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Brandon Gath is General Partner of Kraken Ventures, ex-Head Of Corporate Development at Kraken Digital Asset Exchange. Brandon led the M&A & Investment team at Kraken. Prior to this, Brandon served as Co-Head of CME Ventures, one of the most innovative corporate venture funds, having invested in technologies across Fintech, AI, Geospatial Data, Deep Learning, Quantum Computing, and Blockchain. He led early investments in Ripple, Nervana Systems, Orbital Insight, Crosslend, Digital Currency Group, and several others. In total, he has invested in over 30+ early and late stage technology companies. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago with a Master’s in Entrepreneurial Finance and Economics and received his Bachelor’s Degree from Indiana University in Finance.
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A.J. Kennedy
A.J. Kennedy is the Partner & CFO at Kraken Ventures. Prior to Kraken Ventures, AJ was a member of the Tech M&A / IB team at William Blair, and an operator at egraphs, an ecommerce marketplace. He started his career at Wachovia Securities (now Wells Fargo), where he was an analyst on the FIG team during the GFC. AJ holds an AB from Harvard and an MBA from University of Chicago, where he was the Ronald H Coase Distinguished Fellow.
Mavis Xu
Mavis Xu is a Principal at Mirana Ventures, as well as a Venture Partner for Bybit and BitDAO. Prior to this role, she was a Senior Associate at Kraken Ventures, sourcing investments in FinTech and blockchain/crypto companies, and an Associate at Liberty City Ventures, investing in blockchain technology solutions and companies. Mavis also completed a capstone project with the sustainability team at Bloomberg Associates. She has a background in finance and holds a Bachelor's degree from New York University.
Yuki Yuminaga
Yuki Yuminaga is a lead researcher at Distributed Capital and was previously a co-founder of Byto. He graduated from the University of Chicago.
Michael Toporek
Michael Toporek is the Co-CEO of Soluna Holdings and Managing General Partner at Brookstone Partners. He graduated from the University of Chicago in the United States.
Matt Leisinger
Matt is the CEO and Co-Founder of Alluvial Finance. Alluvial is building the enterprise liquid staking standard. Recently, he was the Head of Liquid Staking Products at Figment, a blockchain infrastructure company focused on building web3. Prior to joining Figment, Matt spent 12 years in the proprietary trading space, leading teams in building high-frequency, algorithmic trading systems. He was a Partner and Managing Director at Transmarket Group. Matt graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Computer Engineering and from the University of Chicago with a Master's in Computer Science.
Duncan Hoffman
Duncan Hoffman is the chief revenue officer at Kiln and previously worked at Chainalysis. He graduated from the University of Chicago.
Peter Knez
Peter Knez is the Chairman of Venom Foundation.Peter Knez is a former Chief Investment Officer at BlackRock.Prior to that, Peter held positions with Lincoln Capital Management and Goldman Sachs, where he led quantitative research and fixed income. Prior to Goldman Sachs, Peter held professorship positions at Kellogg School of Management, University of Wisconsin and University of Chicago. Peter completed his PhD work at The Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania and post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago, with a research focus on term structure models and asset allocation.
Gengmo Qi
Gengmo Qi is a partner at Dragonfly and was previously a researcher and engineer at Chainlink. He graduated from Cornell University and the University of Chicago.
Arnoldo Concepción
Arnoldo Concepci¨®n is the CEO of Gryfyn and the COO of Animoca Brands. He graduated from The University of Chicago
Ainsley Sutherland
Ainsley Sutherland is Product at DerivaDEX. Formerly Product & Partnership Strategy at Enigma MPC. She worked on product development and user research at Enigma, across protocol and application products. She collaborates closely with our engineering team and partners to define feature requirements and feasibility. She advocates for users, current and future, and communicate research both technically and for a broad audience. Previously: DesignX, BuzzFeed Open Lab, ConsenSys, MIT, WHPK.