
Give a brief summary of your background
With a comprehensive background in Political Science, Economics, and Business from Sciences Po and HEC Paris, I transitioned to the tech industry, spending four years at a music tech startup. I quickly moved up from Business Operations Manager to Head of Growth, leading a seven-person team across product development, marketing, growth engineering, CRM, SEO, and SEA. My role focused on driving growth and optimizing performance in a dynamic startup environment.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
With my background in both the creative industries like music and media, and the tech world B2B SaaS, focusing on marketing and sales, it just clicks for me to work across these areas. However, my broad academic base in Political Science, Economics, and Business means I can learn new things super fast.
"""
,

"Milan Clerc [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningComputer VisionData & AnalyticsIOTInsuranceEnergyNatural ResourcesClimateSAAS
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I have developed a climate analysis SaaS platform capable of collecting, processing, and storing over 300 terabytes of meteorological datasets. This platform offers a suite of tools to extract, visualize, manipulate, and utilize this data for building AI solutions or aiding decision-making processes. Initially, I have built the core of the product before transitioning to leading a small team (devops + UI/UX designer + front developer + data engineer+ data scientist)  to streamline its industrialization. This experience has allowed me to build strong product development as well as cloud engineering skills on top of my data science knowledge.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am seeking a co-founder who shares my values and commitment to building solutions with a positive impact. I am mostly looking for someone that shares the same sectors of interests or with a deep expertise in a sector that I am less familiar with. While I typically position myself as a CTO, I am open to considering a CEO position depending on the opportunity, given my background in technology and product development.
Give a brief summary of your background
- Graduated from Ecole Polytechnique and KTH in energy and climate sciences.
- Worked for 3.5 years as a DataScientist building data & AI solutions for clients in various sectors including energy, utilities, insurance and retail. 
- Builded and  co-lead a small team on climate risk assessment.
- Product manager and Tech Lead of a SaaS product for climate data analysis that I have developed.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I have made the decision to embark on the journey of entrepreneurship with the aim of addressing significant societal issues. As such, I am open to exploring various industries, although I possess a particular passion for climate and energy-related topics.
I firmly believe that climate adaptation and mitigation strategies will spur substantial investments in the near future. Therefore, I am keen on developing AI-driven solutions tailored for companies (such as insurance firms, utilities, and industries) as well as public actors to either assess, or deal with the impact of climate events and meteorogical conditions
Besides, I would also be interested in creating AI tools to support the energy sector, including predictive maintenance and strategic planning capabilities.
"""
,

"Jessica [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
PharmaceuticalsDeep TechComputer VisionHealthcareSpeech RecognitionNanotechnologyEngineeringBiotech - SoftwareNatural Language ProcessingLife ScienceBiotechnologyArtificial IntelligenceMachine LearningCommerce & ShoppingFemTech
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I have built an unsupervised deep learning model that helps to identify the best drug candidates from MD simulations data, accelerating the drug discovery pipeline. I have conducted the research + published a paper + presented at a conference in 7 months.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
From a technical point of view, I am looking for a co-founder able to build and deploy AI models with health-related data acquired actively and ideally passively from mobile sensors.
I'm looking for a nice person to work with, since we'll hopefully be spending a lot of time together :)
Give a brief summary of your background
Hi! I'm Jessica :) I have a master's in Biomedical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, where I graduated cum laude and was awarded a merit-based scholarship (top 2 out of 7142, 0.02%).
I bring a deep knowledge of engineering principles and tech applied to healthcare, and a desire to solve critical health challenges by founding a startup. For most of 2023, I lived in Tokyo and conducted research at Keio University at the intersection of computational drug discovery and AI. 
I've spent the last few months learning about and getting involved in the startup world. Last January, I earned a spot in the Silicon Valley Fellowship, an amazing opportunity to be fast-tracked into San Francisco's startup culture.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I want to make accessible early detection of Alzheimer's on a large scale through AI analysis of digital biomarkers. The starting point will be building a model able to detect Alzheimer's from speech, moving then to other metrics that can be collected from onboard device sensors. Building a solution that integrates signals collected from everyday life devices, that contain important information about how your brain is functioning, will be the key to early, accurate, and non-invasive detection of Alzheimer’s disease.
"""
,

"Akhila Raju [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Wallets & PaymentsMetaverse (NFTs / Gaming / Phygital)FinTechWeb3CryptoArtificial IntelligenceE-Commerce & RetailBlockchainPaymentsTravel and Tourism
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
At my first Product job, I was the only UI/UX PM at Dune Analytics, which at the time had over 300K active users. The UI represented 60% of total user engagement on Dune.com. I shipped many products and features from Discovery to Launch which led to a 36% increase in highly engaged users and a 16% increase in revenue. Some of these products and features included: API, Teams, Subscriptions (Pricing / Freemium model), Query Scheduling, Version History, Table Previews (adopted by 46% of users in first week)
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am an extrovert and a people person, and throughout my life I have been frequently told how vulnerable and open people are able to be with me. This lends me very well for a more commercial and customer-facing role, and this is what I'm most passionate about leading. Through my career I have interacted with customers as an Engineer and as a PM, and have led many user interviews, customer feedback calls, surveys, focus groups, and sales calls through my time at Apple, Coinbase, Dune Analytics, and Tweed.

I'm looking for a technical cofounder who is passionate about building, and who is curiosity-driven, resilient, kind, and fun to work with.
Give a brief summary of your background
- Born and raised in the US, work experience in the Bay Area, NYC, London and Tel Aviv (including Google, Apple, Coinbase, and startups)
- Computer Science at UC Berkeley with certificates in HCI and New Media
- 6 years in Web3 (Ethereum protocol engineering, exchanges, blockchain data analytics, wallets and payments)
- 5 years as a Backend Engineer
- 1.5 years in Product (UI/UX focus), and a PM internship at Apple way back on the iPhone Touch ID / Touch
What are you interested in working on at EF?
My experience is mostly in blockchain, but I am openminded to ideas you have. I am very technical and can work with the most technical profiles.
- Mental Health / Healthcare. I have 10 years of experience with different therapists and life coaches across 3 countries (US, UK, Israel). My mother went to medical school while I was a kid, so I have a lot of insight into the US medical system, as well as connections to the #1 cancer hospital in the world and the VA (Veterans Affairs).
- AI & Travel Planning / Assistance (I'm an avid traveler and have been to 59 countries, so I have a lot of ideas here)
- Blockchain infrastructure, wallets and payments, phygital (Web2 experiences in Web3, making it easier to onboard mainstream users)
"""
,

"Adam Rida [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningAR/VRAdvanced MathematicsGamingData Science & AnalyticsWeb3Deep TechNatural Language ProcessingNavigation and Mapping
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
With two friends we took the challenge to build and launch a memecoin in only one weekend with less than 300$ as a starting investment. We built it and launched it on the BSC. My number one priority was: how to make the coin viral and appealing to the crypto-community without falling into classic memecoins clones. 
After several marketing trials, we managed to sell out our pre-sale and grow our community significantly. Within two hours after launch, we reached a market cap of $2 million and a trading volume of over $1 million. The project started to finance itself at this point and we kept the marketing running for a few weeks.
More generally, in all my projects I always found a way to map what I was building with the most relevant audience (in this case, leveraging reddit where the web3 community could be reached)
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
My main priority is to find someone who shares my passion and enthusiasm for massively transformative techs and is eager to build a non-boring company.
Ideally, I would love to work with a tech person who I can build with and prototype fast.
Give a brief summary of your background
- AI researcher and data scientist with a passion for building in tech
- PhD dropout in Explainable AI from Sorbonne University/CNRS/AXA
- Ex Qantev (EF 2019) - Rebellion Research - Societe Generale
- Built projects in web3, LLM (invented a RAG approach https://github.com/adrida/Temporal_RAG) and b2b SaaS projects (killed by chatGPT's release)
- Obsessed with building value-oriented products and finding hacky ways to share them with the right audience
What are you interested in working on at EF?
As I love emerging and transformative new techs that seem underrated at the moment I have a strong interest in spatial computing (Mixed/Augmented Reality) and am keen to build in this space.
As a sci-fi fan I am also curious about what can be done in the hardware space (think Varda or Spin Launch). 
I am also still interested in LLMs applications that go beyond 'chat-with-something', how can we solve problems that seemed impossible to solve so far using the power of foundational models (including multi-modal ones).
"""
,

"Hashim Elzaabalawy [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningSAASAdvanced MathematicsPhysicsEngineeringEnergyTransportationHardwareIndustrial TechHealthcare
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Throughout my PhD and Postdoc, I developed fluid simulation software that exhibits a level of accuracy x10 higher than conventional industrial software. The method was published in the Journal of Computational Physics.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I excel in building both hardware and software, and I'm seeking a co-founder with the typical qualities of a CEO to lead the commercial aspects of our business.
Give a brief summary of your background
I am a Computational Engineer who holds a PhD in Computational Engineering from Centrale Nantes and Técnico Lisboa, with a strong foundation in Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, and Software Development. Previously, I served as CTO at HelioRec, a French start-up that develops floating solar technology. In this role, I worked on both the hardware, designing the floating structures, and the software for predicting solar energy yield specifically tailored for floating solar installations.

I spent two years working at CNRS during my Postdoc, where I developed advanced numerical tools for fluid simulations, focusing on the marine sector. Additionally, I have industrial experience in automotive, HVAC, and energy modeling for buildings.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Software for hardware, specifically in Computer Aided Engineering, utilizing AI and ML to build next-generation modelling tools used for simulating physical problems. This market is expected to be disrupted as AI and ML advance rapidly. I am open to different sectors, whether it's simulations for climate technologies, biotech, electronics, transportation, etc.
"""
,

"Jean-Baptiste Sevestre [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningBiotechnologyBiotech - Software
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
With the team I was working in; we built SOTA BioAI algorithms for Biology problems
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I'm looking for someone who has complementary skills (CEO) with an interest (or skill) in Biology and AI where my skills could be leveraged
Give a brief summary of your background
I worked at InstaDeep for 4 years as a Research Engineer in BioAI; especially, I worked with the BioNTech cancer vaccine team:
- Used Protein Large Language Models to tackle the Protein Binding problem
- Modelised biological processes, extracted immunologic data
- Developed robust and scalable software architecture for Protein LLM training
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I'm really curious and open to discover new topics
"""
,

"Robin Dupont [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Deep TechMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceComputer VisionIOTBlockchainDecentralised FinanceCryptoGaming
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
As a side project, I reverse-engineered without any documentation the full local API of high-end speakers. I turned my insights on this closed-source API into a Python library published on GitHub which is currently downloaded more than 200 times each week. I later leveraged my library to develop and maintain a speakers plugin for the largest smart home project on GitHub (Home Assistant).
My reverse-engineering efforts empowered other creators to develop their own projects.
Some of my reverse-engineering work has been reviewed and promoted on the brand's official X account.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for a co-founder with a profile complementary to mine, meaning someone who can take on the role of CEO and challenge me on thoughts about the product that we will build together, who wants to create a product with impact, based on solid technical foundations. Ideally, they are pragmatic, friendly, ambitious, and curious.
Give a brief summary of your background
I recently defended my PhD at Sorbonne Université 👨‍🎓, where I specialised in deep neural network compression, pruning, and sparsity.

My journey has taken me from developing predictive maintenance models at Air France ✈️ to researching state-of-the-art pruning techniques ✂️ at Netatmo.

On the academic side, before my PhD I graduated from the Imperial College London and Mines de Saint-Etienne. I also spent some time at the University of Edinburgh as a visiting student.

Outside of work, I am passionate about DIY and tinkering and in my spare time I try to make my home smarter 🧠.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I would like to work on a innovative project/product that has strong techical edge and tackles problems in a domain with none or few competitors ( blue ocean), ideally levraging my expertise in in neural network compression and efficiency.
"""
,

"Hayat [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Life ScienceBiotechnologyOther
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Over the course of a few months, I screened more than 14,000 mutagenized plants to identify the few that showed resistance to a plant bacteria. This was made possible through my organizational skills, determination, and the strategic utilization of state-of-the-art technologies to visualize bacterial colonization within individual plants.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I'm looking forward to meeting someone with complementary skills to mine, who possesses the ability to establish a clear strategic plan and secure resources to achieve our goals. A strong work ethic, a collaborative mindset, and good communication skills are also important to me.
Give a brief summary of your background
I am a plant scientist specialized in plant genetics and pathology. After completing my PhD in plant epigenetics in Versailles, France, I moved to The Netherlands to work on a devastating plant bacteria at the University of Amsterdam. I am now eager to use my expertise to build a startup with a strong impact on society through the power of plants.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I am particularly interested in seeking solutions to the new challenges arising from climate change and the agri-food transition. With the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, our agricultural system is at stake. I believe answers can be found in the recent advances in the plant (epi)genetic field.
"""
,

"Finn [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Non-AI Advanced SoftwareMachine LearningAdvanced RoboticsDeep TechAgriculture & FarmingHealthcare
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Trenux GmbH, a bicycle rack that unfolds into a trailer. Production overseas, final assembly in Germany. The first series sold successfully.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Frontend and sales would complement me well.

However, the personal fit is much more important. We need to inspire each other on a daily basis for the next three years.
Give a brief summary of your background
- Studied electrical and mechanical engineering as well as computer science
- Focus on machine learning and robotics in Munich
- Research on data-based model identification and controller development for wing drones
- Founded a start-up for bicycle trailers near Berlin
- Developed neural interfaces for prosthesis control in Sweden

I specialize in merging low-level hardware with high-level machine learning.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I want to build a technological solution that disruptively fulfills SDG goals and has a sustainable impact. 
No matter where I end up after my time with EF, it will be a huge gain in experience and new relationships.
"""
,

"Khalid El Haji [S24 PA Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceData & AnalyticsDevToolsCommerce & ShoppingCommunity & LifestyleNatural Language ProcessingNon-AI Advanced SoftwareApplication DevelopmentWeb Development
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I built an analytics dashboard from scratch when I was 16, as one of the first Software Engineers at an early stage marketing analytics startup. The dashboard was employed by large multinationals (Unilever, PwC) and well-known universities (UC Berkeley) in their marketing research efforts.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for a co-founder with complementary skills sets (sales, marketing, etc.), an unhealthy high dose of grit, and a relentless passion for solving real problems. Being able to work and vibe well together is key :)
Give a brief summary of your background
M.Sc. Computer Science at TU Delft. Graduated in the top 5%.
- At the age of 16 I was a full-time Founding Engineer at a successful Dutch startup.
- Received a national award (the ECHO STEM Award 2022) for excellent STEM students from the former Director of the renown Institute for Advanced Study.
- Played a key role in allocating €1M for well-being initiatives to deal with the mental health aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
AI for Mental Health, Social Tech, AI for Software Reliability
""",

"Saylee Jangam [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceHealthcareSales & MarketingBiotech - SoftwareBiotechnologyEngineeringBiotech-HardwareFemTechData Science & AnalyticsDeep TechHardware
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
During my PhD, I built a microneedle based biosensor to continuously monitor a biomarker of sepsis for its early detection in critical care, signs of which are easily missed and can lead to greater mortality rates.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
In a co-founder, I'm looking for commercial skills or experience of having translated diagnostic products to the market or having delivered projects in the NHS.
Give a brief summary of your background
I have a PhD in biosensors from Imperial College London and my research has focused on real-time monitoring of infection. I have experience founding a FemTech start-up and have also been a consultant at Prova Health for evidence generation of digital health technologies.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I'm interested in working on anything that solves a big problem in healthcare. My focus so far has been on biosensors for infection and FemTech but I'm open to other health spaces as well.
"""
,

"Ryan Kearns [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningNatural Language ProcessingSAASData Science & AnalyticsNon-AI Advanced SoftwareDeveloper and/or Dev Ops ToolsDeep Tech
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Monte Carlo's ML infra. It serves over a dozen production ML models to 300+ enterprise customers, including American Airlines, Intuit, and the New York Stock Exchange.
I'm expecting my answer to be different in a few months, though :)
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Either technical expertise in NLP & mechanistic interpretability, or industry expertise in an applicable domain like law, healthcare, or a hard science. I'm comfortable being either the more or less technical person in a cofounder pair, so long as the pairing of skills provides a right-to-win.
Give a brief summary of your background
I studied Computer Science and Philosophy at Stanford. On the Computer Science side, I did research in language model finetuning at a Stanford AI lab, and published in ACL. On the Philosophy side, I wrote a thesis on epistemic logic for explainable AI (awarded best in my class year).
More recently, I was a Founding Data Scientist at Monte Carlo Data, where I was principal architect of our machine learning infrastructure. I wrote several chapters of a data engineering textbook on this subject, which was published with O'Reilly Media.
See a full CV here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/146tLU9Ocx85ha5gO_oWiZYrFY7gY5MD9/view?usp=sharing
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I'd like to empower smart, nontechnical users with language model-assisted software. Possible applications include interpretability methods for LLMs in certain professional settings (law, healthcare, scientific research, etc.), interpretability toolkits for LM designers, or LM-assisted search and processing for technical documents.
Here's a more detailed prospectus I'll be refining up until cohort start: https://ryanothnielkearns.notion.site/EF-S24-Initial-Prospectus-de7dbed8ebab4cd4a47975e5aed93008
"""
,

"Stelio Ropokis [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Community & LifestyleArtificial IntelligenceMedia and EntertainmentMachine LearningMobileHealthcareIOTFoodMusic & AudioUser Interface DesignNatural Language ProcessingAR/VR
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Defined a multi-year product strategy for audiobook discovery on Spotify. In just 6 months, we conceptualized, built, and shipped an MVP of audiobooks onboarding and personalization.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Any of the following:
• previous founder
• curious, scrappy, first-principles thinker with strong willingness to challenge the status quo
• expertise in AI engineering (knowledge of explainable AI methods is a bonus)
• expertise in social psych
• previous work in social tech and/or relationships tech
Give a brief summary of your background

[ACADEMIC] 
• Symbolic Systems @ Stanford —strong foundations in cognitive science, computation, linguistics, and social psychology
• Collaborated with distinguished behavioral scientist Jennifer Aaker to pioneer two unorthodox courses on humor and purpose as leadership tools, at the Stanford GSB

[PROFESSIONAL]
• 6 years of product management experience at Meta and Spotify
• Led consumer ML + personalization products including feeds, notifications, social, and onboarding experiences
• Most recently, oversaw a team of 25 people innovating on quick personalization and early engagement for Spotify
• Built an MVP of concert recommendations for groups on Spotify, which drove +28% ticket purchases
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Help people discover and deepen meaningful relationships through unconventional AI-powered social tech. 
There is substantial research validating the importance of meaningful relationships to health, happiness, and longevity.
"""
,

"Thomas  [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
PhysicsArtificial IntelligenceHealthcareAerospace
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
In under 6 months, I built a next-generation text editor integrated with a proprietary NLG model at Twain. The project required frontend, backend, infrastructure and the rapid annotation of 15,000 user emails to train our model to identify and correct the most prevalent user errors. Compounded by the need to recruit, convert the LLMs for GPU compatibility, and implement robust analytics. Achieving this highlighted my capacity to lead a team through high-stakes, complex technical challenges and deliver innovation, earning Sequoia's recognition of Twain as a category-defining company.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Vision, growth, grit

Market insights and resilience
Give a brief summary of your background
Sequoia-backed CTO/physicist advancing technology in communication, AI and space.  Track record in AI, founding & leading multidisciplinary engineering teams.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
What we can't live without in 10 years
"""
,

"Aayush [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
HealthcareIOTPhysicsMaterials ScienceFemTechHardwareNanotechnology
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I designed, developed and tested 2D materials based photodetectors for smart contact lenses and the associated electronic and communication system.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Strong interests overlap, domain expertise
Give a brief summary of your background
PhD candidate in 2D materials for bioelectronics at University of Manchester. Equally comfortable working in hardware, software or doing customer discovery and development. Undergraduate degree in Artificial Intelligence. Professional experience in Data Engineering.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Primary focus: 2D materials/nano-electronics for healthcare, climate or computing applications.

Secondary focus: Waste measurement on farms, accessibility technology for science education, drop in electric power trains for decarbonisation of fishing trawlers.
"""
,

"Eeshita [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
HealthcareArtificial IntelligenceFinTechBiotech - SoftwareBiotechnologyBiotech-HardwareFinancial ServicesApplication DevelopmentLife SciencePharmaceuticalsDeep Tech
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Since late last year, I have been building TheaAI, a fun health app published on the iOS app store. 

Most consumer health apps overwhelm users with graphs, charts, and numbers, while offering no actionable insights. Thea is a friendly AI health avatar. She communicates through chat and a home screen widget. Thea makes it fun to take daily actions which improve users' health.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Desire, ambition, and ability to build a $1 trillion company. 

Incredible technical skills to complement my catalyst and market edges. 

Marrying fast execution with deep thinking.
Give a brief summary of your background
I previously led Product Monetization at Cleo (Series C, ex-EF consumer fintech). 
- This meant building Cleo’s unit economics framework (increasing customer LTV by 400%) and building fun consumer features like personalized home screen widgets. 
- I was part of the core team on Cleo’s Series C fundraise, raising $80m. 

Prior to that, I worked in investment banking for 3 years, leading technical analysis on transactions like the £6bn sale of Gatwick Airport.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I am passionate about health, wellbeing, and longevity. Simplifying health and making better health outcomes accessible for more people earlier on will result in large increases in healthspan and lifespan. 

Some ideas I am exploring currently relate to significantly cheaper non-therapeutic weight loss as a starting point for better metabolic health and digital accountability through personalized companions.
"""
,

"Micol [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
FemTechHealthcareBiotechnologyCommunity & LifestyleFoodLife ScienceArtificial IntelligenceOther
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Built a digital clinic offering precise health tests, tailored nutrition guidance, and specialist virtual consultations -all in one service.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Looking for a tech-savvy co-founder who's all in on our mission:
-Brings ambition, drive, passion, and honesty to the table.
-Ready to act fast, get shit done, and go all in.
-Proven at leading a successful engineering team.
Give a brief summary of your background
- Italian, but lived in 4 different countries.
-Finished a Biochemistry degree at Columbia University a year ahead of schedule, then earned a Master's in Bioengineering from Imperial College.
-Entrepreneurial spirit led me to start a women's health startup, taking it from idea to launch and leading a team of nine through university and beyond.
- Additionally, I've held several leadership positions in the life sciences sector, through a leadership program at Halma.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I'm on the hunt for my next problem to obsess over, one that has a meaningful impact on people's lives. Drawn to femtech, biotech, and foodtech, I'm equally eager to explore any area where I can drive positive change, especially in social or environmental initiatives.
"""
,

"Andrei [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceNatural Language ProcessingMachine LearningComputer VisionData Science & AnalyticsData Analysis & Data MiningPrivacy & SecurityOperating Systems and/or InfrastructureWeb DevelopmentDevToolsEnterprise SolutionsEnergyInsuranceRoboticsIndustrial TechDeep Tech
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I pioneered research on distributed training of large models, addressing the challenges posed by the increasing model sizes outpacing GPUs. Published in top-tier venues, one known for introducing technologies like TensorFlow and Ray. My work combined a deep understanding of ML maths with practical software development skills, leading to innovative training algorithms, some of which now underpin companies such as Together AI or techniques used in federated learning.

As part of my ML Engineering role in quant finance, developed model distillation techniques used in an alpha extracting significant value from the stock market and led the design and implementation of a ML pipeline used by 150 researchers, optimised across an entire GPU farm, with considerable economic potential in estimated savings and unlocked capabilities.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for a strong founder-market-fit signal from the start. Someone keen to build as well as talk to users. A superstar with deep domain expertise who can relate to people, drive sales and leverage a large network. We should complement each other (with some overlap in skills) and work well alongside, keen to dive deep into under-explored directions even if seemingly difficult. Other skills: gritty, well-organised, quick to decide, pragmatic visionary.
Give a brief summary of your background
Hello everyone, my name is Andrei. A little bit about me:

I hold a MEng Cmputing - Artificial Intelligence degree from Imperial College London ‘19 (Prize for Academic Excellence awarded to only 3 graduates).

Previously, I worked as a Machine Learning Engineer at G-Research London for 4 years, driving the design and implementation of complex ML training and evaluation pipelines to streamline and scale financial market forecasting (2.5 years) and working as a researcher in representation learning (1.5 years). 

My expertise spans the full AI stack, from GPU programming to building AI-powered apps. Worked at the intersection of large scale ML, distributed systems and specialised accelerators, building efficient systems for the large-scale training and deployment of machine learning models. I have experience building and orchestrating compound AI systems based on varying back-bone models.

In-tune with state-of-the-art advances across the AI field (Oxford ML Summer School ‘23, ELLIS School on Foundation Models ‘24, MLSys ‘23, NeurIPS ‘23). 

Previously co-founded 2 early-stage start-ups: Intuit AI (2019), automating end-to-end ML research workflows and Global AI Catalyst (2023), a marketplace for AI projects.

Hobbies: tennis (played 20+ years, also competitively), sailing, cooking, maths & AI
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Keen to explore where our founding team has a unique edge. I would like to build a B2B company powered by an eventual commercial research lab in one of the following sectors: Energy & Climate Tech, Healthcare/DrugDiscovery, InsurTech, FinTech, Creative/Marketing, Automotive/Manufacturing

Topics of interest:
- Improving core-business in specific verticals, rather than side tooling; looking to create a new segment altogether
- Accelerator-centric Machine Learning Systems (multi-modal, efficient, cost-aware platforms)
- Confidential computing, safety guardrails for foundation models, alignment
- Domain-specific workflows (AI assisted, multi-modal)
- AI for decision making: RL, causality, simulated counterfactuals, grounding agents
- Non-capital intensive areas (e.g., not requiring thousands of GPUs to train models, not requiring building large hardware-based products)
"""
,

"Fay [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
EngineeringClimateArtificial IntelligenceConsumer ElectronicsMaterials ScienceIT
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
During my studies in 2019, I founded Librae, a non-profit that aims to raise awareness and stimulate gender equality and diversity among students in STEM. It is currently run by a team of students who organize bi-annual dinners and mentorship programs and manage partnerships with over 20 different companies (including McKinsey, ASML, PwC, ING etc.), raising over 100k over the last 5 years. It has grown to a network of over 400 students and 200 role models. Did this while writing completing two masters and working 2 part-time jobs.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
As a catalyst, with experience working in various industries in different types of companies (corporates, public, non-profits, start-ups & finance) and a strong engineering background, I'm looking for someone to complement my business & engineering skills with more deep tech knowledge that can help me build a product. Some of my core values are openmindedness (D&I), transparent communication and having a passion for what you're doing. I'm an impact-driven person, who also believes it needs to be driven by creating business value, and will be looking for a disruptive solution to a meaningful problem.
Give a brief summary of your background
I'm Fay de Waal, originally from the Netherlands but grew up in Shanghai. I completed a BSc in Mechanical Engineering and a double MSc in Materials Science & Industrial Ecology at the TU Delft and specialised in recycling critical materials, circular economy and data management for sustainability. In my bachelor's, I spent 3 months in India and became very passionate about waste and how to maximise the value of a product during its life cycle. I've also worked in finance for a PE firm in charge of ESG, a climate fintech start-up looking into compliance and for a non-profit assessing climate impacts of new technologies.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I'm interested in exploring how we can obtain more value from waste, specifically to recover critical materials from electronics or improve the refurbishing/remanufacturing of products. Spaces include improving waste management through data management, product lifecycle management or looking into the supply chain and optimising for the collection of e-waste. While I have no expertise in AI, I'd love to learn more about the potential of AI to support my ideas and I am also open to exploring other ideas as long as there is a sustainability aspect!
"""
,

"Jan [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceApplication DevelopmentWeb DevelopmentData & AnalyticsEngineeringDeveloper and/or Dev Ops ToolsClimateFinTechPrivacy & Security
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
As a founding engineer I've build very early stage startup from 0 revenue and 0 product to PMF. This involved very fast iteration cycles and experimentation (often multiple times a day), building & testing both D2C and B2B2C acquisition channels, building core company IP, scaling from 0 to 10000s of users and building high-performing engineering team.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Strong determination, grinder, growth mindset, passionate, value overlap and complementary skill-set. Ideally domain expert and more commercially minded
Give a brief summary of your background
CS background both at uni & 7+ years of commercial experience. Worked at various scale-ups such as DAZN where I was responsible for high traffic app serving live sports to 15million users worldwide over 100+ devices; or Snyk over 7B valued unicorn where my team was responsible for 40% of overall revenue (about $35m ARR at the time) supporting whales (uber, swiss banks). Most recently have spent last 2 years building very early stage startup as founding engineer from 0 to PMF
What are you interested in working on at EF?
No-code progressive automation of legacy manual processes in operationally bound businesses leveraging AI. It's industry agnostic and ubiquitous problem. The ambition is to drastically decrease unit economics for operationally intensive businesses

I'm naturally curious about many problems areas, such as better eval functions for personalised LLM output, climate tech, data & analytics etc.
"""
,

"oliland [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceSales & MarketingComputer VisionAR/VRProperty/Real EstateDeep TechGeneralist
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Built Citymapper. At one point was making £3,000 / month from keyword hacking the iOS app store.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I work best with other (ex) PhD students and people with scientific backgrounds who are interested in turning research into products.
Give a brief summary of your background
Apple student scholar. Founding engineer of Citymapper. Briefly head of AI at a film studio. Ex-UCL Computer Vision PhD.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I'm looking for an important, high-impact, human-oriented problem to fall in love with.
"""
,

"Olha Dolinska [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
HealthcareFemTechBiotechnologyPharmaceuticalsFoodSAASFinTechCommunity & LifestyleArtificial Intelligence
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
The key thing about me is I get shit done. At my prev job (HealthTech) founders passed off entire projects to me 0-100 w/ no oversight. Big ones incl:

⁠•⁠ I ran their first ever research study with 100s of patients. I designed and executed the protocol, analysed the data, and wrote a kick-ass white paper. This was used to close sales and prove legit value in marketing and acquisition convos. By myself, start to finish 1 month, within a miniscule budget (so I had to negotiate like hell). 
⁠•⁠ I also built them a complex financial model from scratch, my projections being final call for major company decisions e.g. hiring/funding.
⁠•⁠ Dirty work too - hundreds of S&M posts/blogs/webinars and personalised emails, which secured partnerships with BigCo Health (Ro, Xealth, League).

I hustle in my personal life too:
⁠•⁠ Waitlisted for NY Tech week events - so I threw my own event together in 72h, driving 300+ signups of VCs and founders, securing free venue and 5 sponsors incl a VC fund.
⁠•⁠ CBA with job search so engineered a viral linkedin post which got 40k views, 400 engagements, YC BookFace repost, and 5 job offers in 36h.
⁠•⁠ Cut from the uni lacrosse team (fuckers) so set up a new one at Oxford AND Cambridge, and my team got the best varsity result seen in a decade.

TL;DR - no obstacle will stand in my way to world domination
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
1) we have fun together
2) fast doer and fast learner
3) technical/can build product (not necessarily software)
4) obsessed with customer and finding their pains (only interested in building smth we have proof people will pay for)
5) evidence-based opinions (so we make transparently good decisions)
6) exorcised BigCo mindset - scrappy & comfortable in chaos
Give a brief summary of your background
[ACADEMIC]

I’m the least mid person ever, and people love giving me money, so logic dictates VCs will follow this pattern.

Couldn’t speak English when I started school -> best grades in my year -> full scholarship to top London private school -> award for having the best grades there too -> full sponsorship of tuition fees at Oxford by Credit Suisse ->graduated with First (in *every* exam)

[CAREER]

Oxford Neuroscience -> stint at Credit Suisse (RIP) -> 2-time Chief of Staff in teams <10ppl (aka founder but without the equity) most recently at a US HealthTech.

I’ve worn every CEO-founder hat imaginable: fundraising, finance, customer interviews, sales emails, marketing, PMF strat, website design, hiring, automation, product testing, even acquisition. Technically experienced too - lab work & writing papers (specialties: Alzheimer's + sleep).

I’m comfortable in chaos, mega organised and process-oriented, type A. Also hugely positive, high energy, open-minded, fun & friendly :)
What are you interested in working on at EF?
In no particular order, some thoughts:

1) The biggest cost in most companies is human labour. The companies that win - and the easiest sales - will be software or hardware that reduces this need. I'm interested in exploring this for different customers. I am already thinking about it for researchers + clinical trials, as these are easy people to reach in my network.

2) I see an opportunity for starting an agile company in spaces that are lagging behind wrt modernisation. Not-very-tech-savvy customers or industries.

3) Of course, Health/Bio is a big interest, since I have medical knowledge + am well connected to the academic & HealthTech ecosystem in the US & UK. I have a hunch that there's an untapped market in the UK for private care being brought to people in more straightforward, convenient, and sexy ways. Specifically thinking about areas where the NHS doesn't cover treatment, or diagnoses take a very long time (why now? huge NHS backlogs and people are desperate).

4) I'm generally passionate about helping people live healthier, longer lives. It is frequently stated that it takes an average of 17 years for research evidence to reach clinical practice (in biomed research generally). We can change that. One of my specialities during my degree was Sleep, so I'm especially keen to explore problems here.

5) More HNWIs (rich ppl) = more demand for 'white glove' (luxury/concierge) services. 

-> I am very logical, so if a good business case for anything is put forward, I will likely get excited about it!
"""
,

"Jamie Weigold [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceBiotechnologyMachine Learning
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
In a team of two at my last startup, nex.art, we trained a multi-modal, multi-billion parameter text-to-image foundation model better than Stable Diffusion (before SD3.0) in 6 weeks.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Ideally, I'm looking for somebody like myself: a good builder who can really get their hands dirty and knows what they're doing, but can keep their eyes on the horizon and maintain a strong vision for what they want to achieve. Though it would be very interesting to me if this person had a deep technical expertise in a specific domain, such that I could complement it with my background in ML to work at the intersection between them potentially, I am also open to working with quick-learning and creative entrepreneurs who do not have this background. The strongest expectation that I have of a co-founder is the ability to build.
Give a brief summary of your background
Hey! I'm Jamie. I've got a solid background in CS from Cambridge & UCL, with the vast majority of my work/expertise coming in AI. Most of the substantive works I've undertaken academically are in applied AI to biology – e.g. diffusion models for protein-protein docking or VAEs for to create generalised encodings of EM-imaged slices of mammalian brains. However, I also have expertise in applying AI in the context of entertainment – training multi-modal foundation text-to-image foundation models in the last startup that I worked with. I have now been on the founding teams of 2 startups prior, and have set up another AI-based non-profit initiative, the work of which has contributed to actively take carbon out of the UK atmosphere on the kilotonne-level and continues to do so every year.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Though I am very open-minded, I prefer looking at novel problems/products (what I call a potential step-function improvement to people's lives) as opposed to products seeking to optimise/compete with things that we already have. Given my technical background, it is likely that I will end up working on something with a substantive technical component, but due to the generality of this technical background, I am not married to a single problem domain.
"""
,

"Phil Pfeffer [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceFinancial ServicesEnterprise SolutionsMachine LearningAR/VRComputer VisionE-Commerce & RetailMediaPaymentsMedia and EntertainmentSAAS
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Creation of River Lightning (https://rls.dev / https://docs.rls.dev). As part of a team of four engineers, I designed the product, made architectural decisions for the codebase, implemented a significant amount of the system and actively maintained it (infra, accounting, debugging).

We made Bitcoin Lightning payments easy using a simple API, hiding all the ugly infrastructure and capital management from our clients. Among other clients, we power El Salvador's primary payments app, Chivo. Our first client was a nation state. Then, public companies. Now, we are the backend for many ssytems. River Lightning has facilitated 3+ million transactions, saving users hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of time while making payments.

I built a whole system with a tiny team. And I'll do it again.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Preferably another technical person, so we can iterate quickly on the product/problem together. I have good product sense, so want to increase my output with another builder. That said, the right market edge could create a great pairing.

Ideally, my cofounder is as geographically flexible as me - they would physically move to SF or to wherever the largest customer base is.

Not considering back-up options. *The* thing they want to do is build a big company.
Give a brief summary of your background
I'm an engineer and storyteller at heart. My background in EE (BS Stanford '21) & CS (MS Stanford '21, focus on ML) comes from my desire to know every layer of abstraction from sand to thinking computer. My background in storytelling includes filmmaking and writing science fiction (https://www.philpfeffer.com/).

I love building, e.g. a haptic vest with miniaturised computer vision models for edge hardware, founding robotics clubs in high school, etc (https://philippfeffer.github.io/).

For the last 2 years, I worked at River Financial (https://river.com), writing our brokerage code and creating River Lightning (https://rls.dev).
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I want to revolutionise media and entertainment. The overlap between my passion to tell stories and my knowledge in ML, particularly now, are the perfect recipe for a new media giant.

It can't be done the obvious way: 'just build a foundational text-to-video model' because it'll be eaten. But the time is ripe for new content creation and distribution models across all forms of media (written, audio, video, gaming). Immersive & interactive media experiences will fundamentally change how stories are told and consumed.

I'm also open to uncover ideas in other, more 'boring' spaces. E.g. automating away ERP consultancies so that retail chains no longer have to hire teams to deal with terrible software.
"""
,

"Wass [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""RoleCEOLinkedInwww.linkedin.com/in/[email protected] Linkhttps://calendly.com/wass-ayouch
Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningComputer VisionHealthcareSales & MarketingMarketplacesFemTechCommunity & Lifestyle
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I founded Women Who Build (https://www.womenwhobuild.co), a fast-growing NGO during my time in venture capital. We're on a mission to bring the startup ecosystem to female students in the UK to ultimately reshape the landscape of entrepreneurship, one person, industry, and geography at a time. With just 2% of global VC going to female-founded companies, I believe it is time for a change. 💥

Just eight weeks post-launch, we've achieved:
- 500+ female student sign-ups across 20+ universities in the UK.
- 100+ sign-ups for our inaugural 'product' (i.e. the mentorship programme).
- 35+ mentor sign-ups from the European ecosystem, ranging from early-stage founders to tier-1 investors (e.g., ICONIQ, Atomico, Balderton, Dawn Capital), as well as C-level executives and early employees at companies such as OpenAI, Folk, Sylvera, VEED.IO, Peppy, and Lindus Health, among others.
- 10+ partnerships with student societies, collectively representing thousands of students.
- 5+ institutional partnerships, including Entrepreneur First (Europe's #1 incubator), Women Societies Alliance (UK's largest female society), Slush (the world's largest tech conference), Lindus Health (the UK's fastest-growing health tech startup).
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Technical expertise (in Product and/or ML/AI) who has the ambition to revolutionise an entire industry from the ground up, empowering people to lead more fulfilling lives. I especially value passion, emotional intelligence, reliability, high integrity, a strong growth mindset, and a commitment to making the journey energising and fun for our future team.
Give a brief summary of your background
Former McKinsey manager, early-stage tech investor, and startup advisor with a passion for consumer, wellness, and health.

⁠•⁠ Consulting: Engaged in 20+ Strategy, Ops, and M&A projects over four years; predominantly served consumer/tech scale-ups and global PE funds.

•⁠ Investing: Specialised in early-stage European tech deals (Seed & Series A), held three Board Observer roles, and supported four portfolio founders with go-to-market, recruitment, and fundraising efforts.

• Founding experience: Co-founded womenwhobuild.co, a UK-wide initiative aimed at bringing female students into the startup ecosystem to help reshape the European landscape of entrepreneurship. I was also part of the founding team of x26 - McKinsey’s global community of founders and angels (now 5k+ members across four continents).

• Advisory: Led the fundraising efforts for a former unicorn founder in the AI space in the US, successfully securing a Series B round of $15M.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
A customer-centric company at the intersection of AI and healthcare/wellness.

I have a strong Catalyst edge, with Domain expertise in the consumer sector (10+ strategy studies for consumer scaleups and Fortune 500 during my tenure at McKinsey) and healthcare industry (having engaged with 60+ health tech startups as an investor and served 5+ healthcare/wellness clients at McKinsey).
"""
,

"David Kell [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceBiotech - SoftwareData Science & Analytics
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
My previous startup. We built a tool to understand consumer behaviour in the physical world through anonymised location data. I took the product from idea to sale as technical co-founder.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Possibly someone with experience on the 'real world' engineering side, ideally biotech - but open to anything
Give a brief summary of your background
Physicist by training, PhD dropout. Built and exited a data science startup as technical co-founder. Most recently led AI at protein engineering biotech.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I'm thinking about AI and biology as a technology to program matter, and what tooling and infrastructure we need to make that happen - e.g. lab automation, lab clouds, reliable protein production, enzyme/function models
"""
,

"Gediminas [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningComputer VisionHealthcareDevToolsFemTechData Science & AnalyticsData & AnalyticsApplication DevelopmentBiotech - SoftwareAdvanced MathematicsChemicalsBiotechnologyLife ScienceDeep TechBiotech-Hardware
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I have built algorithms and software in my field that increased the speed of the state of the art methods by 1000s order of magnitude.

Finished my PhD at 25

Won a bronze medal at International Chemistry Olympiad, most prestigious chemistry tournament in the world.

I was leading a French Horn player in Lithuania in my teens
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
High focus, determination, grit, quick worker. I would want my co-founder to take the lead on business, networking, people side so I would be able to focus my energy on the technological start.
Give a brief summary of your background
Recent PhD graduate from the University of Oxford in Chemical Physics. Expert in mathematical modelling, computer simulations, scientific computing, ML, and other topics.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Interested in AI and computing applications in science, healthcare, and engineering. I love hard technical challenges and building the best possible team for solving them. Hence, the industry is not always important as long as computation is the key tool in business.

Personal interest in supplements, optimization, health, meditation and sports. I was a professional musician before, and now I teach people Latin dancing.
"""
,

"Sebastian [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
AerospaceArtificial IntelligenceHR & TalentGovernment and MilitaryDeep Tech
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Build open-source EEG based Brain-Computer-Interface hardware + software and raised 25k$ via a Crowdfunding campaign (hackerBCI)
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
- Ambitious
- Extremly hard working
- Going the extra mile
- Technical
in terms of skills I would be interested in working with someone who has experience in developing software for complex systems.
Give a brief summary of your background
Had two startups before. Scaled one to 30k€MRR. 
Market Edge in the Brain-Computer-Interface and AI Recruiting Software industries.
More: sebastianvoelkl.com
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Currently very intersted in building software for the aerospace&defense industry.
Open for other market edges to commercilaye and bring to the market.
"""
,

"Alliance  [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Financial ServicesEngineeringEVEnergy
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
- Built the high and low power systems on the Hyperloop pod, HYPED at the University of Edinburgh.  
- Ph.D researcher in battery technology at UAB-Center for microelectronics 
- Was accepted into competitive scholarship program Schwarzman College Scholars with 5% acceptance rate. 
- Curator for Global Shapers Community in Beijing - a community of highly prominent entrepreneurs.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Experience in ML  Automation and Optimization, Competent software engineer, open-minded and resilient.
Give a brief summary of your background
Electrical engineer who transitioned to investment banking with a focus on renewable energy in Asia. Previsouly worked in semiconductor manufacturing and development of flow batteries. Strong understanding of the development trends in the energy sector and leading technologies.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
The energy sector is the core industry focus. Interested in exploring the following ideas (1) Material recycling of electronic devices (2) Automation and optimisaztion of operations in the Utilities Sector (3) Explore ideas connected to deepsea mining.
"""
,

"Julio Magoga [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial Intelligence
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
- from 0 knowledge of code, in just a few months I built a booking platform that got to 3000 recurring monthly visitors and 400 monthly bookings
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
- bias for action, doesn't create a process for everything
- not afraid of pushing people to do their best. you know they might complain in the moment but they'll thank you later
- understands and applies compound interest to their actions
- can't stand the idea of not starting their own thing and doesn't give up!
Give a brief summary of your background
- was part of the previous EF cohort; my idea went on to get IC investment. I had the CEO role to a much more technical co-founder
- 2x founder, CTO at first startup. made me a bit of money
- worked as a Product Manager and in Sales for 2 years. 40% more conversions on B2C product, which is now used by the British Council
- did an MA in Education at the Institute of Education, UCL (#1 in the world) because I care about making people more productive/knowledgeable/connected. I researched amongst other things culture and migrations 
- software engineer at hottest agetech startup in the world - Birdie
What are you interested in working on at EF?
in no particular order:
- anything where I'm the CTO and I can be genuinely interested in (https://paulgraham.com/schlep.html)
- anything deep tech -- you're the CTO and you need help with a technical generalist who can do the commercial side
- psychology engineering -- tools that enable conversations that have previously not existed (for teams or individuals); IaaS (Incentives as a Service) or CCCaaS (company culture change as a service)
- future of work -- think Slack, Notion, Rewind or anything that increases productivity (https://www.indexventures.com/companies/sector/future-of-work/region/all)
- Observability 2.0 -- engineering teams who work closer to users/customer support
- age tech (see what a massive opportunity home care is https://www.digitalnative.tech/p/techs-blind-spots-the-startups-building?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2)
- languages -- language learning, I was a language teacher. 
- learning/training -- for any skills the world will need
- I've built AI apps and tinkered with ML at the previous EF cohort
- I once researched and solved a health condition I had after countless doctors said they couldn't fix it themselves. that's to say I learn about other areas pretty fast -- tell me about yours!
"""
,

"Gus Neate [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceEngineeringLegal/LawData Science & AnalyticsCompliance/RegulatorySAAS
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Technical - for my engineering thesis at NUS, I built a prototype virtual reality glove that connected flex sensors via Arduino to an HTC Vive in Unity to increase user immersion. It received top grades and the research was carried on by my professor.

Commercial - while at law school, I co-founded a tutoring business. We hired c. 50 tutors, onboarded 30 individual and 3 business clients internationally and eventually sold the business to a competitor.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
A partner for the long run where we both really enjoy working together
Technical ability (incl. hiring and leading a world class engineering team)
Ability to ship quickly with a strong customer focus 
Growth mindset and vision
Give a brief summary of your background
My background is in Engineering having studied it at Oxford & NUS. Since then I have built deep legal domain expertise: spending 4 years at Clifford Chance in private equity law (personally working on transactions worth over £50Bn); working in product at a legal tech scale up; and working as in-house legal in a cloud computing startup, at a private equity fund with £100bn+ AUM, and in a large re-insurance company with 300+ lawyers.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I am really excited by the opportunities I have seen from a number of perspectives to apply new technologies in legal and compliance. We are at an inflexion point for awareness, curiosity and willingness to adopt new innovative solutions. Now is the perfect time to build disruptive products that address large problems in the space and have wider societal impact.
"""
,

"Chris Haggard [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningData & AnalyticsNon-AI Advanced SoftwareBiotech - SoftwareBiotechnologyLife SciencePharmaceuticalsPhysicsMaterials ScienceBattery TechnologiesDeep TechChemicals
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I have a built a few C++ packages in my PhD for moving molecules around/seeing what happens. Looking back, it was crazy (and unnecessarily) complex but at least it was fast! The most impressive work would probably be designing a new graph neural network architecture in PyTorch for fast error estimates. This was hard because it required getting into the internals of the software and tinkering around at the low-level. From a non-technical perspective, I was part of a team that build one of Cambridge’s largest societies, the algo trading soc – we reached over 900 members and had super-high sponsorship levels.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am interested in building a scientific/technical company as I think that most effectively leverages my edge. A co-founder with a semi-technical background, like a technical undergrad degree, would be great but what would be even better would be if they filled in the gaps in my knowledge/skills! They might also have deep commercial knowledge from working in a company/start-up/VC in a specific area or are an expert in some experimental/processing science that could benefit from a combining with computation.
Give a brief summary of your background
I am just finishing up a PhD in computational & theoretical chemistry at Cambridge. I worked on developing computational methods to capture the quantum behaviour of molecules. Recently, I researched the use graph ML in chemistry, aiming to speed up computation of important molecular properties by 100x – this is useful if you want to design new batteries (or similar). In summary, I did a lot of maths and scientific programming for the last 3 years and now want to apply that to a company built at EF!
What are you interested in working on at EF?
At EF, I am interested in leveraging my scientific and technical edge to build a company in that domain. I am particularly interested in using advanced computation (like ML) to speed-up R&D - one of my theses is I don’t think large companies currently do this well. That can be in a specific domain, like discovering new cathodes in batteries, to more generally building a scientific company with a heavy focus on automation and computationally guided experimentation. I am particularly interested to meet people with adjacent but not overlapping skills i.e. commercial understanding of a specific tech area or skilled experimentalist.
"""
,

"Fazl Barez [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningComputer VisionGovernment and MilitarySpeech RecognitionData & Analytics
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I've been passionate about AI safety and interpretability since 2019. During that time, I've coded, wrote and shipped impactful ideas that prioritize transparency and interpretability, setting industry and governance standards.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
- Extensive experience in AI (safety and interpretability would be a plus)
- Strong team player
- Visionary who can translate complex ideas into meaningful, achievable goals
- Ability to write and communicate effectively with people of all backgrounds, both technical and governance-related
- Strong ability to convert research outputs into code and code into products
Give a brief summary of your background
🔬 Research Fellow at Torr Vision Group, University of Oxford, leading safety research. Affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (Cambridge), Krueger AI Safety Lab (Cambridge) and Future of Life Institute.

💼 Previously worked on technology policy at RAND, interpretability at Amazon/The DataLab, safe recommender systems at Huawei, and economic scenario forecasting tools at Natwest Group.

👨‍💻 Expertise spans AI safety, existential risk, interpretability, and security policy.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I'm interested in learning how to become a start up founder, meeting like-minded people, and potentially building the next AI safety startup during my time at EF.
"""
,

"Carl [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceAR/VRLife ScienceLegal/LawGovernment and MilitaryReal EstateIndustrial TechBiotechnology
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I have delivered and built a team that delivers solutions in the Foundation Models industry to some of the largest enterprises and government organisations in the world.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am a technical person and I write code daily but I also know that I am not a CTO of technology company. Therefore, I am looking for a co-founder who has deep technical expertise in their domain and is looking for somebody who can build the company around the technology but still is able to understand and discuss technology related decisions and challenges.
Give a brief summary of your background
I worked as a Team Lead AI Solutions Engineering @ Aleph Alpha (AA), where I shaped the transformation from a small AI research lab to the largest founding round (500M$) in Europe in 2023. During that time, I wore every hat that you could wear at a start-up ranging from Business Development, to Product and Research. My daily work includes talking to CXOs, enabling my team and building models.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
As I have been exposed to a myriad of industries during my time at AA, I am very open to all kinds of ideas and not limited to any technology or industry. 

Within the context of Foundation Models I am particularly interested in customization of models and evaluation/red-teaming of Foundation Model applications.
"""
,

"Tom  [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceComputer VisionEnterprise SolutionsMachine Learning
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Co founder of GirlsWhoML.com - a not for profit which provides courses to improve access for female university students to enter the field of AI/ML. The program runs at several institutions (mostly in the uk) and has over 500 students in the alumni. (Please reach out if you want to get involved in anyway). From a technical POV, I’ve built many demos/proof of concepts in the deep learning space.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I’m looking for someone who I can deeply connect with and can help me to develop and lead a team (eventually large company) and which is greater than the sum of its parts. I feel it’s important to have overlap in many skills and essential that you trust each other without any doubt to make appropriate decisions. Ideally they’re someone who is visionary, enthusiastic and someone I’ll happily spend lots of time with for the next 10 years. It’s very hard to write down specific qualities, so I’m looking to spend as much time as possible with everyone to see what emerges.
Give a brief summary of your background
Completed undergraduate (engineering) and PhD (Machine learning and AI) at Oxford, finishing in 2021. Thesis was centred around multimodal learning and generative models. Worked as a research scientist at Five (self driving car company) focussing on robustness/safety/explainability.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I have a particular interest in the following area: information retrieval/search of documents; application of generative models for games development; applying machine learning to increase efficiency.
"""
,

"Deepanshu [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
ClimateEngineeringEVAerospaceEnergyTransportationAgriculture & FarmingRoboticsBattery TechnologiesMaterials ScienceFood
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Towards the end of my PhD at University of Oxford, I helped my supervisor develop a novel heat transfer device that could be used to provide sustainable heating and cooling solutions at low cost and high performance to the world. The technology could be used for domestic heating (reducing reliance on gas boilers), and refrigeration (for cold food and drug storage). My grant applications and pitches to investors helped the start-up raise ~£3 million in government funding and strategic industry partnerships. However, due to diverging product development ideologies and my ambition to work on my own start-up, I decided to apply for Entrepreneur First program.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Someone to join on my journey to take calculated risks and make them successful! At this point, I am open to explore what others in the cohort have to offer and at the same time, happy to share some of my own ideas so ping me ;)
Give a brief summary of your background
Previously part of the founding team at an Oxford based spin-out; developed products providing sustainable heating and cooling solutions; wrote successful grant applications and formed strategic industrial partnerships; raised ~£3m.
Recent role: Research Associate, Aviation Impact Accelerator at University of Cambridge; developing evidence-based tools to advise policymakers and industry towards decarbonisation in aviation. Also, lead business development for the group. 
PhD in Aerospace Engineering from University of Oxford: Worked with Rolls-Royce on experimental research into aircraft engines, leading to reduced emissions and costs of engines. Project funding ~£13m
Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
Held various leadership roles during studies and outside: President of Oxford University Scientific Society, Captain of Tennis Team and Chair of American Society of Mechanical Engineers student body. 
Super excited to be part of the program and looking to build a company to tackle climate change. Also open to explore other brilliant ideas that this group has to offer ! Message me if you are already in London and would like to meet up over a coffee.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I am interested in establishing a sustainability-focused venture. I have technical expertise in aerodynamics, heat transfer, and experimentation, combined with key business development and public engagement skills. I possess adept project management, leadership abilities, and a network within aviation industry and academia. Proficiency in grant writing and successful investor pitches.
"""
,

"Bryan Wei Zhi Tan [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
HealthcareLife ScienceBiotech - SoftwareArtificial IntelligenceData Analysis & Data MiningMachine LearningNon-AI Advanced SoftwareData & AnalyticsAR/VRData Science & AnalyticsEducation
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Instead of a technical product, I am most proud of the society I put in immense work to revive whilst at university. Taking over a society riddled with debt after the incumbent President resigned, I finished the year turning over >£70,000 in revenue which is admittedly kind of silly for a UK student society. I led its rebranding and growth achieving an all-time high of membership sales (460% YoY increase) transforming it into the largest cultural society in the university by rallying my leadership team and an incredible community of ~500 students around me. I've got a track record of bringing people together to tackle tough-to-crack but meaningful causes and also making profit along the way! I will bring the same to our startup :) 

I did this whilst maintaining top-class academics, research, work, sports, and experiencing successive familial losses testifying to my grit and commitment towards responsibilities that I undertake.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
	Wants an extremely rapid build/measure/learn iterations to take advantage of compounding effects. 
	Technical skillset so we have the fastest iteration time possible with 2 technical co-founders. I can pick up the slack on non-technicals and learn rapidly where I haven't already.
	Holds Strong Views Weakly. A deep thinker, with developed worldviews. Welcomes verbal sparring and constructive criticism. 
	Not married to any ideas and keen on finding product/market fit.
     Will commit the time and effort to build a huge company. Be very certain they wouldn't quickly jump ship for a back-up plan.
	Geographically flexible, let's go to San Francisco or where our target market is.
	Transparent and healthy communicator, it's better to bring up mistakes early!
Give a brief summary of your background
Brief Headlines
	Rank No. 1 amongst ~370 Cambridge University Undergraduates across all Biological Sciences
	Triple First Class Honours, MSc in Computational/Systems Biology (Rank 4), BA in Genetics (Rank 1). Extensive self-taught coding.
	Leadership on the University Student Council, Student Union, led the growth of a society to achieve status as the single largest cultural society.
	Submission to Nature Communications under final review. Significant contributions to ground-breaking research in Genetic and Healthcare Big Data methods under Professor Durbin’s (h-index: 155) direct mentorship, also at the Gurdon Institute, and Medical Research Council.
	Had surgery to remove half a lung after an accident in the military. Two years later represented university on a sports team ranked 2nd in the nation.
	Internally motivated. Lived independently since I was 13 and moved alone to a country 11,000 km from home. 
	I believe my greatest strengths are my ability to (1) distil the quintessential aspects of any complex problem and (2) synthesise thoughts/solutions that break the mould.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I want to accelerate the transition to Preventative and Personalised Healthcare and Wellness. My collective experiences uniquely position me to understand opportunities and build at the intersection of life science and computing. Tripartite breakthroughs in the fields of Genetics, Bioinformatics, and the Information industry have opened the doors to step function changes in the way we diagnose and treat patients. This will redirect immense amounts of cash away from antiquated healthcare systems into the hands of companies such as the one we build together. I also really like that the healthcare idea space is resilient to potential economic downturns.

My skills cover lots of areas in life science, crunching big data, and making models to explain or predict complex systems. That means I'm also interested in other areas besides healthcare. I'd be excited to check out: (a) fast-growing small markets like VR/AR and functional usage of AI, (b) selling shovels in current/near-future gold rushes (e.g., Terra, Nvidia), (c) finding new ways to use dense data that people haven't tapped into much yet, like multiomics and video data (Genomics PLC, Verkada), (d) bringing elderly back into the workforce with the help of AI increasing retirement ages and providing relief to countries with aging populations.
"""
,

"Janek [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Machine LearningNatural Language ProcessingComputer Vision
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Built a search tool for conducting machine learning research (an LLM-based interface between user and a database of 500k ML papers). It addresses limitations of existing search tools by improving feedback loop and user control of (re)search journey.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Someone technical or with a deep understanding of their profession. Someone hands on, an executor, with sharp intuition, confidence, high information-throughput, and never ending energy.
Give a brief summary of your background
A blend of ML and Full Stack engineering skills - I can design and train ML models and create the UI and the infrastructure stack to expose them to end users. Hold a Master’s in Machine Learning from the University of Cambridge. Previously, I worked at an LLM startup, built algorithms for trading, and conducted research in computer vision (image relocalisation, 3D reconstruction) and Probabilistic Machine Learning (Normalizing flows, Bayesian Networks, Causal Inference)
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Build an LLM/ML startup. I'm interested in exploring both deep-tech innovations and practical applications of LLM/ML. (i.e. tooling for LLM agents, copilots, reshaping old industries with LLM-enabled solutions.)
"""
,

"Alex [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
RoboticsMachine LearningHardwareConsumer ElectronicsArtificial IntelligenceNatural Language ProcessingDeep Tech
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Probably my startup AskGuru (askguru.ai). It is an AI toolkit for customer support software providers, which allows them to embed our tools (message drafting, information retrieval, dialogue summarization, etc) into their software and receive additional revenue from upselling these features. We got a small $20k investment from Pioneer (pioneer.app) acceleration program on a $2M valuation, participated in their acceleration program in SF, and got customers across the UK, India, and Armenia. Read more in my blog: https://asmirnov.xyz/askguru
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for a guy who can elaborate on why building a company. What is the internal driver? Will it be enough in the long run? Would you fall for biscuits like taking a job in a big tech if offered? Another thing is that a person should be over-excited by the mission of what we will build because my opinion is that when everything goes wrong (always in a startup) and you are having bad days, the idea & mission is the single thing that keeps you going.
Give a brief summary of your background
BSc in CS, MSc in NLP; ex Machine Learning Engineer @ Booking.com, Yandex, JetBrains, etc. Founded a B2B SaaS startup focused on providing an AI toolkit for customer support software companies. https://asmirnov.xyz/
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Affordable robot housekeeper that helps with everyday tasks like bringing you water, doing the laundry, putting dishes into the dishwasher, wiping the table, etc. My hot take is that consumer AI is too commoditized right now and the barrier of entry during the last year has become very low (not good for me as an engineer). But what I found from researching household robotics over the last several months is that this space looks similar to NLP space in 2017-2020 years: no SOTA solutions for general tasks (try to find a robust grasping module for example), no big players on the consumer side (even for hundreds of thousands $ you are not able to buy general purpose household robot). This is not working because of the lack of generalization of robot algorithms, which prevents robots from seamlessly adapting to new environments. However, breakthroughs in Visual Language Models like LLaVA and general computer vision models like Segment Anything are potentially able to close this gap. https://dontbuildsaas.com/
"""
,

"Indra [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceAerospaceMachine Learning
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Designed a satellite thruster based on an electrodynamic tether that operated by using the Earth's magnetic field.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Domain experience in the commercial space industry, or expertise in regulated industries with similar dynamics (biotech, energy, mining, automotive). Ideally, combined with a technical or engineering background (software/aerospace/mechanical, etc.).
Give a brief summary of your background
ML R&D @ Ooma & previously 2600Hz. Working on a copilot for software engineers in the space industry. Previously started a space hardware company building thrusters for nanosatellites.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I'm mostly interested in the intersection of machine learning and the commercial space industry, although I'm also open to ML applications in similar domains.
"""
,

"Aaron Joyce [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningSales & MarketingNon-AI Advanced SoftwareDeveloper and/or Dev Ops ToolsData Science & AnalyticsEnterprise SolutionsPaymentsHR & TalentCompliance/RegulatoryFinTechSAAS
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I'm proud of what we built at my previous startup, where I worked across engineering, product, and sales. 

Specifically:
- I worked on an internal search and knowledge creation platform designed for customer-facing teams in the Enterprise. I led the development of our data layer, syncing and harmonizing data from across many sources (e.g., Slack, Zendesk, Salesforce, Gmail, Google Drive, Jira, Confluent, and more). I also built an interactive Slack bot to capture tribal knowledge from Slack conversations and search across the org without leaving Slack. The product was used by large customer-facing teams, e.g., at Yotpo and ThousandEyes.
- I was involved in developing an early GPT-like solution (before the initial release of GPT-2), where we developed LSTMs to speed up the internal knowledge content creation process.
- More recently, I led the engineering effort for our Talent product to automate sourcing, outreach, and candidate lifecycle management workflows. Using our platform, Bigeye - a San Francisco-based data quality management startup, hired 14 people (representing > 50% of their headcount addition over the period) using our fully automated solution.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
- Open to technical or commercial co-founders, provided a strong skills complementarity exists, enabling us to move quickly in critical directions.
- Ambitious and resilient.
- Customer-first mindset.
- Excited to get on planes in marginal situations, e.g., for one of our early lighthouse customers at my previous startup, I flew back and forth between Europe and San Francisco every 2-3 weeks to spend time with users and iterate on feedback.
- Bias towards validating over building early on.
Give a brief summary of your background
- I started my first business in high school - an e-commerce company focused on the domestic Irish market. 
- I studied Computer Science at Trinity College, Dublin. My final-year dissertation was on price prediction on the Amazon Marketplace using machine learning techniques.
After I graduated, I started a venture-backed startup, where I was a co-founder and CEO. We pivoted a few times. The company was acquired in early ’23. 
- I have experience building for and selling products to Customer Support, Customer Success, and Talent functions, primarily focused on selling to companies with between 1 and 1000 employees.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Broadly, I am interested in enabling Enterprises to utilize AI-based solutions better. It could focus on GenAI tooling, e.g., streamlining custom LLM training, observability, and trust (given existing hallucination concerns). It could also be a point product (with room to solve adjacent problems later on) to eliminate large swathes of manual, repetitive work, e.g., fraud QA or a GenAI-powered Enterprise LMS platform for dynamic Enterprise learning environments (sales, support, success, finance). I’m seeking to build products that represent a step change.
"""
,

"Andreas [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
HealthcareAgriculture & FarmingBiotech-Hardware
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I have built a platform for lab integration and automation for my lab during my PhD.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Someone commercial with a good network, and perhaps strong developer/coding skills
Give a brief summary of your background
 Recently did a PhD working in synthetic biology, mainly biomaterials and 3D printing. I worked for a bit as a founding scientist in a biotech startup, and also worked with SOSV & Nucleate.
 What are you interested in working on at EF?
 Drug testing, improving drug discovery/production efficiency, biofabrication, agritech
"""
,

"Reuben Steenkamp [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Financial ServicesArtificial IntelligenceFinTechPaymentsData & AnalyticsClimateLife ScienceEnergyInsuranceSales & MarketingDesignWeb DevelopmentEducationGaming
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
- I founded an international charity which ships essential items from the UK to Zambia. In total, we have shipped over 1,600 essential items to date.
- I founded a tutoring company during covid-19 which raised £5,000 to provide free tuition to children from disadvantaged backgrounds. We hired and managed 6 tutors to deliver the project.
- I wrote a finance newsletter using web scraping and gen AI to automate content production. I grew the newsletter to 300 daily active readers.
- I am currently curating an ex-GS angel syndicate/founders club https://www.broadstreet.club
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking to work with a scrappy technical co-founder who loves to build fast and experiment.
Give a brief summary of your background
TL;DR: bio background with 4+ years experience in finance and countless hours spent on side projects. 'Non-technical' but loves building stuff with no-code tools.

- Oxford University: studied biology and graduated top of the year
- Goldman Sachs: worked in private wealth management, managed $7.5bn AUM and sold over £100m of autocallables making a record £1m fee revenue in one day
- Starling Bank: focused on detailed financial and market analysis to support strategic reviews and special projects across strategy, corp dev and finance, such as new ventures & growth, capital/debt raising and M&A
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I'm interested in Fintech, AI, ClimateTech and No Code, but I'm also open to exploring different areas.
"""
,

"eugene [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
FS DevelopmentApplication DevelopmentDeveloper and/or Dev Ops ToolsData & AnalyticsMachine Learning
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Most recently I was the Head of Engineering/CTO at a proprietary crypto trading firm (a portfolio company under the Winklevoss twins) where I doing a lot of everything to build the tech and company. I played the role of tech manager, backend dev, frontend dev, dev ops, data engineer, architect, operations manager, product manager, tech recruiter, team outing organizer, and snack master all in one. I lead, managed, and grew (and coded alongside) a team of 8 developers to scale our systems, building code and culture that would (and should) last long after I am gone.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
- ambitious, driven, passionate
- enjoys getting down and dirty
- gets shit done, with a no excuses attitude
- humble yet confident and resilient
- critical thinking and a knack for ideating
- understands what it means to pivot and iterate when building a startup
Give a brief summary of your background
My experience has built me a strong tech and catalyst edge. I’ve spent most of my life in NYC and the last 10 years working as a software engineer in finance, fintech and healthcare tech spaces at several small (startups) to medium sized companies. More specifically full stack, dev ops, and data engineering primarily building products on top of large data pipelines. I am a 'full stack' engineer in the fullest sense - with experience in backend, frontend, data pipelining, devops, and architecting - coupled with CTO experience in tech management, product roadmapping, and building teams. I've primarily built products that sit on top of large datasets, coupling data and ETL work with product development. I like to get down and dirty, solve interesting problems that matter, and push myself to always improve!

Why people will want to work with me:
- I don’t give up and there isn’t much that scares me anymore (especially tech wise)
- I’m trying to find product market fit, solve customer needs, and I’ll do whatever it takes to build success:
  - ⁠if that means cold calling 1000 customers I’m up for it
  - ⁠if that means building a killer product all day every day, I’ll happy to team up with another gritty dev
  - ⁠if that means building prototypes where CEO has a market edge, I’ll run as the CTO
- ⁠I’m looking to explore ideas and build something friken cool with someone
What are you interested in working on at EF?
- solving interesting problems that matter (vague, yes I know)
- open minded to the industries to solve problems in (although my professional experience is in tech, finance, and healthcare)
- combine my experience in software, data, and product development
"""
,

"Thom [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
ClimateDeep TechRoboticsBiotechnologyEnergy
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Halfway through my bachelor's, I put my studies on hold to dedicate two years to a competition organized by Boeing aimed at creating a personal flying device. We set up our company Silverwing and won the first and second phases. I led the structural team, focusing on creating the mechanical and carbon fibre components for the 200 kg electric VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft. I’m very proud that our team of nearly 40 members was able to be present in Palo Alto for the finals. We spent around six weeks there, doing flights at multiple airfields. This entire journey taught me how to bring together a team to work hard towards a common goal, especially in challenging times.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Curious, open and positive. I'm seeking a co-founder whose curiosity goes beyond just digging into the business problem, someone who's equally keen on understanding each other deeply. Next to that I value openness, so that we can create a safe environment for constructive conflict. We can have fierce debates about topics where we do not see eye to eye, but always with the goal of working towards the best solutions and bringing out the best in each other. Positivity is another trait I value highly - someone who views challenges as opportunities and approaches them with a high level of energy.
My goal is to create a venture that has a meaningful impact, ideally at the intersection of climate change and animal welfare. I'm on the lookout for a partner who shares this vision and determination!
Give a brief summary of your background
Hi everyone! I'm Thom from the Netherlands. To give a first impression: I teach Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to kids and adults, love to make furniture and I’m currently traveling through Kenya with a friend from Unicef. My technical background started at the TU Delft where, during my BSc in Mechanical Engineering, I founded a company to enter a competition aimed at designing a personal electric air taxi. Afterwards I continued my MSc in Offshore Engineering and got accepted for a double degree abroad, but dropped out to start a new company. This venture focused on improving the efficiency and safety of offshore wind farm inspections by building a hydrogen-powered drone for remote operations. Over the span of three years, we secured more than €600k in non-equity funding and developed our MVP. Eventually we realized that we were not solving our customers top headache and, after attempting to pivot, my co-founders and I found out we wanted to pursue different paths. I made many mistakes along the way, but this only gave me more energy to create a new impactful venture, with the lessons learned in mind.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I'm passionate about finding better alternatives to intensive animal farming. Currently, my focus is on researching the use of bioreactors to produce animal proteins even more cost-effective. However, my approach is problem driven, and I'm very open to discovering different solutions.
"""
,

"Cathy Chen [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
FemTechCommunity & LifestyleHealthcareDesignMobileMachine LearningMedia and EntertainmentProcurementMarketplaces
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
A 4,000 sqft pottery studio in a railway arch in Lambeth.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I'm a lethal 'enabler' will work best with a highly technical co-founder. I'm looking for someone who shares a 'puppy dog like' desire to sniff out solutions to problems. I have a dual degree in CS and Business and will ship code.
Give a brief summary of your background
I'm a Product person with a fascination for company building who has seen a lot of the world. I worked on Search at Google in SF and Tokyo, scaled mobile apps at Hopin (series D, 'fastest growing startup in europe ever'), and led 0>1 PMF at Gaia (series A, IVF insurance). I also own a pottery studio in London and sit on the Board for an international entrepreneurship non-profit.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I am super open to learning about hair-on-fire problems in all industries. I have a bias for consumer software, women's health, and micro-business solutions but I'm not limited to that. The only thing I am NOT interested in is AI agents/chatbots.
"""
,

"Ale Torresquintero [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceDeep TechNatural Language ProcessingMachine Learning
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
A new method of controlling pronunciation in AI voices (a key part of them sounding less robotic)
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Someone who is good at understanding market fit, and pitching to potential cients and investors. Also someone who is equally as excited as I am to create something new.
Give a brief summary of your background
Masters in Speech and Language Processing. Published some papers. Owned model training and deployment of AI voices in the product at an AI dubbing company.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I'm excited to work on something brand new. I don't want to find a solution to an existing problem; I want to create a new market with generative AI.
"""
,

"Jesse Adler [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Materials ScienceClimateChemicalsDesignNatural ResourcesFoodClothing & Apparel
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Jesse has grown Pitri Ltd. from a thesis idea to an incorporated business that is gaining traction and recognition. Jesse has supplemented her lack of consistent lab access with strategic collaborations and research opportunities taking her from London, to Oaxaca (Mexico), to Maastricht (Netherlands), and equipping her with a global network of experts and innovators.

Jesse's patent-pending proof-of-concept cosmetic collection (from her 'Alchemical Mycology' thesis) has been exhibited in London, Milan, Eindhoven, Cologne, Maastricht, Paris, and Arizona. Jesse was Central Saint Martins winner of UAL’s Future 50 Founders and Freelancers Award 2023, and she has been shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Futures Awards 2023 for Bio Design, D&AD Future Impact Award 2023, and the Global Design Graduate Show 2022, and nominated for the MullenLowe NOVA 2022 award and the Green Concept Award 2022.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Although Jesse is uniquely suited to lead Pitri (as a biomolecular scientist and interdisciplinary designer, with the ability to understand the technical biochemistry of colourants as well as the technical needs of commercial colourants), she lacks the knowledge and experience to be Pitri’s CTO. 

She aims to team up with someone experienced in precision fermentation and/or commercial ingredients production who can confidently design and lead Pitri's technical arm (upstream and downstream bioprocessing + scaling production).

Jesse is seeking someone who is curious about the natural world, empathetic, and practical; someone whose big dreams drive them to experiment and is grounded by the commercial viability of their hypotheses; someone who is organized, articulate, and clear about their vision while also being open, respectful, and receptive of other's viewpoints and ideas.
Give a brief summary of your background
Jesse (she/her) is a biomolecular scientist (BS Biomolecular Science, 2019, University of Michigan) and interdisciplinary designer (MA Material Futures, 2022, Central Saint Martins, UAL) working at the intersection of design, science, and sustainable innovation. Her research is led by her curiosity about the natural world and passion for planet-centered design. 

During her 3+ years in R&D at PANGAIA, Jesse leveraged her scientific background towards the assessment and development of sustainable materials while identifying under-innovated spaces, such as sources of renewable colourants. 

Jesse is the founder of Pitri Ltd, a startup spun out of her masters’ thesis research, exploring the pigments that fungi naturally produce and the suitability of these renewable, biofabricated colourants in consumer applications.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Pitri Ltd. is a deep-tech startup disrupting the global colourants market, focusing on the power of pigments extracted from fungi to reduce humans’ dependence on non-renewable resources (namely minerals and petrochemicals) for colour and address the growing global demand for nature-based colourant solutions. 

Widely untapped and underexplored, biofabricated fungal pigments are renewable, non-toxic, biodegradable, high performing, and available in a unique range of colours, making them a more commercially viable source of natural colour. At scale, Pitri’s product portfolio will offer a wide range of commercially significant colours that are presently difficult, or impossible, to obtain from other renewable resources (ie plants and animals).
"""
,

"Anoushka Menon  [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
FemTechLife ScienceHealthcareCommunity & LifestyleBiotech-HardwareGeneralistBiotechnology
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
- Brought the first at-home fertility test to market in the UK a few years ago.
- Most recently, launching the world’s first PCOS and endometriosis experience-share platform and telehealth service after speaking to hundreds of women to better understand the gaps in care. It was particularly important to me, as I have battled with PCOS since I was a teenager. The CEO was on maternity leave, so very much led the building and shipping of this as a proxy founder.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
- A technical CTO that is mission-driven, who will challenge me and that I can learn from. 
- Someone who loves to learn and iterate fast, but also equally customer-focused. 
- Someone with a background in bio & ML and/or bio hardware.
Give a brief summary of your background
My background is BioSciences and Genetics from UCL and Cambridge. I have spent the last 5 years scaling high-growth consumer start-ups in health tech and female health. 

I started my commercial career at Thriva Health (D2C and B2B2C preventative health and longevity platform), where I was fortunate to be part of an incredible seed stage to scale-up journey. I was their second Growth hire, and left when the company had >150 employees and an ARR of over £70 million. 

In my most recent role as Head of Growth at the Lowdown (one of the UK’s leading female health platforms), I joined to scale a D2C contraception business, but ended up leading the company through a pivot to a data-powered reproductive health research and telehealth platform.
Also led on building a viral community in a very short space of time with no marketing budget (2 million women visit the platform yearly), and an epic Instagram and TikTok presence.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I am deeply motivated by impact. I have personally struggled with my female hormones for the past decade, and feel a duty to build impact in the space of reproductive health. I have also spoken to hundreds of women in the past year in my role, and believe I have a clear steer of the female health landscape and where the gaps in care are. 

A customer-centric consumer health company at the intersection of women’s health, AI and /or hardware.
"""
,

"Euan [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Privacy & SecurityProcurementNavigation and MappingGovernment and Military
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
In 2022, I pivoted from UK Government to a startup, transforming a global community for Chiefs of Staff by commissioning the company’s educational platform, launching a new revenue stream, and increasing the sales capacity of the business. My approach reduced churn and doubled the number of members, evidencing my ability to rapidly adapt and deliver impactful results in a commercial setting.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I’m looking for a top-tier technical co-founder, with experience of creating production-ready, scalable code. I’m particularly keen to speak to any data engineers or software engineers with experience of working with LLMs.
Give a brief summary of your background
I began my career as a specialist within the UK National Security domain, working operationally for a number of years and then as part of a strategic leadership team. After leaving, I became experienced building and scaling businesses, working in a Director role at a startup and consulting early stage companies in the Defence and Security domain.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I’m looking to build a solution to some of the problems that need solving within the Defence and National Security arena. As geopolitical tensions and conflict continue to rise, there’s a need to rethink what security and intelligence looks like to both states and business. I want to build a solution to existing security problems that can serve both military or security agencies, as well as corporate users.
"""
,

"Jon Hudson [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
AR/VRApplication DevelopmentConsumer ElectronicsDesignUser Interface DesignEV
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
The Pub Golf App
🎨 Built as part of my dissertation exploring how drunk people and toddlers use mobile applications.
🔨 Built a component library and design system in Figma and React Native from scratch.
🗺️ Built a TSP routing algorithm that suggested 9 pubs on the way to your club of choice, with the distances between the pubs getting shorter the drunker you get.
🍻 Drinks were allocated to pubs that made sense (cocktails suggested in cocktail bars for example).
📣 Designed a distribution strategy that involved getting university sports captains all over the UK to play the game (in turn telling their friends) and also scattering custom beer mats all over London.
👬 1000 paying users in the first week, 5500 in the first month.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Depending on the idea:
1️⃣ A relentless CEO who can also code, with the ability to validate ideas quickly with the aim of creating something super viral.
2️⃣ A CTO with an idea of some cutting edge, magical technology and is looking to take it to consumers.
Give a brief summary of your background
📖 Computer Science @ St Andrews - specialising in Human Computer Interaction.
🔑 EF W23 Grad - worked on a consumer non-invasive neurotechnology headband for productivity who then went on to pass IC.
📱 Fullstack Web and Mobile developer.
🎨 Figma wizard.
🏎️ Founded the St Andrews Formula Student team and built an electric formula race car that came 17th/35 despite having no engineering department.
🚀 Loves a good GTM strategy and trying to understand why users use products
🎙️ Talk to me about motorsports (esp Formula 1), cooking and craft beers!
🌐 www.mrjonhudson.com
What are you interested in working on at EF?
1️⃣ Personal LLM hardware (think Tab, Rabbit, Brilliant Labs)
2️⃣ Something expanding component-driven design
3️⃣ A gamified user experience using generative AI or spatial computing
"""
,

"Jenny [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningComputer VisionHealthcareData & AnalyticsBiotech - SoftwareEngineeringData Analysis & Data MiningData Science & Analytics
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
COVID-19 AI-driven screening algorithm, implemented during pandemic within Oxford's JR hospital, and currently extending to Vietnam and Thailand hospitals.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Passion, commitment, resilience/grit, business development or marketing expertise, technical skills (understanding of engineering/software tools, AI), interest in healthcare sector.
Give a brief summary of your background
PhD in Clinical AI at Oxford, focusing on fairness-aware/ethical AI (prev Engineering Physics bachelors and Bioinformatics masters at UBC). 10 first-author publications either published or under peer review in the last 3 years. Completed AI placements within drug discovery, genetic engineering, cancer research, neurostimulation therapies, etc.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Greatly interested in health tech, AI, ethical/fair AI, regulatory/compliance for AI...
"""
,

"Michael Hirn [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceEnterprise SolutionsNon-AI Advanced SoftwareDevToolsProcurementSales & MarketingDeveloper and/or Dev Ops ToolsSemiconductor/Chip designOther
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
In addition to the above, I build a SaaS business when I was 16 where we ended up repricing the inventories of 200 eEcommerce SMBs ($1-50M annual turnover).
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
1. Understands Rise to Serve (not serve to rise)
2. Technical, strong problem taste
Give a brief summary of your background
Back in 2014 I wrote a high-performance ML framework in Rust when Caffe, theano, torch were state-of-the-art. Then earned half an MBA by working in VC and starting a $100m fund with two partners.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Building a capital-efficient business in an under-appreciated, under-explored niche. E.g. compilers theory, OSS PLG motions.
"""
,

"David [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceData Science & AnalyticsMachine LearningHealthcareBiotechnologyPharmaceuticalsEnergyMaterials ScienceGeneralistInsuranceClimateChemicalsNatural Language Processing
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
As acting CEO of a Climate Tech startup I raised seed funding which I used to grow (double) the team, build out our MVP and secure our first contract while simultaneously completing a part time Masters focused on AI at UCL
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Am looking for a technical cofounder who is experienced in building production level ML models across the full lifecycle from conception to deployment and/or has experience in the research domain. Functionally, am looking for someone who is methodical and metrics oriented
Give a brief summary of your background
Academically: First degree and Masters in Chemistry, second focused on AI
Professionally: Initially a strategy consultant at BCG, before moving into central government as an advisor to the British Prime Minister on National Security and Technology. Following that I was acting CEO for a Climate Tech startup while the founder (a successful serial entrepreneur) stood back for personal reasons before moving to DeepMind for a role focused on identifying and incubating new products and ventures from the organisation's research
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I have a strong conviction in the potential of AI to transform the world we live in (including, but not solely limited to, the application of LLMs). More specifically I am interested in where it can be applied to real world problems through a B2B channel. The domains that I have a general interest in are energy, insurance and climate, sustainability & biodiversity
"""
,

"David de Gruijl [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceMachine LearningHealthcareBiotechnologyEngineeringIOTRoboticsNon-AI Advanced Software
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I built an electronic pill that unfolds inside your stomach. It has a gas sensor network (e-nose) that continuously monitors the presence of organic compounds and compresses the data using edge AI.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
To quote Reid Hoffman: starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down. 

I am looking for a mission-driven co-founder who is ready and excited to jump off that cliff: without any backup plans, figuring out a way to make things work.

Ideally:
- relatively high energy and decisive. 
- transparent and doesn't let issues fester.
Give a brief summary of your background
- Graduated high school at the age of 16, and have since then lived in Beijing, Hong Kong, Graz, Zurich, London, Seattle, Boston, and Delft.
- MSc. EECS at the TU Delft with a focus on data science and optimization algorithms (evolutionary algorithms, constraint programming, etc.).
- In the past 2.5 years, I have worked at labs in ETH Zurich, MIT, and Harvard Medical School on the development of medical devices and integrating AI into them.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I would love to improve people's health with technology. Working at Bob Langer's lab has given me a lot of insight on how science is translated into clinical applications from the earliest stages of development. I also built a significant network in the health tech space, which I want to leverage.

I have broad exposure to technologies, from sensor development, materials science, control systems and electronics design to machine learning and computational science - so I am pretty much tech-agnostic.
"""
,

"Massimo [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
BlockchainWeb3DAOsIOT
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Designed the first (afaik) consensus algorithm reaching deterministic finalization in 1 round-trip time. Implemented it in Rust for the Internet Computer blockchain.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Unstoppable person that always finds a way to get what they want
Give a brief summary of your background
Studied analog electronics at Politecnico di Milano during the bachelor and then moved to ETH Zurich to study neuromorphic computing for my master. Ended up taking an unexpected path and focused on distributed systems.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
- computers that can make strong commitments
- networks and applications governed by communities instead of companies
- network of devices acting as peripherals of one ubiquitous computer
"""
,

"Yash Khandelwal [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
BiotechnologyMaterials ScienceBiotech - SoftwareBiotech-HardwareClimateIndustrial TechLife Science
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I've helped build 2 venture backed start-ups in parallel. 
At Funny Nani, I developed a patent-pending process technology that helped us commercialise the world's first soft-cheese made from watermelon seeds. At Better Dairy, I developed and scaled its bioprocess capabilities, helping the company create its proof of concept and unlock Series-A funding.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I'm looking for a CTO with experience & interest in synthetic biology/ chemistry/ general life science/ AI for biology.
Give a brief summary of your background
Hey everyone, I’m Yash - over the past 4 years I've helped build 2 start-ups in the alternative protein sector. I’ve co-founded a foodtech start-up called Funny Nani and was part of the founding team at Better Dairy, an EF-backed synthetic biology start-up. 😄
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Products built by engineering biology hold immense potential in solving the climate issues we face today. But the costs and complexity associated with biotech impede our ability to deploy these solutions at scale. At EF, I'd like to work on developing solutions that accelerate the advent of synthetic biology-enabled products 🧬
"""
,

"Roberto [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
BiotechnologyArtificial IntelligenceBiotech - SoftwareGeneralist
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
During my PhD, I built a biosensing platform to optimise the performance of engineered mammalian cells and developed RNA-based thermosensitive structures to control their behaviour in response to temperature. Outside the lab, I set up a wellness business in London from the bottom up.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Highly technical in the AI domain with a drive to disrupt the bio-industry.
Give a brief summary of your background
BSc and MSc in Industrial Biotechnology, PhD in Bioengineering from Imperial College. Spent the last six years engineering complex cellular behaviour for applications in the bioindustry. Worked with DNA, RNA, and protein technologies across various living organisms (bacteria, yeast, and mammalian cells) and non-living entities (artificial cells).
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I am looking broadly at the intersection of biology and AI. Can we use AI to wipe out the unpredictability and unreliability of biological systems? Even partial answers to this question have the potential to accelerate biological innovation at a rate we've never seen.
"""
,

"Szymon [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceCommerce & ShoppingE-Commerce & RetailAgriculture & Farming
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Built AI agriculture project from nothing to creating state-of-the-art ML predictive models for farming and deploying it to largest growers in California, academia, and other industry partners.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
coding, engineering
Give a brief summary of your background
- polish
- graduated from Imperial Computing degree with GNN thesis in 2019
- founded and led AI agriculture project at Google X for 4 years after leaving uni
- quited last year and work on a number of side project including LLMS/e-commerce,
What are you interested in working on at EF?
education
agriculture
knowledge discovery
e-commerce
"""
,

"Avery Koh [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Legal/LawCompliance/RegulatoryMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceSAASUser Interface Design
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
1) Developed a virtual conversational lawyer for CS thesis at Imperial College London, offering tailored divorce law advice based on sentiment analysis metrics (received distinction).
2) Created a Share Purchase Agreement bank clause software at a top international law firm in London (my own initiative), allowing partners and associates within the private equity and M&A team to easily find precedent clauses to aid them in the drafting process, and saving over £50,000 in billable time monthly.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
1) Character: Someone with grit and growth mindset 
2) Our relationship: Great work chemistry, mutual respect, shared values
3) Technical: Experience and/or interest in LLM, Machine Learning, Full Stack Developer, focus on Back-End, ability to build and lead an engineering team. 
- My strengths lie in deep client and industry understanding within the legal space, design and focus on UI/ UX, and strategic networking to build towards leads and sales.
Give a brief summary of your background
- 5 years at Baker McKenzie as a private equity and M&A lawyer in London
- Led M&A deals, restructuring, joint ventures (value over £50bn)
- Lead advisor on private equity fund investment matters for institutional and sovereign wealth funds, recently won a client mandate on private equity fund with AUM USD25 billion
- In-house experience at NTT (global data center conglomerate) and S&P Global
- Legal tech champion for the wider Corporate Group at my firm, with MSc in Computer Science background, overseeing legal tech procurement initiatives.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
With the advancements of GenAI, we are entering an exciting new era to build something that could really disrupt the legal industry. I am also passionate about leveraging technology to improve the quality of life and work of people in general. If you’re interested to learn more about the space, please do send me a text or set up some time for a call :)
"""
,

"Emmanuel [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceManagement ConsultingData & AnalyticsSAASData Analysis & Data Mining
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
In my UN role, I founded and led the Dalili Application in Lebanon, aiding refugees in comparing food prices. This smartphone app, downloaded by over 50,000 users, reduced essential item prices by 12% in Lebanon and garnered expansion interest from Palestine, Jordan, and Kenya. During COVID-19, it became a lifeline for online food ordering in remote refugee camps like Dadaab and Kakuma in Kenya.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
First and foremost - a great person: Hard-working, resilient, kind. Nice to be around and comfortable with ambiguity. 

Ideally, also a strong technical person, with experience building and scaling technical solutions in a start-up context. Can build something themselves, and can also build a strong team.
Give a brief summary of your background
Hi! I studied applied mathematics at Polytechnique in France (ranked 3rd in nationwide exam) before studying management and economic development at Harvard. I then worked in strategic consulting at BCG in Boston. Then I joined the United Nations (mostly in Beirut), where I built a smartphone app to help refugees compare food prices (50,000 users). I then worked for PolyAI as Director of Product for 4 years, managing two product lines and building conversational AI assistants for the Marriott and Hilton hotels lines
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I'm open to any ideas; I'm especially interested in deep tech and/or conversationalAI. 

I'm currently exploring ideas linked to my experience at PolyAI: 1) Building voice conv AI products for small companies (e.g., hair salons, healthcare practices, restaurants, taxis, etc) 2) Building monitoring and analytics tools for conversational AI services (ensuring that the AI agents does a good job, and flagging where it has issues)
"""
,

"Christian [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceCommerce & ShoppingMachine LearningE-Commerce & RetailPrivacy & SecuritySAASMarketplacesData Science & AnalyticsMarketing SolutionsDigital MediaAdvertisingData & AnalyticsPayments
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
During the past year I have been a lead developer in a greenfield analytics product for an AdTech company supporting trillions of datapoints. Worked across the whole process, from customer research and product development to implementation and delivery. Due to the vast scale and low-latency query requirements, we utilised cutting edge real-time analytics databases and probabilistic data structure and I was responsible for writing a large amount of the code and managing all of the cloud infrastructure. The product was rolled out across 100 customers including major global news publishers, allowing them to answer analytics queries across their data in milliseconds.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for a co-founder with commercial experience to take the CEO role in the business. Ideally someone who has experience and/or interests in what I am looking to build but also interested in those with experience in other 'internet-native' style industries such as fintech, cyber security, crypto, AI etc. Don't need to know how to code but technical acumen and understanding of modern technology is a must. Looking for someone with experience in sales/BD as I would be looking for them to own that side of the business. They should be a strong communicator, have good networking skills and must be interested in growing a fast-growing B2B SaaS company.
Give a brief summary of your background
1st Class Masters degree in CS and Maths. I have experience at a number of startups as an engineer with a focus on building petabyte-scale real-time data management and analytics products supporting 100s of customers. Cloud expert. Domain edge in the AdTech and MarTech industries, particularly in the areas of commerce media and privacy enhancing technologies.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Generally looking to build a B2B SaaS, data-focused company (i.e. one in which data is at the core of the offering). Generally industry agnostic but particularly interested in marketing tech/advertising tech, fintech, AI/LLMs, cyber security. 
Things I am particularly interested in:
- future of consumer privacy and privacy-preserving data collaboration
- retail/commerce media 
- embedded finance
Generally excited about utilising generative and applied AI to solve real world business problems.
"""
,

"Jack Skerman [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Financial ServicesAdvanced MathematicsArtificial IntelligenceNon-AI Advanced SoftwareWeb DevelopmentMachine LearningData & AnalyticsPhysicsEngineeringEducationAgriculture & FarmingQuantum ComputingData Analysis & Data MiningDevTools
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I singularly built FundInsight, a product that monetised my companies massive data resources with respect to large UK Asset Managers and Discretionary Fund Managers. I wore all the hats as the Frontend Engineer, Backend Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Data Scientist, Data Engineer and Product Owner.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Fast learner
Takes initiative
Efficient with their time
Excellent communication skills
Technical in some field (not necessarily software)
Give a brief summary of your background
I completed undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Mathematics followed by four years working in FinTech as a Software Engineer, Data Scientist, and Product Owner.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I’m particularly interested in FinTech, EdTech and Physics start-ups. My experience pulls me toward Financial Analytics and Data Science. I’m really interested in problems surrounding self-directed investment portfolio risk (education, mitigation, etc.).
"""
,

"Ryan [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Financial ServicesHealthcarePharmaceuticalsData Science & AnalyticsEngineeringGeneralist
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
During my PhD, I spearheaded the first-ever collaboration between the Department of Chemistry and Cambridge Public Health, bridging the gap between epidemiologists and chemists.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for a highly technical co-founder with an Edge that complements mine, who is excited to grow together and have fun along the way :)
Give a brief summary of your background
I spent the last year working in healthcare M&A at Lazard, focusing on biotech/biopharma. Prior to that, I was a Gates Scholar at Cambridge where I completed my PhD in biophysical chemistry looking at drug repurposing for Alzheimer's disease. I have been an adjunct professor in Nigeria, a public health researcher at the CDC, and a life science VC investor at Start Codon.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Open to anything in the healthcare space (and beyond), ideally with an AI/ML component!
"""
,

"Harsh [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Management ConsultingProcurementEngineeringEnergyAgriculture & FarmingNatural ResourcesConstructionDeep TechGeneralistCommunity & LifestyleSales & Marketing
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
A cold storage startup. I went from mapping out the problem to distal the particular type of system that would solve it, modeled it, built prototypes to prove the tech, raised grant funding for a pilot, signed on farmers and customers of the pilot, ran the pilot to prove the unit economics.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am looking for a technical cofounder who either brings mechanical engineering/thermal engineering/agriculture science experience. 
I am also exploring ideas at the intersection of climate x AI. If the idea goes down that route, I would want a very technically smart AI person, who can build own building the tech end to end (scoping the problem, gathering data, building the model, and ideally some sort of API/app/output that customers can use.

Outside technical skills, I believe in transparency and collaboration. I am looking for someone who is focussed on optimizing tasks for the final company and is open to providing/receiving feedback so we can grow together.
Give a brief summary of your background
I studied mechanical engineering at Duke University, where I research energy and food systems and built my first startup (a sustainable cooling company - taking the tech from idea to pilot and raising 20k USD along the way). I then worked with climate tech startups (series B-D) and investors at McKinsey NY. I am excited to join EF with the hopes of building on my insights in climate over the last 8 years to launch a company that further accelerates important climate solutions.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
I am interested in working on climate tech/sustainability. I am sector agnostic within climate but have strong insights in energy, cooling, agriculture, sustainable materials. Some insights/tangents I am thinking on include - 
A. Data/process optimization to boost the deployment of renewable technology (managing permit application, project planning, etc). B. anything to do with availing IRA and other government benefits. C. Sustainable cooling/ACs (huge issue with few solutions - software optimization, hardware retrofits, commercializing new tech are all options). D. financing sustainable projects - lots of fintech, upfront financing plays. E. Future of food and housing are very interesting and I have strong thesis on them but initial thoughts are that they are too hard to build right now - either need to be broken down or become a second startup. F. improving aerodynamics of trucks (specially in markets where these solutions don't really exist).
"""
,

"Sam [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial Intelligence
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I'll be so bold as to share a few: 
* I built possibly the first real-time video Neural Style Transfer to work on mobile chips.
* I created a system to bet on darts games by intercepting packets from electronic darts boards that were used when the sport 'moved home' during COVID.
* I created a system to track horses running around a race track from a live video feed of the race.
* I created the most accurate method of deriving cell lineage from genetic data by using Graph Neural Networks. 
* Many-to-many neural retrieval algorithm - similar to Weaviate but making n searches with the same speed as a single search
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Somebody I communicate with well. Technically gifted and good at prioritising business requirements. Good 'marginal thinker'.
Give a brief summary of your background
AI/ML engineer. Mathematics grad; CS Master's. Experience in AI for Sports Modelling, Graph Nets for Computational Biology, and Gen AI for 3D and Computer Graphics.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
General purpose AI algorithms for sports modelling
"""
,

"Heather Litwiller [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
ClimateRoboticsEnergyEVAgriculture & FarmingBiotech-HardwareBiotechnologyFemTech
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
I designed the product for my current enterprise SaaS start-up from the ground up, including outlining the data-science and all technical requirements of our back and front-end. We use a video-based survey platform, web-based dashboards and client platform to understand and change behaviours within organisations. 
I have since also taught myself foundational UX/UI design to bring design in-house and python to validate and do early versions of our data science. I helped rebrand and rebuild our sales and marketing strategy, increasing revenues 3x in a period of 9 months.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I'm looking for someone that is equally passionate about solving a big problem. If you are highly technical and looking for someone that can make your technology a commercial reality we could be a great fit. 
	•	Strong resiliency and commitment to go the distance 
	•	Interest in applying technology to solve social problems
	•	Optimistic but equally realistic 
	•	Technical skills in hardware, bio-tech or computing
	•	Excitement for all things start-up :)
    Give a brief summary of your background
    Hi I’m Heather, so excited to get to know you all! A little bit about me: 
	•	Background in Electrical Engineering & Robotics and MSc. in International Business.
	•	Spent the last 4 years designing the product and leading the engineering, design & data science teams for a B2B HR SaaS start-up here in London.
	•	Early experience across bio-tech, robotics and retail start-ups.
	•	My passion area/edge: start-up jack of all trades, I'm a strong executor across sales, marketing, branding, product and engineering. Strong belief that success requires equal passion for technology and commercial execution.
    What are you interested in working on at EF?
    I have a deep passion for solving social problems - I can't wait to make an impact in one of: climate, energy, agri-tech, bio-tech or fem-tech sectors. Open to exploring other areas where climate or health & wellbeing outcomes can be improved as a result.
"""
,

"Nickel [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
PhysicsEngineeringEnergyMaterials ScienceNanotechnologyDeep TechClimate
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
Development of codes to accurately and efficiently pre-process and post-process all HPC files required for quantum transport calculations. This development enabled the creation of molecules and the calculation of their physical and electronic properties for characterization and performance enhancement purposes.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
I am seeking an AI/ML expert with the capability to build products from the ground up. A keen interest in materials science will be considered a significant advantage, as I envisage a company that melds the cutting-edge fields of materials science and machine learning. This unique combination aims to innovate and lead in the development of advanced materials and technologies.
Give a brief summary of your background
Mechanical engineering background. PhD in quantum engineering, specialized in theoretical investigation of quantum transport through new molecular structures for nanoelectronic applications. In particular I have focussed on thermoelectric materials, materials that can generate electricity from waste heat.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
My interests include leveraging machine learning for the discovery of new materials, given the critical role current materials play in contributing to up to 50% of global CO2 emissions. I believe that exploring the vast, uncharted universe of potential materials through advanced ML techniques holds significant promise for addressing this pressing environmental challenge.
"""
,

"Pietro Bonazzi [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Machine LearningArtificial IntelligenceManagement ConsultingComputer VisionWeb DevelopmentHardwareAR/VRData Science & Analytics
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
A differentiable point cloud reconstruction and de-noising tool from diffusion adjusted images.
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
Seeking a co-founder with expertise in complementary areas such as business development, strategy, and project management, with a shared passion for AI and innovation.
Give a brief summary of your background
👋🏻 I am a Machine Learning Research Scientist, Engineer at ETH Zurich. With a strong background on Statistics and half a decade of experience in training models.

🔥 Currently, I'm working on Efficient Machine Learning (Quantization, Spiking Neuron Networks, Hardware-Aware Design, etc.). To this end, I interface daily with hardware especially with Neuromorphic Chips, GPUs, ASICs and FPGAs.

⏳ Previously, I worked on diffusion models, differentiable rendering, contrastive vision-language learning to reconstruct and de-noise 3D point clouds from images. I also worked on conditional 3D scene generation architectures from scene graphs and designed my own graph transformer from scratch (back in 2021).

❤️ Passions : AI, walking.
What are you interested in working on at EF?
Interested in working on Efficient and Explainable Machine Learning and its applications
"""
,

"Tom Hollands [S24 LD Core] Founder": 
"""Skills and Hobbies
Artificial IntelligenceSales & MarketingGovernment and MilitaryData & AnalyticsEducationClimateMarketplaces
What's the most impressive thing you've built?
joining wren.co as first hire with 0 marketing/growth experience... (profitably) growing company 12x to >$6m ARR in 2 years

wrote about it here:
https://betweenthecracks.substack.com/p/25-leaving-wren
What skills are you looking for in a co-founder?
- gives kind, scathing feedback

- ambitious+humble. Learns extremely fast

- insane build speed. Ship every day baby

- extremely good at evaluating engineering talent

- understands the product x tech x business as a big system of feedback loops
Give a brief summary of your background
- ran growth at consumer climate startup, grew them 12x to >$6m ARR

- built ML/computer vision tools for KYC startup, deployed to 19m+ users

-  ran special projects at b2b media network, sold >$1m in partnerships in 5 months

- did all this while writing online. My writing has been read by >1m people

- physics + applied math background (narrowly avoided PhD)

- gonna play touch rugby for Canada in the world cup this year :)
What are you interested in working on at EF?
- using AI to automate boring extractive bureaucratic crap (paperwork in govt services, legacy businesses like healthcare, professional services)

- serving customers I care about: immigrants, founders/small biz owners, knowledge workers wasting time with boring processes... maybe new customers you can tell me about

- I love product-led growth + super-linear word of mouth + compounding growth loops... defensibly getting big is cool :)
""",





    
}