Manish Arora, BDS, MPH, PhD
Manish Arora is the founder and CEO of Linus Biotechnology — a precision
medicine clinical stage company. His co-founders are Drs. Christine Austin PhD and Paul Curtin PhD. Dr. Arora, an environmental epidemiologist and exposure biologist, is also the Edith J.Baerwald Professor and Vice Chairman of the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Dr. Arora’s research focuses on the effects of prenatal and early life chemical exposures on life- long health trajectories. In 2020, he and colleagues proposed the “Biodynamic Interface Theory,” a novel theoretical framework that explains how the environment interacts with physiology in a dynamic way over time. This theory has the potential to shift the paradigm of environmental health research from a static to a more nuanced dynamic view of health throughout the life course. In Dr. Arora’s own research, environmental dynamic principles paved the way for his groundbreaking work on the tooth and hair biomarkers. Drs. Arora, Curtin and Austin led this technology to an FDA Breakthrough Designation for an autism biomarker that can be applied at birth.
Dr. Arora is currently the Principal Investigator or Co Investigator of eight research projects funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), including the Human Health Exposure Analysis Resource (HHEAR) Untargeted Center grant, and the R35/RIVER grant. He has received multiple honors throughout his career, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) awarded by President Barack Obama in 2015 and the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award in 2014.
Dr. Arora is the author of the book Environmental Biodynamics: A New Science of How the Environment Interacts with Human Health, published by Oxford University Press in December 2021.
Ashok Krishnamurthi
Ashok is a Managing Partner at GreatPoint Ventures. He is a serial entrepreneur and investor focused on enterprise IT, and the intersection of computer science and life sciences. He also holds more than 20 patents in his name.
Most recently he founded two medical related companies: CAPP Medical, a liquid biopsy company for cancer diagnosis that he sold to Roche Diagnostics, and CiberMed, which focuses on biomarker discovery. Previously he founded Xsigo, a provider of advanced data center connectivity, which he sold to Oracle.
Prior to Xsigo, Ashok was one of the early leaders of Juniper Networks where he helped develop many of the products that power today’s internet, and which was one of the largest venture investment returns of all time. Ashok has also been an investor in a number of innovative companies like GoEuro, Reflektion, OttoQ, Veradocs, Falcon Systems, Robin Systems, and ScoreData, amongst others. He is on the board of ScoreData and various GPV portfolio companies.
Rafi Syed
Rafi Syed, General Partner at Bow Capital, has been a venture capital investor and startup technology executive for the last 10 years. After leading product and growth at Foursquare, a consumer social network funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Rafi joined Bessemer Venture Partners on the consumer investing team in 2012 and was responsible for executing and/or managing investments in companies such as Rev, Wikia, Mindbody, Homebase, Shopify, and Pinterest, among others. On the consumer investing team at Khosla Ventures, Rafi led the development of theses around insurance, real estate technology, and B2B payments. Rafi’s technology operating experience also includes building and executing the initial business and launch plan for Maven Clinic, a telemedicine marketplace funded by Sequoia Capital, as COO and Head of Growth. Rafi started his career as a management consultant at The Boston Consulting Group, and studied Economics and Computer Science at UC Berkeley.
Amol Deshpande
Amol is the CEO and co-founder of FBN. He’s spent much of his career around agriculture at startups, large companies like Cargill, and as a partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers. Amol is also on the board of Axia Seeds, a leading breeder of vegetable seeds for indoor and outdoor environments. Amol funds and invests through Divergent Investments, a personal investment vehicle focused on impact in healthtech, edtech and neurodiversity. He has an engineering degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MBA from Cornell.
