Dr. Clemen Chiang

Dr. Clemen Chiang is an entrepreneur, founder of two successful tech startups, and business and management expert recognized by Forbes, Harvard Business Review, the Singapore Institute of Directors, and more. Dr. Chiang joined our program in 2023 as founder and CEO of Spiking, a social trading platform that connects traders to consolidated data on 10 different exchanges across Asia and Australia. However, Dr. Chiang’s has worked in the startup space since 2001, when he founded early social networking site CozyCot with his wife. Both ventures have been successes for Dr. Chiang, with Spiking named as one of the fastest growing companies in Singapore since its founding in 2016. Since joining our program, Dr. Chiang has been a valuable advocate and influencer on his large social media platform. He is a main voice spreading the word of our program with his large social media presence, and his international recognition has helped us grow into a global program.

Dr. Melissa Sassi

Dr. Melissa Sassi is not only an advisor, but a founder of our program! As an IBMer in 2019, Dr. Sassi gathered the first cohort of 10 startups in what was then called the IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator, with a mission to empower and inspire early stage startups in fintech, healthtech, insurtech, regtech, edtech & musictech. Prior to her work in creating this program, Dr. Sassi worked as a senior-level director or vice president of marketing, sourcing, and vendor management at several top firms. Her expertise in creating and fostering communities and audiences is evident, as her work has brought us from her first cohort of less than 10 startups to 5 years and over 200 startups transformed in our program. Dr. Sassi continues to thrive in the global startup ecosystem, developing over 250 tech executives in 80 countries and presenting at key events by the United Nations, the World Bank, and other global entities. 

Boris Esanu

Boris Esanu is an ex-founder-turned-VC that has provided critical investor perspective on our program since joining in 2022. With IDEACTION, Esanu enabled other startups to turn ideas into successful products by helping them build robust engineering and IT teams. Esanu guided these companies in UX/UI design, development strategies, and creating pipelines for continuous improvement. As such, he has made a perfect advisor for startups in our program looking to grow their technical teams and accelerate their development. 

Dr. Ryan Young

Ryan Young, MD, MBA is Co-Founder & CEO of Opollo Technologies. In addition to medicine and business, Dr. Young also has backgrounds in quantitative finance, artificial intelligence, medical natural language processing, and distributed systems. Dr. Young received his Doctor of Medicine from the Jacobs School of Medicine and MBA from the University at Buffalo School of Management in May 2021. Dr. Young is an IBM Today's Architect who has advocated on our behalf on many channels, drawing in new startups and helping us build a robust network of founders and investors. Opollo Technologies has become a flagship company of our program. They are a healthcare AI company which is transforming operational efficiency in healthcare. Their platform uses artificial intelligence to predict surgery durations in minutes while also allowing healthcare facilities to sell unused operating room time to payers on a marketplace, like an Airbnb for medical services. This boosts healthcare facility revenue, reduces costs for payers, and increases patient access to high-quality, low-cost healthcare.

Pete Turner

Pete Turner is the Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer at Opollo Technologies. Pete has been programming in Silicon Valley since he was 14 years old. He worked at Microsoft for several years before founding and working at multiple startups. His most recent position before Opollo Technologies was as a Staff Technical Lead Manager developing Augmented Reality SDKs for Escher Reality (acquired by Niantic). Pete was at Escher Reality (and then Niantic) from working with three people in a basement, through the acquisition, and eventually hiring for and managing multiple teams. In particular, Pete managed teams working on real-time AR Services, AR Mapping, AR Operating Systems, and Machine Learning. Pete’s work with IBM Cloud products and services has been invaluable to our program, as we gain key insights into our clients’ goals and needs. With his deep expertise in numerous software engineering disciplines, Pete has helped us prepare our security services for the new challenges introduced by AI.

Brad Deveson

Brad Deveson started his journey by founding and growing a successful B2B fintech software company in sunny Sydney, Australia. In 2014, Deveson sold the company, now known as Expense8, and started taking time to relax and give back to the startup world he came up in. He works closely with many startup teams, particularly early stage teams from local universities, as an advisor and collaborator. Deveson is an expert in the Lean Canvas framework for evaluating startup ideas, which he uses to review a startup's position and generate new ideas for their growth. He has, as he calls it, an "on-demand ear" to assist a startup team he believes in on whatever specific problems they have. Since his intitial move into startup consulting, Deveson has assisted dozens of startups over 10 years of professional consulting, making him an unmatched expert in accelerating technical startups to success.