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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!)

    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

    David Nilsson

    Chief Financial Officer

    David Nilsson

    Chief Financial Officer

    David has operated for the last 20 years at FD/CFO level for VC (including HNW & Family Wealth) and PE backed high-growth scale-up technology businesses. The last 12 years has seen him involved in several scaling B2B SaaS organizations, mostly recently managing the strategic sale process, maximizing shareholder value in the process.

    He has also been responsible for several fund raises, including large debt consolidation. He is adept at navigating operational re-structuring and professionalisation of scaling businesses. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Management Accounts.

    He is married with a son, and spends his time in West Sussex walking the dogs.

    Hobbies: traveling, trying new cuisines, plus playing (and watching) golf.

    Anna Ravvin

    VP Customer Success

    Anna Ravvin

    VP Customer Success

    Anna worked for Novartis for ~10-12yrs doing digital project and program management spanning across the organization and often cross divisionally. (As Novartis sold and acquired companies, Anna often had a front row seat - as with GSK, and Alcon at various times throughout her time there.)

    She approaches Customer Success from a project management angle and started working at a SaaS startup as VP of Customer Success managing the whole customer journey post-sales. 

    Anna enjoys that CS is often at the crossroads of customer facing and internal work within a company - expressing the product capabilities and roadmap to the customer and bringing back the product feedback and ways of utilization/usage back to the teams.

    Hobbies: CorePowerYoga, international travel with her family and community engagement with her synagogue.

    Role models: Everyone who manages to juggle the term "work hard / play hard" and do it all with a smile! And Golda Meir :)

    Brian Danforth

    VP Sales

    Brian Danforth

    VP 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

    Yael Ben Dov

    VP Product & Design

    Yael Ben Dov

    VP Product & Design

    Yael is a strategic product leader with an operational mindset. With a wealth of experience in B2B environments, she thrives on creating transformational products that reimagine how far people can go and how might they get there, improving their lives and changing their behaviors.

    A true people leader, she excels at fostering multidisciplinary high-performing, collaborative teams. Before Synthace Yael headed Product and Service Design at Railsbank, an innovative BaaS startup; founded and led product and design teams for B2B SaaS product across industries, from corporate finance, to FinTech, healthcare and HR tech. She started her career at Fraud Sciences, PayPal acquired company and holds an MSc in Human Centred Systems from City University London.

    Hobbies: Listening to audiobooks on long scenic walks, cooking with friends, putting together jigsaw puzzles.

    Role model: Her grandmother, who was both a seamstress and a truck driver, forever finding ways to be useful and seeing the best in the people around her.

    Becky Farnea

    VP People & Culture

    Becky Farnea

    VP People & Culture

    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