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    Meet the Synthace
    leadership team.

    Building and implementing the world's first experiment platform is a tall order. That's why Synthace is run by a multidisciplinary team with strong experience in the life sciences, deep tech, and product-focused B2B SaaS.

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    Guy Levy-Yurista, PhD

    Chief Executive Officer

    Guy Levy-Yurista, PhD

    Chief Executive Officer

    Guy is an accomplished executive with deep multidisciplinary experience across science, technology and business. He specializes in commercializing advanced technologies in fast-changing market environments and has previously served as the Chief Strategy Officer for Sisense, a hyper-growth big data company where he played a pivotal role in their success as a market-leader for data analytics. His personal superpower is finding product-market fit for technical innovations, then delivering on it.

    Guy holds a PhD in Physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and is a graduate of the Talpiot program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He lives in the Washington DC area with his wife, three daughters, and his guitar (which he never seems to get enough practice with).

    Hobbies: great wine, finishing a book every week, trying to play guitar

    Role model: Captain Jean-Luc Picard

    Markus Gershater, PhD

    Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer

    Markus Gershater, PhD

    Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer

    Markus is a co-founder of Synthace and one of the UK’s leading visionaries for how we, as a society, can do better biology. Originally establishing Synthace as a synthetic biology company, he was struck with the conviction that so much potential progress is held back by tedious, one-dimensional, error-prone, manual work. Instead, what if we could lift the whole experimental cycle into the cloud and make software and machines carry more of the load? He’s been answering this question ever since.

    Markus holds a PhD in Plant Biochemistry from Durham University. He was previously a research associate in synthetic biology at University College London and a Biotransformation Scientist at Novacta Biosystems.

    Hobbies: playing piano, growing plants, reading science fiction

    Role model: his Dad, a biochemist, who taught him Design of Experiments (along with a great many other things!)

    Lauren Fovargue, PhD

    VP of Customer Success

    Lauren Fovargue, PhD

    VP of Customer Success

    Lauren is passionate about making transformational scientific change succeed and endure, and it drove her to start Customer Success at Synthace in 2018. She and her team work closely with our customers, helping each and every scientist we work with get the most out of our platform. Originally joining the company from an engineering perspective, she has a deep understanding of how our platform works and is pivotal to the success that we see emerging in the R&D teams who run their experiments on Synthace.

    Lauren holds a Ph.D. in Computational Mathematics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Prior to Synthace, she spent 5 years in Computational Fluid Dynamics and Biomedical Engineering research. She lives in coastal Northern Ireland with her fiancé and an unofficial nursery of houseplants.

    Hobbies: long wanderings with a good cup of coffee and audiobook, outdoor sports, knitting

    Role model: her mom, who taught her that hard work and a good attitude are timeless

    Mathieu Ayel

    Chief Product Officer

    Mathieu Ayel

    Chief Product Officer

    Mathieu commands a formidable level of expertise in B2B SaaS product leadership. He has deep experience in helping groundbreaking startups forge cutting-edge technical products, and in leading high-performance product development teams. As Synthace CPO, he leads the team charged with building an experiment platform capable of fundamentally transforming what scientists can achieve.

    Before Synthace, he was VP of Product at AI startup Tractable. He has worked in software testing, IT management, video games, and insurance. He lives in West London with his wife and 3 daughters.

    Hobbies: cooking for friends and family, skiing, playing board games with my kids

    Role model: Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes

    Edita Vatenaite

    VP of Marketing

    Edita Vatenaite

    VP of Marketing

    Edita possesses a niche skill for marketing cutting-edge technology products to highly qualified subject matter experts. She has a track record for pushing past marketing inertia and paralysis in ambiguous, fast-changing environments; something she achieved, prior to Synthace, at Ansys—a leading engineering simulation software company. Edita is passionate about helping groundbreaking startups achieve their potential by driving awareness and demand in the market.

    Her core expertise is in product marketing, but it’s demand generation that gets her out of bed in the morning. If she had it her way, she’d work remotely from a villa in Bali but, for now, she’s based in the Washington DC area.

    Hobbies: finding the world’s best beaches, cooking through cookbooks, tennis (but only in the summer)

    Role model: Anthony Bourdain

    Brian Danforth

    VP of Sales

    Brian Danforth

    VP of Sales

    Brian is a consummate B2B SaaS sales leader with an uncommon talent for identifying and maximizing the value we can provide to our customers. He has a storied career working in sales: before joining Synthace, he was a sales director for WalkMe as the company scaled from a unicorn startup to a publicly-traded company. He has also achieved significant results in sales leadership positions, spanning the gamut of companies, from large to small, across a wide range of industries.

    As a key member of the leadership team, Brian oversees Synthace’s overall go-to-market efforts and drives the introduction of the Synthace platform to as many organizations as possible where we can provide tangible impact.

    Hobbies: travel, volunteer captain for Wounded Warriors, drone photography, cetology, and ornithology

    Role models: Oprah Winfrey, Adam Grant, Jacques Cousteau, Sir David Attenborough, my father, my wife

    Nick McCleery

    Chief Financial Officer

    Nick McCleery

    Chief Financial Officer

    Nick has over a decade of experience helping fast-growing VC-backed companies forge a path toward trade sale or IPO. Prior to this, he co-owned and successfully sold a communications technology company, Mettoni Ltd, to a global NASDAQ quoted organization. He has been involved in twelve corporate transactions and six major fund raises and has at each company aligned the financial and administrative support to the needs of the business.

    Nick is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants (FCA) and holds a BSc (Hons) degree in Economics and Accounting. He has lived in rural Berkshire for over 20 years having previously lived in London and Texas. He is married with two grown up sons.

    Hobbies: running (5k-half marathon), music (ideally live), Premier League fantasy football, golf.

    Role model: Nick has worked for and with a number of inspirational leaders, all of whom have taught him something, most of which was positive.

    Becky Farnea

    People & Culture Director

    Becky Farnea

    People & Culture Director

    Becky has a singular ability to design, build and guide high-performance, people-first cultures with a strong emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). As People & Culture Director at Synthace, she is building the foundation for our diverse and multidisciplinary team to succeed in our goal of helping scientists solve humanity’s most pressing problems. Before joining Synthace, Becky was Head of HR at United Biosource Corporation, a Clinical Research Organization, and Global HR Projects Director at Kantar Health and Public before that.

    Becky has a Masters in Human Resources Management and over 17 years of deep expertise in people management, strategy, employer branding, DEI, global mobility, and organizational development in global corporate settings. She lives in leafy West London with her husband, 3 children, and 2 unruly cats.

    Hobbies: yoga, DIY, and dabbling in silversmithing

    Role models: 3 inspiring female CEOs I was very fortunate to work with throughout my career

    Kiran Kambo

    Interim VP of Customer Success

    Kiran Kambo

    Interim VP of Customer Success

    Kiran is an accomplished customer success leader with a career spanning a wide range of B2B SaaS tech companies, from fashion tech to cybersecurity. She has over a decade of experience leading Customer Success teams and is passionate about helping customers make the most of the Synthace platform.

    A major highlight of her career was joining a leading brand security platform in its infancy, and building out a world-leading customer success team to 50+ people. She’s hooked on seeing customers succeed in integrating new technology in their work, to help improve what they care about the most.

    Kiran joins the Synthace leadership team while Lauren Fovargue is on maternity leave.

    Hobbies: reading, playing pool, being an unbeatable movie buff

    Role model: Terry Pratchett