Desigan Chinniah

Advisor, Office of the CTO

2024 - Current

Advisor

2024

[Enjoy the internet—safely. Cloaked is a consumer privacy company that helps to seamlessly generate virtual identities to protect their personal privacy including email addresses, phone numbers, passwords and now credit cards all in a zero-knowledge password manager. It protects personal information, by offering people-first, everyday privacy solutions and has expanded into areas like data monitoring, data deletion, and identity theft insurance.] #privacy

Investor

2024

[LightHearted is dedicated to preventing 10 million heart-related cardiovascular deaths by 2030. They are pioneering a laser-based non-contact medical device that has the ability to gather essential data through clothing and at a distance. The technology uncovers unique biomarkers in less than a minute, enabling quick and accurate diagnostic reports without expert intervention, making the process faster, more accessible and efficient.] #healthcare

Venture Partner, Mozilla Ventures

2023

After a decade of experiences within the world of Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, the president of Mozilla invited me to become a Venture Partner within their newly formed Mozilla Ventures team. https://mozilla.vc/team/desigan-chinniah/ The role includes: - scouting new pipeline opportunities - supporting existing portfolio - investment committee feedback [Mozilla Ventures, a first-of-its-kind impact venture fund to invest in startups (responsible AI, security & privacy, ethical technology, healthier communities) that push the internet — and the technology industry — in a better direction.] #startups #vc

Investor & Advisor

2023

[Manara is a social impact startup and community of top computer scientists in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA). It's mission is to unlock human potential and diversify the global tech sector, while uplifting the economies of the region, with a focus on Palestine and women. The Manara team and community mentors, identify the top computer scientists in the region, build skills, teach them how to pass interviews, vet them, and help them to reach their dreams of world-class jobs, either remotely or onsite via relocation.] #middleeast #africa #futureofwork #diversity #education

Venture Partner

2022

I am African (South Africa born in Durban). And I care deeply about the future of the continent, its challenges as well as opportunities. Being a venture partner allows me to get up close and personal with early stage innovation led by gritty and determined entrepreneurs off-the-continent solving problems for-the-continent. The role includes: - identifying new pipeline opportunities - supporting existing portfolio - founder mentoring and coaching - expansion and growth [Ventures Platform back founders building the future of Africa. We invest in companies that solve for non-consumption, plug infrastructural gaps and democratise prosperity in Africa, by eliminating the barriers to access and reducing the costs of delivering goods and services.] #africa #startups #vc

Investor

2023

[Intron Health provides clinical speech recognition for 200+ accents spoken in developing countries starting with Africa, reducing clinical documentation time by 6x, and freeing up time so overworked doctors can spend more time with patients. Intron is post-revenue with 27 active hospitals across 4 African countries. NVIDIA and the Commonwealth recently partnered with Intron to bring our technology to several Commonwealth states. They recently signed Africa's largest hospital and the 3rd largest hospital in the world, Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa; West Africa's largest Hospital, University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria; and Meridian Health Group, a leading private hospital in Nairobi, Kenya.] #healthcare #speech #voice #ml #ai #africa

Investor

2023

[Anterior is giving clinicians a second set of hands—and fixing one of the biggest pain points for patients. It is a LLM-powered co-pilot for administration, handling all the work that comes before the clinical decision-making. Where it might take a nurse several hours to track down, organize and summarize hundreds of pages of records they need, Anterior can do it in seconds, allowing clinicians to increase their output tenfold and focus on what matters most: helping patients.] #healthcare #ai

Member, Technology Advisory Board

2022

Due to caring about longevity of life as well as the historically skewed data used for health data, especially women and ethnic minorities — I was blown over by the audacious goals of Our Future Health. That coupled with some really big data and the multifold privacy challenges to solve — got me excited enough to apply for a seat on the technical advisory board. https://ourfuturehealth.org.uk/news/technology-advisory-board-members-announced/ Alongside esteemed other technologists and healthcare professionals we provide direct strategic input and advice to the CTO (and other C-Suite leaders) on topics ranging from: trusted research environments; encryption techniques; cloud infrastructure; gdpr and other privacy legislation and regulation; open-source; talent acquisition and retention [Our Future Health, in partnership with the NHS, will be the UK’s largest ever health research programme, designed to help people live healthier lives for longer through the discovery and testing of more effective approaches to prevention, earlier detection and treatment of diseases. It will build a cohort of 5 million people (~8% of the population) to enable research at scale to identify the key health, genetic and environmental triggers for diseases earlier. Thereby helping people live healthier for longer through more effective prevention, earlier detection and treatment of diseases.] #healthcare #research #data #privacy #security

Investor

2023

***A PIVOT FROM ATHENS RESEARCH***