Meet the group of accomplished professionals who make up our second scout cohort! From groundbreaking startups to innovative healthcare solutions, these experts have made significant contributions to their fields and are paving the way for the future. Discover their stories below.
If you're interested in learning more about our scout community, check it out here!
Yetunde Duro-Emanuel
Yetunde is a product leader focused on consumer-centric and purpose-driven offerings that empower users to live their healthiest, most well lives. With a career that has spanned a variety of healthcare, consumer goods, and tech-centric settings at companies like Spora Health and Republic, she specializes in driving creative end-to-end solutions to business challenges, and she's passionate about the intersection of diverse industries to drive innovations that enhance quality of life. Her work with her consulting practice, Ologie x Design, drives organizational design initiatives that result in profitable products, rich brand experiences, and services that create the utmost value to consumers. She's most passionate about engagement focused on increasing resources for diverse and/or underserved populations, with a focus on access and education initiatives.
Alex Kim
Alex is the co-founder and COO at Homebase (Techstars Boulder '23), a platform democratizing access to real estate through tokenized home investments. His background is in robotics as well as real estate investing and he previously led global operations at a digital health startup, Alveo Technologies. He's a proud Tufts alumni and NCAA athlete. In his spare time (of which there is very little), he spends his time trying new restaurants and running with the NYC tech running group, Pitch and Run.
Shola Farber
Shola co-founded a venture backed The Tuesday Company, a tech company that transformed civic engagement in America, and led it to a successful exit. She previously worked on climate policy at the White House National Economic Council, and on business strategy at POLITICO. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Shola serves on the SXSW Advisory Boards for Startups and Climate Change. She is an On Deck Climate Tech fellow and a mentor to early-stage founders through Austin's Capital Factory and First Round Capital.
Christopher McDowell
Christopher is currently building quilt, a digital platform for families to request, share and organize memories across generations. He has 12+ years leading and developing finance and strategy teams for venture-backed companies (Enterprise SaaS, DTC, B2B, Tech-enabled services). Experience helping companies scale (<$10M to $100M+ in revenue), raising capital (>$50M), and preparing for successful exits.
Andy Chen
Andy is a New Ventures Lead at Aledade focusing on M&A and new business incubation. Before joining Aledade, Andy was a Corporate Development Senior Associate at UnitedHealth Group, working on various M&A transactions and strategic projects in healthcare services and technology sectors. Andy started his career as a physician and healthcare venture investor in Taiwan. He earned his MD degree from National Yang-Ming University and MBA & Master of Bioengineering dual degrees from UC Berkeley.
Brittany Ryan
Brittany Ryan is an independent healthcare consultant helping health technology and life sciences companies develop and commercialize new solutions and business models in collaboration with their provider and payer stakeholders. She also works alongside NextGen Venture Partners, She's Independent, and Redesign Health. Brittany previously held product and partnership leadership roles within ConcertAI, Aetion, and UnitedHealth Group. Brittany holds an MBA from NYU Stern, and a B.S. in Chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University.
Carlos Liverani
Carlos is a self-proclaimed happy overgrown child exploring the frontiers of health, performance, technology, and fun. Trained as a biomedical engineer, developing moonshot technologies that enhance the lives of others is his purpose among many other passions. Currently, he’s working on reinventing clothing to have more purpose at Spectral. Also, derives energy from supporting and investing in other people who are passionate about building the future as a venture scout.
Ruth Ku
Ruth is currently building Vrolio, the leading platform to facilitate short term rental investment transactions powered by technology and data. Most recently co-founded Bookkeep. Bookkeep aggregates and normalizes sales data from multiple front end systems and automatically updates accounting systems like Quickbooks and Xero. She's a serial entrepreneur with three startups and successful exits. She's counseled leaders on identifying revenue opportunities, improving operating margins, raising debt and equity financing, and increasing LTVs. Held leadership roles at ShopKeep, RotoQL, Formulas Black, and Ellevest, among others.
Patrick Wesonga
Patrick Wesonga is an accomplished tech professional with over 15 years of experience at companies like Coral Health, Capital One, Clear, Zocdoc, and Citi delivering experiences across a variety of industries. He combines entrepreneurial hustle, startup grit, and just the right amount of corporate sophistication to build remarkable mobile, web, and custom hardware products (often taking them from “zero to 1”).
Noah Elion
Noah Elion is the Founder and CEO Lovd. Lovd started in New York City in 2022 to make buying secondhand the default purchasing behavior. The company partners with large refurbishers and creates software to help them sell inventory more efficiently. After the first eight months, the service had already gained more than 70,000 users. The Tufts University graduate received $4.5 million in funding from Y Combinator, BoxGroup, Fuel Capital and other venture firms.
Tarul Kode
Tarul is a purpose-driven executive and community leader with two decades of progressive experience and success in the healthcare ecosystem. She says her key strengths include "low-ego, values-based leadership, high emotional intelligence, and consistent execution through curiosity and growth." She's passionate about transformational leadership, healthcare equity, technology, and innovation. She currently serves as founding principal at Ellipsis Healthcare Leadership, Strategic Partnerships Consultant at BigRio AI, in addition to Advisor at Redesign Health, AMCP Heath Disparities Committee, and various equity focused community organizations. Her past experiences include Chief of Staff at Spora Health, VP, Senior Benefits Consultant with Segal, Director of Account Management at MedImpact, Blue Shield of California, and UW Medicine.
Kish Sachdeva
Kish is a seasoned leader in the field of Machine Learning, with over a decade of experience in creating and selling products that leverage ML technologies. He has also conducted foundational research in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and Language Modeling (LLM), resulting in published patents. Kish's work in Machine Learning on YouTube affects more than one billion views annually. He has advised and mentored more than ten startups in the ML/AI space, helping them with strategies, data gathering, and developing differentiated models. Collectively, these companies have raised $50M+ in early-stage funding from investors like Sequoia, Greylock, a16z, etc. In 2021, Kish founded a generative audio company. Recently, he has been collaborating with venture capitalists, providing guidance on due diligence, market analysis, and identifying white space opportunities in the ML and Generative AI sectors, them differentiate solid companies from vaporware.
Elise Omaits
Elise Omaits is the former Head of Population Health at Spora Health, where she built and scaled three programs that look to address health equity through different channels in the digital health space. She has spent her career in public health and health equity with companies like NYC Health + Hospitals and the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene – and pivoted to tech during the pandemic. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband where you can find her running in Prospect Park on nice days.
John Bailey
John is the Co-Founder of OneFund Investments, a platform making it easier for more people to invest in top-tier Private Equity and Venture Capital funds. Prior to starting OneFund, John was an Operating Senior Associate at General Atlantic, a leading growth equity fund, and a consultant at Simon-Kucher & Partners. John got a BA in Art History in Economics from Tufts University where he was a 4-year varsity rower.
Sneh Parmar
Sneh is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lucky, a platform that connects brands to their retail inventory for omnichannel fulfillment. He has an expertise in consumer purchasing behavior, eCommerce, and retail tech at companies like Kairos Society, Sagepath Inc, and Atlantic Technology Angels. Outside of work, Sneh enjoys going to new restaurants, playing tennis/basketball, and walks with his new puppy.
Phillip Ellison
Phillip Ellison is a connector, community weaver, creative problem solver, strategist, and advocate. Phillip is currently a lecturer in Entrepreneurship at Tufts University and, recently, was a Scout Advisor for The David Prize which invests 200k in unrestricted funding to extraordinary individuals with ideas, projects, products, and passions that are making (or will make) New York City a better place. Prior, he was in city-executive government as the Manhattan Borough Advocate at the Office of the New York City Public Advocate and liaison to the Chief Technology Officer. At the same time, he was the inaugural Civic Innovation Fellow at The Digital Life Initiative research lab at Cornell Tech exploring how existing and emerging digital technology impacts society. Phillip has experience across innovation and entrepreneurship, politics and government, technology, education, and workforce development. Through his LLC, Interspace Strategies, he connects the dots between early-stage or emerging ideas, people, and resources.
Kyle Blacklock
I’m a former financial analyst turned product designer. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been passionate about visual art, illustration, and design. Now, I’m using my love of aesthetics to create digital products that make people’s lives easier and give them joy. I work as Product Designer (UX/UI) at Health Gorilla, the leader in healthcare interoperability making medical data more actionable and accessible for our users. I’m based in New York City.