The MIT Startup Exchange Lightning Talks and Startup Exhibit listed below are part of the full agenda for 2023 MIT Innovations in Management Conference - Leading your Company in Challenging Times.
On top of “business-as-usual”, company leaders must face very complex and uncertain geopolitical and macroeconomic challenges, particularly for global companies. Some of the macroeconomic uncertainties these leaders have to overcome are inflation, rising interest rates, and fear of recession. Businesses also have to deal with the diversification of its supply chains and potential relocation of manufacturing plants, energy supply restrictions and cybersecurity risks, while reaching its business, equity and sustainability goals. Join us to hear from MIT faculty and MIT Startup Exchange entrepreneurs to learn about their views on how to deal with some of these pressing issues, lead creatively and innovate in times of uncertainty.
Program Director, MIT Startup Exchange
Catarina Madeira joined Corporate Relations in May 2021 as Program Director, Startup Exchange.
Madeira has been working with the Cambridge/Boston startup ecosystem for the past 10 years and joins Corporate Relations with a solid network in the innovation and entrepreneurial community. In 2010, she joined the startup accelerator IUL MIT Portugal working in Lisbon and working with the Cambridge team on all aspects related to the accelerator’s launch. She held positions including Operations Coordinator, Program Manager, and Business Developer. The accelerator soon achieved steady growth in large part due to the partnerships that Catarina led with regional and global startup ecosystems. Most recently she worked at NECEC, leading a program that connects cleantech startups and industry. In this role, she developed and built a pipeline of startups and forged strong relationships with both domestic and European companies. She has also held positions in Portugal and France including at L’Oréal and Saboaria e Perfumaria Confiança as Pharmacist and Technical Director.
Madeira earned her Bachelor in Chemistry at the University of Porto and her Bachelor in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. She went on to earn her Master of Engineering for Health and Medicines at University Lyon 1 and EM Lyon in France.
Co-Founder, Akkio
Craig Wisneski is a Co-founder of Akkio, the no-code AI company, that makes artificialintelligence easy enough for any company to become an AI-powered business. He previously led Productat digital manufacturer Markforged and helped speaker maker Sonos grow from a startup to over $1B inrevenue in various product leadership roles. He has a SM from the MIT Media Lab and SB from MIT.
Founder & CEO, Covariance
Dr. Michael Fleder’s MIT research forms the basis for Covariance.ai: a machine learning startup thatenables near-real-time competitive and market insight with previously-impossible accuracy and depth.Michael’s work has been featured inMIT News (2021, 2019) and leading modeling conferences. Michaelhas extensive background in robotics (MIT, NASA/JPL), quantitative trading, and technology advising forthe C-Suite at retail banks. Michael earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from MIT.
Co-Founder, Hopara
Dr. Stonebraker is a Hopara Co-founder. Hopara is a data visualization solution that allows users to navigate around and dive into their data for more detail with more context. He has been a pioneer of data base research and technology for more than forty years. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, and the object- relational DBMS, POSTGRES. These prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science for twenty-five years. More recently at M.I.T. he was a co-architect of the Aurora/Borealis stream processing engine, the C-Store column-oriented DBMS, the H-Store transaction processing engine, the SciDB array DBMS, and the Data Tamer data curation system. He also serves as Chief Technology Officer of Paradigm4 and Tamr, Inc. Professor Stonebraker was awarded the ACM System Software Award in 1992 for his work on INGRES. Additionally, he was awarded the first annual SIGMOD Innovation award in 1994, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997. He was awarded the IEEE John Von Neumann award in 2005 and the 2014 Turing Award, and is presently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at M.I.T, where he is co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center focused on big data.
CEO, Kinnami
Sujeesh Krishnan is the Chief Executive Officer of Kinnami, and has over 20 years-experience leading strategy, sales, market development, and product management in the high-technology industry. His career spans private sector, where he has brought new technologies to optimize supply chains and solve critical data management issues to market in the aerospace, defense, oil & gas, and chemicals industries, as well as public sector organizations, including the Carbon Trust and the United Nations. Sujeesh serves on the Board of Directors for CLASP, a leading non-profit focused on improving energy efficiency globally. Sujeesh holds a M.S. in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Co-Founder & Head of Go-to-Market, Modzy
Kirsten Lloyd is one of Modzy’s co-founders and leads all aspects of go-to-market. She has authored and contributed to numerous reports on the intersection of ethics and AI, including Assessing the Ethical Risks of Artificial Intelligence, A National Machine Intelligence Strategy for the United States, and Bias Amplification in AI Systems. She has spoken at conferences such as NVIDIA GTC DC 2019, AAAI 2018 Fall Symposium series, ISACA’s 2018 Governance, Risk, and Controls conference, and Stanford’s inaugural Digital Cities Summit in 2016. Previously, Kirsten worked in corporate strategy, identifying new business opportunities aligned to emerging technologies. Kirsten earned her B.A. in global studies, with a concentration in Latin American studies, and history from the College of William & Mary.
Co-Founder & CEO, Sync Computing
Jeff received his PhD his EECS from UC Berkeley as an NDSEQ fellow, was a Batelle Post-Doctoral Scholar at MIT, and is an Entrepreneurial Research Fellow at Active. Prior to Sync, he was a technical staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Co-Founder & CEO, Paragon One
Matt is the co-founder & CEO of Paragon One, a tech platform helping Fortune 500 teams launch remote student education programs around real work experiences. These programs, called Remote Externships, allow employees to engage with cohorts of students in an efficient and scalable manner. Paragon One helps companies like PwC, Meta, and National Geographic engage with underserved and underrepresented students, who often lack access to traditional internships, to provide hands-on student work experiences which elevate their employability. By allowing Paragon One to streamline and automate the application process, onboarding, project work experience and final evaluations, host companies only need one hour per week during a 7-week externship program to connect and network with up to 50 students. Matt holds both a B.S. degree in Computer Science & Engineering and a B.S. in Management Science from the MIT. Matt previously co-founded AHAlife.com, a curated luxury marketplace for discovering 1,000+ designers and artisans from 45+ countries, which successfully merged with ASX-listed Design Milk. Matt oversaw a number of operating and business development roles as Chief Financial Officer, in addition to the fundraising of over $20M in venture capital. Before launching AHAlife, Matt sourced, executed, and oversaw consumer internet investments with Technology Crossover Ventures, a $10Bn venture capital fund. Prior to TCV, Matt began his career in the Media & Telecom Investment Banking Group at Morgan Stanley, focusing on M&A, IPO, and debt issuances for new media and telecom companies.
CEO and Co-Founder, Vividly
Alexander Whatley is the co-founder and CEO of Vividly, which builds next-generation AI-powered workflow technology for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. He has extensive background in software engineering and data science. He holds a bachelor's and master's degree from Harvard in Applied Mathematics.
Founder and CTO, Zing Data
Sabin Thomas is the founder and CTO of Zing Data and is focused on making data engagement simple and collaborative. Sabin built and managed the teams behind the data pipeline and business intelligence platform for payment transactions at Rakuten. A serial entrepreneur, Sabin has co-founded and sold two startups making intuitive and secure products for developers, devOps teams, and for security teams.
Disclaimer: MIT Startup Exchange can make introductions that ideally provide open ended discussions in order to share mutual interests and potentially create common ground that incite the parties to collaborate. MIT Startup Exchange introductions may eventually lead to mutual partnerships, but that is not in any way guaranteed by MIT, MIT Corporate Relations, MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) or MIT Startup Exchange, which takes no responsibility for these outcomes and no formal part in such discussions following our introduction. MIT Startup Exchange and its activities and events are not for purposes of soliciting investment or offering securities.