UBS Disruptive Technology CEO Summit 2025

Piers Ingram is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Hummingbird Bioscience. Excited by the increasing pace of progress in systems biology and immunology, Piers co-founded the company in 2015 to better apply these advances to drug discovery and development.

Prior to co-founding Hummingbird Bioscience, Piers spent 15 years in the biopharmaceutical industry in R&D consulting, commercial strategy and academia. Between 2013 and 2015, Piers was employed by Sanofi (NASDAQ: SNY) as Head of Strategic Planning, South East Asia, an between 2011 and 2013 at Monitor Group (and then Monitor Deloitte) as a Manager in the Strategy Consulting practice. Between 2008 and 2010, Piers was first a Research Fellow and then acting Research Group Head at the Centre for Integrative Systems Biology, Imperial College London.

Piers holds an MSci in Mathematics, an MSc in Bioinformatics and a PhD in Systems Biology from Imperial College London, and an MBA from INSEAD.

Andrea Choe, MD, PhD, is the co-founder of Holoclara, a biotechnology company pioneering therapeutics that extend human healthspan by tapping nature's most potent human health innovations. She leads the development of HC-002, a first-in-class small molecule that has successfully completed Phase 1 clinical trials. Her work integrates cutting-edge methods such as Cryo-EM-enabled small molecule discovery and translational biology to accelerate discovery and development across Holoclara's pipeline. Andrea's doctoral research at Caltech laid the foundation for this work, shaping the scientific vision that drives Holoclara today.
Drawing on her background in clinical medicine, molecular science, and entrepreneurship, Andrea brings a distinctive perspective to disruptive health technologies. She is focused on unlocking the therapeutic potential of our gut’s ancient macrosymbionts to build medicines that enable longevity and resilience. At Holoclara, her mission is clear: to restore a missing piece of the immune system - the piece required to unlock human healthspan.

Krishna Kumar is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cropin, the world’s most advancedAI platform for Food and Agriculture. Krishna is on a mission to transform global food systemsand secure the future of food through digitalization, data, and AI.

Founded in 2010, Cropin is driving innovations such as the first enterprise grade real-time Gen AI-powered agri-intelligence platform, a Micro Language Model (μ-LM) for Climate-Smart
Agriculture, and the world’s first industry cloud for agriculture. Cropin’s Gen AI powered platform, Cropin Sage, provides actionable insights by decoding the past, present, and future
of crops. Today, Cropin is revolutionizing global food systems, delivering cutting-edge AIpowered solutions that enhance predictability, sustainability, and traceability across over 5% of
the world’s cultivable land.

Through strategic partnerships with more than 100 B2B customers, Cropin has digitized 30 million acres of farmland, positively impacting over 7 million farmers worldwide. Our extensive crop knowledge graph, covering 500 crops and 10,000 varieties across 103 countries, powers the Cropin Cloud, delivering predictive intelligence for over 1 billion acres of farmland globally. Cropin stands at the forefront of enabling agribusinesses, CPG and food retail companies,financial institutions, development agencies, international organizations, and governments to harness Agri-food tech solutions that transform global food systems.

Krishna has been recognized as a UBS Global Visionary and serves on the World Economic Forum's Steering Committee for the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2025. He has also contributed as a non-official member of India's National Startup Advisory Council, guiding the country's innovation and entrepreneurship landscape.

Prior to founding Cropin, Krishna was associated with General Electric, where he moved froma technology role into a leadership role as part of their Information Management Leadership Program, and worked in GE Appliances, GE Industrial and GE Energy during this stint. He has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Visvesvaraya Technology University. When he is not solving planet-scale problems at Cropin, Krishna loves travelling and reading.

Ling Fan is a scholar and entrepreneur whose work explores where AI, business and creativity merges. He is the founder of Tezign, a leading "Content + AI" unicorn dedicated to
empowering enterprises with generative AI for efficient content management, production, and distribution, driving business growth.

He is the professor and founding director of the Design AI Lab at Tongji University, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and Aspen Institute China Fellow.

Dr. Fan has a doctoral degree from Harvard University and a master’s degree from Princeton University.

Dr Hon Weng Chong is the CEO and founder of Cortical Labs, a deep technology startup building biological computing devices. Cortical Labs pioneered the field of engineered biological intelligence through its groundbreaking publication in the journal Neuron describing the process of growing stem-cell derived neurons in silicon computing devices and training them to learn how to play the classic Atari video game Pong.

Since that publication, Hon and the team at Cortical Labs have commercialised this technology by developing the world’s first programmable biological computer known as the CL1 that was announced in March 2025 that is now shipping to various laboratories around the world. Cortical Labs are backed by Horizons Ventures and 3C AGI Ventures.

Prior to Cortical Labs, Dr Chong was the co-founder and CTO of a medtech startup called CliniCloud making connected medical devices that was backed by Tencent and Ping An ventures. Dr Chong trained as a medical doctor at The University of Melbourne and did a research fellowship at Johns Hopkins University.

Max Mao is a capital markets and strategic advisory leader with over 13 years of experience spanning institutional investor relations, secondary market strategy, and cross-border transactions. As Founding Partner & Co-Founder , he drives the firm’s investment strategy and oversees its deployment across technology, consumer, and capital markets infrastructure sectors.

Prior to co-founding the fund, Max was Executive Director at Futu Holdings, where he led capital markets engagement with listed companies in finance, TMT, and high-tech industries. He played a key role in shaping investor narratives, enhancing valuation positioning, and building long-term institutional alignment in the secondary market.

Earlier in his career, Max co-founded Chaomeng Data, a retail-focused data intelligence company, and began his professional journey at Deloitte, advising clients on cross-border M&A transactions.

Max has partnered with a range of public companies on market-facing strategy and stakeholder engagement, including Giant Biogene (HKSE: 02367), CNHTC, Boss Zhipin (NASDAQ: BZ), and Li Auto (NASDAQ: LI).

He holds an MSc in Management from Tsinghua University and a BSc in Economics and Finance from the University of Toronto.

Mr. Wei Liu is an experienced venture capitalist. Before founding BioMap, he founded and managed four venture capital firms, serving as CEO of Baidu Ventures and Corporate Vice
President of Baidu Group, General Partner at Legend Star, and Deputy GM at CCID Investment. Over his 18-year investment career, Mr. Liu has been dedicated to leveraging cutting-edge
information technologies to improve industrial efficiency, completing investments in more than 300 early-stage technology projects worldwide, including over 100 AI-related companies and more than 50 life sciences companies. He has been recognized dozens of times with honors such as "Top 10 Angel Investors in China" by Zero2IPO, "Top 10 AI Investors in China," and
"Forbes Top 100 Investors."

Yuxiang Zhou is the founder and CEO of Black Lake Technologies, a Shanghai-based industrial tech company with a mission to empower flexible manufacturing through data-driven
collaboration across factory networks. Prior to founding Black Lake, he co-founded MadaData, a business intelligence startup developing analytics tools for enterprises, positioned as China’s answer to Palantir.

Earlier in his career, Yuxiang held roles as an investor at a sovereign wealth fund and an investment banker. He holds a degree from Dartmouth College.

Yuxiang has been honored as 40 under 40s by Fortune, China’s Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company. Under his leadership, Black Lake Technologies was named a World
Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.

Juerg Kaeppeli is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Noumena Digital AG, a Swiss deep-tech company pioneering protocol-based software technology for secure and compliant applications and federated business networks. Noumena has established itself as the European leader in delivering stablecoin and tokenization platforms for regulated financial institutions, bridging the gap between traditional finance and the digital asset economy.

Juerg is an advocate for decentralized finance that is robust, secure, and economically competitive with today’s financial infrastructure. He is actively shaping the future of digital assets by driving tokenization, stablecoin, and digital exchange initiatives in emerging markets, where new financial infrastructure is being built at speed and rapidly closing long-standing gaps in access and inclusion.

In parallel, Juerg is spearheading the application of Noumena’s technology in combination with AI to modernize the foundations of today’s software, addressing persistent challenges of security, compliance, and scalability at their root.

Previously, Juerg was Head of Strategy Projects at Credit Suisse Group and a Partner in Financial Services at McKinsey & Company. He holds a PhD and postdoctoral experience in Theoretical Physics.

Philip is the Co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, which is building data centers in space to solve the AI energy challenge. Starcloud was formed in early 2024, is backed by Y Combinator, raised a USD 21M seed at the end of 2024, and will launch the first Nvidia H100s to space in November 2025.

Philip is a second-time founder who previously spent time at McKinsey & Co. working on satellite projects for national space agencies. Philip has an MPA in National Security & Technology from Harvard University, an MBA from Wharton, an MA in Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics from Columbia University, and is a CFA Charter holder.

Tom Plümmer is the co-founder and CEO of Wingcopter, a leading German drone technology company recognized for its innovative approach to creating meaningful impact across multiple sectors. Driven by a vision to harness unmanned technology for real-world good, Tom has led Wingcopter to raise over USD 100 million in funding and was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2023.

Tom is a strong advocate for the transformative potential of technology in addressing pressing societal, national, and strategic challenges. Under his leadership, Wingcopter has become a pioneer in the development of dual-use drone technology, designing versatile solutions for varied applications across a range of sectors. Wingcopter’s drones have been deployed worldwide to deliver medical supplies to remote communities, support disaster relief efforts, enhance supply chain efficiency, contribute to critical national infrastructure security, and more.

Steven Goldfeder, Co-Founder and CEO of Offchain Labs, co-founded the company in 2013 and worked as an initial developer of Arbitrum, one of the largest and most advanced blockchains in the Ethereum ecosystem. Steven authored "Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies," and pioneered multi-party computation, shaping the future of blockchain interaction for consumers and institutions alike. Steven received his doctorate from Princeton University and is a published author of multiple research papers on blockchain science, crypto technologies, smart contracts, and more.

Waseem Shiraz is the Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at Quantinuum, where he leads global efforts to drive innovation at the intersection of quantum computing and AI, accelerating breakthroughs in energy, climate, healthcare, cybersecurity, and beyond. A founding member of Cambridge Quantum and Quantinuum, he has been instrumental in shaping Quantinuum into the world’s leading quantum computing company.

Anna Liu joined HashKey Group in 2018, the first five years, she headed the legal department in the HashKey Group, with solid legal skills and deep regulatory insights, Anna has led the legal team to provide all round legal support for the whole ecosystem of the Group, including licensed exchange, custody business, brokerage business, venture capital, asset management, node validation, and other Web3 infrastructure services in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and other jurisdictions. She has also led the team to provide on-the-ground legal advice for the application and maintenance of the Group’s licenses in multiple jurisdictions, successfully managed to swiftly respond to, and overcome the challenges in, the ever-evolving legal and regulatory environment in the virtual asset industry.

Starting from May 2023, Anna has assumed the role of the CEO of HashKey Tokenisation, the tokenisation arm of HashKey Group, continuing to contribute to the development of the industry ecosystem in a new capacity. HashKey Tokenisation advises on, and executes, the tokenisation of various types of assets, with a particular focus on Web3 native assets. It provides clients with an end-to-end service, from advisory and providing expert guidance on token economics design and legal structuring, through to the execution of asset tokenisation.

Prior to joining the HashKey Group, Anna was a Senior Legal Counsel at an internet giant, and prior to that worked at a leading international law firm. With a focus on financial innovation, FinTech and internet sectors, Anna has over 10 years of experience in private equity and investment funds, cross-border investment, M&A, Hong Kong and overseas capital markets.

Dr. He Wang is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies (CFCS), Peking University. He is the founder and CTO of Galbot and a BAAI Scholar. His research focuses on developing generalizable skills and embodied multimodal large models for general-purpose robots.

Dr. Wang’s works have received numerous honors, including the 2022 World Artificial Intelligence Conference Youth Outstanding Paper (WAICYOP) Award, ICCV 2023 Best Paper Finalist, ICRA 2023 Outstanding Manipulation Paper Award Finalist, and Eurographics 2019 Best Paper Honorable Mention. He was also awarded the 2024 Ant InTech Award, Intel China Excellent Honorary Scholar, and recognized as one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 China (TR35 China).

He serves as an Area Chair for CVPR and ICCV. Dr. Wang earned his Ph.D. in 2021 from Stanford University under the supervision of Prof. Leonidas J. Guibas and received his Bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University in 2014.

Mr. Jiyang Gao is the Co-Founder and CEO of Galaxea AI.

Mr. Gao previously served as a Senior Engineer and Technical Lead at Waymo, as well as Executive Director at Momenta, where he led a team of over 100 members. He possesses comprehensive experience in autonomous driving technology, product development, and mass production. He is also responsible for steering the company’s overall technical direction and strategic planning, driving product innovation, and overseeing marketing strategies.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University (Class of 2011) and completed his Ph.D. in Computer Vision at the University of Southern California in just 3.5 years.

With a rare combination of strong academic research capabilities and industry-leading engineering execution experience, he has published more than 20 papers at top-tier conferences and has over 4,000 citations on Google Scholar.

He is recognized as the only person in the industry to have completed the end-to-end R&D and mass production of full-stack algorithms and products for intelligent driving by the age of 30.

Robin Khuda is the Founder & Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of AirTrunk, Asia-Pacific & Japan (APJ)’s leading hyperscale data centre provider, enabling the growth of the cloud and artificial intelligence in the region.

A visionary entrepreneur, Khuda observed the emerging growth of cloud adoption in APJ and anticipated the need for a local and independent hyperscale data centre platform to support the growing capacity requirements of large technology companies.

Khuda has led AirTrunk to be one of the fastest growing technology companies in the world. In 2024, a consortium led by Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager, and including Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), acquired AirTrunk in a A$24 billion transaction, investing alongside Khuda. At the time, it was the largest-ever data centre deal globally and largest deal in Australia in 2024.

Khuda has received global recognition for his leadership, entrepreneurialism, and influence.
In 2024 he took out the Australian Financial Review’s (AFR) top prize as joint ‘Business Person of the Year’ and won the ‘APAC Digital Infrastructure Leader’ Award at The Tech Capital APAC Finance Awards.  

Elinor Huang is the co-founder and CEO of MEandMine, a revolutionary AI platform blending neuroscience and gamified therapy to transform children’s mental and behavioral health, scaling mental and behavioral health for K-12 students. Elinor was recognized by Amazon in 2021 as one of eight “Female Entrepreneurs to Watch.”

Earlier in her career, she held leadership roles at Johnson & Johnson, Stryker, and L’Oréal, and worked with early-stage Silicon Valley startups developing AI technologies from the ground up. Before founding MEandMine, Elinor served as VP of Product at Doc.ai, where she led multidisciplinary teams building AI-driven preventive health solutions and co-led the Stanford Medicine – Anthem partnership through to a successful exit.

She is an alumna of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Motivated by a personal loss at MIT, Elinor now combines neuroscience, AI, and play to transform classrooms into scalable early-intervention engines that build children’s self-regulation skills — ensuring every child is future-ready.

Yada is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Ajaib, a leading consumer fintech platform in Indonesia with a mission to democratize access to wealth for everyone. Since its founding in 2019, Ajaib has grown to serve millions of Indonesians with access to stocks, mutual funds, U.S. equities, and crypto.

Yada graduated from Stanford Graduate School of Business with a Fulbright scholar, and her career has spanned technology and finance across Asia and the U.S. She is passionate about building products that expand financial literacy and opportunity, empowering a new generation to invest with confidence.