ABOUT

I've always understood the world by making things. As a kid, that meant Lego Technic trucks, robotic arms, and model rockets. At nine, I stood in front of my primary school classand gave my first talk, on laser beams. I've been fascinated by light eversince.

At sixteen, I lostmy mother to a brain tumor. It made me think deeply about how the mind works and what makes us who we are. I started by trying to understand the nature of reality, beginning with the physical world.

In high school, inspired by an article on brain imaging, I built a magnetic levitation system for a science project. Thatcuriosity led me to aerospace engineering, where I learned to think from first principles by designing complex physical systems, from satellites to rocket propulsion, where every watt and every gram counts. 

Two books shaped my worldview: Abundance by Peter Diamandis andThe Third Industrial Revolution by Jeremy Rifkin. Both argued that abundant clean energy would reshape civilization while stopping climate change. Since then, I've believed that every major leap in civilization starts with an energy revolution, and batteries were the missing piece. After stumbling upon Elon Musk's 2012Wired interview, I knew Tesla was where I wanted to help build that future.

At 27, I moved to California to join Tesla, where I learned how exceptional teams build ambitious hardware with the speed and iteration of software. I designed the Model X battery structure to make battery packs safe, leading to its 5-star crash rating, and helped shape the early Model 3   prototype ahead of 325,000 reservations in the first week. Tesla taught me that bold ideas can transform entire industries and inspired me to build a company of my own.

I later returned to Europe as employee #10 at Lightyear, where I led the design of the world's most efficient EV powertrain, enabling a 450-mile range from a 60 kWh battery. We delivered the first production solar electric vehicle, reached a $400M valuation, and was recognized as one of TIME's Best Inventions.

Those experiences showed me that batteries, not vehicles, are the bottleneck, and that critical materials constrain the entire energy transition. I founded Universe Energy to make recycled batteries the primary source for the next 100 million batteries. We built battery firmware, robotics, computer vision and AI to repurpose used EV batteries into GWh-scale grid storage, aiming to avoid 6 gigatons of CO₂ emissions by 2050.

Looking back, each step revealed the same pattern: the hardest problems are systems problems, and the constraint keeps moving down the stack. EVs were limited by their batteries, and batteries by their materials. As intelligence becomes more capable, the constraint is shifting again to the physical infrastructure that generates power, moves data, and performs computation. And like energy, intelligence can expand human potential, but only if it remains human-centered, accessible and responsibly governed, rather than concentrated in the hands of a few.

After Universe Energy, Vipassana meditation brought me back to the question I'd carried since I was sixteen: how does intelligence emerge from the physical world? Observing my own mind made one thing clear. We're trying to design intelligence without learning from the most sophisticated system we already have, the human brain. That insight led me to the physical layer of intelligence, where materials, light, and electronics come together.

Today, my focus is the infrastructure that powers intelligence. I believe the future of computing won't come from simply scaling today's architectures, but from rethinking the hardware underneath them. The brain is my blueprint: it computes in parallel, adapts as it learns, and does it all on about 20 watts. That's the standard I want our systems to approach.

Light offers a fundamentally different way to compute, processing many signals at once through the physics of propagation and interference. Combined with thermal materials that pull heat away at the source and more efficient power electronics, it lets us design computation, memory, and communication together from the start. I believe the defining technologies of this century will emerge where light, hardware, and AI converge.

For me, that leads to one question: how do we build humanistic intelligence that thinks the way the brain does, decentralized, local and self-regulating? And how do we apply it to what we most need to solve, from materials science and drug discovery to power distribution and mental health? The next frontier is intelligence that is power-efficient by design, and ultimately, infrastructure that carries it beyond Earth.

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