Dakin Sloss is an entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He is the Founder and General Partner of Prime Movers Lab, the world’s leading partner to breakthrough scientific startups. He has led investments in transformative companies including Momentus (MTNS), Heliogen (HLGN), Vaxxinity (VAXX), Tarana, Upward Farms, and Boom Supersonic. Prior to founding Prime Movers Lab, Dakin served as founding CEO of Tachyus and OpenGov.
He is also a philanthropist dedicated to ending world hunger, resolving the global mental health pandemic, and redesigning early childhood education to cultivate integrated beings across body, mind, and spirit. Dakin studied Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy at Stanford University. Dakin has been recognized as one of Yahoo Finance’s THE NEXT: 21 people who will have a significant impact on the worlds of finance, business, sports, or politics in the year ahead. In 2016, Dakin was recognized as the featured Forbes 30 Under 30 energy entrepreneur. In 2017, he was named a San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40 honoree.
Zia Huque is a General Partner of Prime Movers Lab where he focuses on growth-stage investing. Zia brings a wealth of experience in later-stage financing, having been in the business of risk investment and risk management across credit, rates, equities, and derivatives asset classes for the vast majority of his career. Zia also brings his operational expertise to Prime Movers Lab, having had vast executive, strategic and operational responsibilities across multiple businesses and regions of a top-five global investment bank managing tens of billions of dollars and thousands of employees. He led investments in Energy Vault (NRGV), Lyten, and Upward Farms. He also serves on the boards of Boom Supersonic and Vaxxinity.
Zia served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., the U.S. Broker Dealer of Deutsche Bank, from early 2018 until his departure from Wall Street in 2019. At Deutsche Bank, Zia was also Head of Equities, Fixed Income & Currencies for the Americas from 2016 to 2018 and Global Co-Chief Operating Officer of Corporate Banking and Securities from 2012 until 2016. During Zia’s 30-year finance career on Wall Street, he held multiple executive positions in the United States, Europe and Asia while leading investment banking, sales and trading functions spanning many industries, products, and clients.
Zia received his BA in Economics and in Political Science from Williams College. He resides in Wyoming with his wife and two daughters and is active in the local community.
Amy Kruse is a General Partner of Prime Movers Lab where she leads our life sciences investments. As a neuroscientist and biologist, she discovers emerging new companies and leads in-depth due diligence into potential investments across areas including neuroscience, human augmentation, synthetic biology, longevity/regeneration, and agriculture. She also supports portfolio companies in evaluating and overcoming scientific and implementation challenges, with a specific emphasis on deploying complex technology into real-world environments. She serves on the boards of our portfolio companies, Paradromics, Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals, Cognixion, and Attune Neurosciences.
Amy is formerly the Chief Scientific Officer at Optios, an applied neuroscience company. She built the company’s scientific vision and completed acquisitions that resulted in a robust intellectual property portfolio. Amy also served as the VP and CTO at Cubic Global Defense overseeing innovation and the R&D portfolio across the entire defense enterprise. Early in her career, she served as a government civilian program manager at DARPA where she created and oversaw the Agency’s first performance-oriented neuroscience programs, with a combined budget of over $300M. Amy is a Founding Member of the Loomis Innovation Council and a Guest Lecturer for Singularity University. She earned a BS in Cell and Structural Biology and a PhD in Neuroscience from University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, where she was awarded an NSF Graduate Fellowship.
Anton Brevde is a Partner of Prime Movers Lab. He supports the Prime Movers Lab team and portfolio across all facets of the business. He utilizes his seven years of startup experience to help the team evaluate the market for potential investments and to support portfolio companies. He serves on the boards of our portfolio companies E-Space, Nelumbo, Space Perspective, and Alpha Insights.
Previously, Anton was co-founder and CEO of Asseta, a B2B marketplace for manufacturing equipment and spare parts. Asseta provides leading semiconductor manufacturers a safe and efficient platform to sell their excess assets. At Asseta, Anton raised money from premier investors such as Y Combinator, Gil Penchina, Jeff Epstein (ex-COO of Oracle), and Red Swan Ventures. Anton’s day-to-day focus was on business development. He led a global effort targeting Fortune 1000 companies across the US, Europe, China, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, and Japan. Anton earned a BS in Finance from Villanova University cum laude.
Gaetano is a Partner for Prime Movers Lab where he invests both in early-stage and growth-stage companies. His areas of interest include energy transition, agriculture, transportation and infrastructure. Gaetano currently serves on the boards of portfolio companies Mycoworks, Atom Computing, Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals, Oceanix, and Bandit. Gaetano is a three-time entrepreneur and brings his experience building companies to evaluate opportunities and supports portfolio CEOs in scaling world-changing companies. Obsessed with building teams and organizations, he co-founded and served as CEO of Cabin Technologies, the tech-enabled long-distance mobility company solving intercity travel, and was responsible for launching their never-before-seen, actively suspended cabins that makes highway travel smoother than trains.
Previously, Gaetano was the COO of Betable, the world’s first fintech/game-engine platform powering real-currency play in apps across any platform or device. In 2006, Gaetano founded Machina, a production company focusing on web series, music videos, and commercials during the transition to digitally-consumed content. Gaetano was nominated for a Grammy in 2013 for his work with Foster the People and also produced Beyonce’s “Move Your Body” video for Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” project. Before becoming a producer, Gaetano was a consumer and retail investment banker at Goldman Sachs in New York. Gaetano is an alumni of Wharton and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Having grown up in Brazil, Venezuela, Canada, and the United States, Gaetano speaks three languages fluently and lives to explore.
Liz Stein is Principal Systems Engineer and Partner at Prime Movers Lab. While her background in Aerospace Engineering drives her interest in space, aviation, and defense deals, she is also more broadly interested in geothermal energy, infrastructure security, advanced manufacturing, and reproductive longevity as investment areas. Liz serves as a board observer and independent technical reviewer for Venus Aerospace.
Liz’s 15 years of engineering experience runs the spectrum of extreme environments from freezing cold rocket turbopumps to blazing hot hypersonics. Liz enjoys working on challenging problems and building relationships with other keen innovative thinkers. She started her career in a small R&D environment developing rocket propulsion technologies and clean energy combustors, taking designs from concept through demonstration testing. She then moved on to develop hypersonics capabilities at Lawrence Livermore National Lab starting collaborations with NASA, SNL, AFRL, industry, and university partners. Liz remains engaged professionally through AIAA, serving as the HyTASP Technical Committee Communications chair, where she writes the annual year-in-review article on hypersonics for Aerospace America magazine. Liz received her Master’s and Bachelor’s both in Aerospace Engineering, from Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Florida, respectively.
Justin Briggs is a scientific entrepreneur and investor working at the nexus of biology, chemistry, and engineering. Justin is a Biologist and Partner at Prime Movers Lab, working to accelerate our portfolio companies and cultivating new breakthrough opportunities. Over the last 15 years, Justin was an operator at nearly a dozen biotech, nanotech, robotics, and software companies with multiple exits and over $100 million in venture backing. Justin also supported venture creation at startup studios such as Deep Science Ventures and Accele Venture Partners. Justin developed novel therapeutics and regenerative medicines in disease areas including oncology, neurology, autoimmune, cardiometabolic, and infectious diseases across ten countries and four continents.
Prior to joining Prime Movers Lab, Justin developed next-generation biologic medicines, novel pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, and other technologies at companies including Antiverse, Tetherex Pharmaceuticals, Accele BioPharma, Otologic Pharmaceutics, Pamlico BioPharma, Synereca, Jortan Pharma, Altheus Therapeutics, Crescendo Biosciences, and Southwest Nanotechnologies. Justin co-founded TomorrowScale Ventures and startups Chorus Labs, SnapLab Technologies, and Patch Botanics. Justin is knowledgeable across many discovery, development, commercialization, and scaling activities relevant to deep tech and life science companies, has a degree in biomedical sciences from the University of Oklahoma, an MBA with high honors from Oklahoma City University, and is a co-inventor on multiple issued patents.
Taylor is the VP of Finance and Partner of Prime Movers Lab. She helps manage the firm’s financial operations across accounting, reporting, and financial planning.
Before joining Prime Movers Lab, Taylor served in controller and accounting roles with P Soros Investments and Long Light Capital, LLC. She oversaw accounting functions for the family offices, while also handling HR functions for family office employees. She began her career as a tax accountant with RSM US where she focused on private equity companies and high net worth individuals. Taylor earned a master’s degree in Corporate Accounting and an undergraduate degree in Accounting with a minor in Judaic studies, both from The University of Miami. She is a licensed CPA in the state of New York and a Level III CFA Candidate.
Michael J Savage is an Executive Coach with Prime Movers Lab. He meets with founders in our portfolio on a monthly basis and supports them as they evolve with their organizations. He coaches individuals to achieve more and helps organizations come together to celebrate milestones like initial sales. He brings two decades and over 100,000 hours of coaching experience across a wide range of businesses, from startups coming out of Y Combinator or 500 Startups, to C-Level executive coaching inside some of the most recognizable companies today. For over 15 years Michael traveled the world supporting individuals and teams as a Business Coach and Trainer with Robbins Research—founded by Life and Business Strategist Tony Robbins where he facilitated Business Results Workshops on a broad range of topics, as well as Tony’s Life & Wealth Mastery Events. He is an ICF and BCC certified Executive Coach.
Outside of coaching, Michael has successfully built businesses in financial services as well as retail. He has supported founders and startups, coaching individuals and teams, as well as training and certifying coaches working in startup ecosystems like Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project in Las Vegas. As a business coach and advisor Michael holds board seats in a number of small and medium-sized organizations and holds a seat on the Board of the Hero Initiative, a not-for-profit charity supporting the creative minds behind the world’s greatest comic book and pop culture icons. He resides in central Florida with his partner and daughter.
Ashley is Prime Movers Lab’s Talent Partner where she leads talent and people operations initiatives for the firm, manages our Fellowship program and Advisor ecosystem, handles Board of Director placements and executive search, while also creating human capital strategies aimed at doubling or tripling revenue over a two-to-three year period. Additionally, Ashley helps build engineering, sales and leadership teams, supports our portfolio companies with compensation and equity planning, as well as diversity and inclusion initiatives.
Before Prime Movers Lab, Ashley collaborated with venture capital firms like First Round Capital, early stage startups and growth stage startups preparing for exits on their talent, people operations, and community initiatives. Ashley serves as a moderator for “Women in Venture Capital” which is a global community of 10,000+ women supporting each other in the investment space and has spoken internationally on people operations strategy for startups in Santiago, Los Angeles, and more. Ashley received her B.S. from the University of Colorado in Journalism with a minor in Technology, Arts, and Media.
JJ Moi is the Creative Director and Partner for Prime Movers Lab. As a designer, he evaluates the products of potential investments and engages deeply with portfolio companies to develop differentiated branding, marketing, and design strategies. JJ has designed brand identities, websites, digital and physical products, and buildings across various startups, large institutions, local and federal governments, and design agencies.
Prior to joining Prime Movers Lab, JJ has served as an innovation specialist at GSA/18F, an innovation laboratory within the U.S. federal government. Before that, JJ was the Design Director at Tachyus and OpenGov, where he created seamless user experiences for the world's leading open data platform. Before OpenGov, he supported world-leading companies in their design and branding efforts through multiple top-tier design agencies. He continues to be a mentor at various places teaching aspiring designers about the tricks of the trade. JJ completed postgraduate studies in New Media from the Academy of Art University and earned a BFA in Industrial Design from Rangsit University.
Gavin is the Communications and Government Relations Partner at Prime Movers Lab where he leads public relations and government relations for the firm as well as its portfolio companies, helping entrepreneurs tell their stories to key audiences, including media, consumers, investors, and policymakers.
Prior to joining Prime Movers Lab, Gavin was a Vice President at Method Communications where he supported the firm’s startup clients on issues related to media relations, public affairs, and crisis communications. Gavin previously worked for Edelman’s Washington, D.C. technology practice, representing some of the world's largest technology brands, such as Samsung, Adobe, and the Business Software Alliance. He also worked as a lobbyist for companies like eBay and Verisign. Gavin started his career on Capitol Hill with the Senate Finance Committee’s press office for Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), advising the majority staff on media strategies to pass trade, healthcare, and tax legislation. He graduated with a master’s degree in political management from The George Washington University and earned bachelor’s degrees in communication (journalism) and political science from Washington State University.
Brad is a Partner at Prime Movers Lab where he leads deal sourcing and supports the diligence process. His work spans Prime Movers Lab’s six sectors but he has a particular interest in agriculture and foodtech and has led the firm’s landscaping efforts into several nascent food technologies including cultivated protein and mycelium.
Prior to joining Prime Movers Lab, Brad was the first employee at Asseta, a marketplace for semiconductor manufacturing equipment, where he led go-to-market efforts in Asseta’s largest business lines. He led efforts to secure and manage an international asset disposition deal with a Fortune 100 chipmaker. Brad was relentlessly focused on delivering customer value and launched two of Asseta’s most successful services. Earlier in his career, Brad worked in KPMG’s M&A diligence group, specializing in the energy, agriculture, healthcare, and transportation industries. Brad earned a BBA from Emory University and was recognized as a member of the 100 Senior Honorary for emerging alumni leaders.
Daniel is the Chief of Staff to Dakin Sloss, founding partner at Prime Movers Lab. He supports Dakin across the operations of Prime Movers Lab, The Immovable Movers Foundation, and Yugen Ranch. Daniel is passionate about interacting with, being of service, and creating magical moments for everyone that we have the honor to engage with.
Before Prime Movers Lab, Daniel held various marketing roles in the tech startup world of Atlanta. He also spent 2 years as the president of a community organization that organized music and art events around town. His experience in this arena allows Prime Movers Lab to lean on him for planning and executing events for founders and investors.
Nicolette manages investor relations for Prime Movers Lab, supporting the capital raising process, building relationships with our limited partners, and developing our community of investors. Nicolette also provides support to General Partner Zia Huque, who specializes in later-stage, growth investments.
Prior to joining Prime Movers Lab, Nicolette served as Operating Officer with BDO in the Cayman Islands where she managed the firm's operations and business development efforts. Before moving to the Caribbean, she spent two years working with the Boston Consulting Group in Denver, Colorado. Nicolette's passion for community engagement and public service has inspired her to work with diverse local and international nonprofit organizations. Nicolette holds a dual BA in International Studies and Business Administration from the University of Denver.
Della is an Executive Assistant with Prime Movers Lab, supporting our partners. Della has over ten years of experience working in the legal field, family office management, and as an executive assistant. Most recently, she managed a scientific-based consulting company.
Della is passionate about working with forward-thinking like-minded individuals focused on health and healing. She assists in research, project management, event coordination, scheduling, and whatever it takes to make the team successful. She brings intentional positive energy to every interaction. Della attended Florida International University in Miami and holds a BA in Journalism.
Suzanne is a Venture Partner of Prime Movers Lab. She has 20 years of experience working in the technology and investment space. She serves on the boards of portfolio companies: Upward Farms, Spartan, Halo Industries, Diamond Age, and Fort Robotics.
Suzanne spent five years at StartX, the Stanford University-focused entrepreneur community, managing the Stanford-StartX Fund, and working directly with hundreds of entrepreneurs. Prior to that, she spent ten years doing secondary private equity investing. Suzanne started her career at Morgan Stanley in the Technology Financial Sponsors Group.
As Fund Manager at StartX, Suzanne oversaw $175M of direct investment in 300 start-ups across 500+ rounds, from seed through Series D, in industries ranging across Enterprise, Consumer, Hardware, and Medical. She earned an MBA from Stanford University and a BS in Finance and Information Systems from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania magna cum laude.
Brandon is a Venture Partner of Prime Movers Lab. He serves on the boards of portfolio companies: Venus Aerospace, Carbon Capture, Elevian, Unlimited Tomorrow, polySpectra, and NobleAI. He previously served on the board of Pyka.
Brandon has wide-ranging startup experience as an investor, operating executive, board member, and corporate lawyer. Brandon began his career as a law clerk to Chief Judge J.L. Edmondson of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and then advised startups and investors as a corporate lawyer at Hogan Lovells. At Tachyus, Brandon built the business from Series A through Series B as COO and CEO. Brandon invests in his community through his series Celebrating Black Founders and Investors, his family’s entrepreneurship initiative Oakland Idea Shop, and his mentoring platform LOVE (Let Our Vision Evolve). Brandon earned degrees with honors from Stanford Law School and UC Berkeley.
Referred to as “the most famous astronaut since Neil Armstrong”, Colonel Chris Hadfield became a household name as the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station. Formerly NASA’s Director of Operations, Hadfield is a heavily decorated astronaut, engineer, and test pilot whose many awards include the Order of Canada and the Meritorious Service Cross.
Hadfield is also a three-time bestselling author, an acclaimed musician, an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo, chair of the board of the Open Lunar Foundation, and host of two internationally acclaimed television series, In addition, Hadfield leads the space stream at Creative Destruction Lab, one of the world’s top tech incubators.
