Abraham Chaibi is cofounder and CEO of Sapho Bio, a pharmaceutical testing lab in San Carlos, California. Sapho runs USP-validated lot release and stability studies for pharmaceutical companies. Its rapid sterility method returns results in 2 days. The standard takes 14.

The lab is an ambition he has carried since Princeton, where he studied mechanical engineering and did research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and South Africa's CSIR. He wanted to run an independent research lab. The people he looked up to told him a traditional research career was an unlikely way to get there. He decided to start one himself.

That took a decade. He worked on optimization problems, NFL scheduling among them, then on data systems at LiveRamp. In 2017, he cofounded Dexterity Capital, a high-frequency trading firm, and served as its CTO for eight years. He wrote more than 100,000 lines of its trading software and built a 10,000-core data center to run its models.

He started Sapho with John McSpedon. Their first project was a drug for astronauts. Developing it meant paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for outside testing, in an industry that had barely modernized. They turned the lab toward fixing that. Sapho combines AI tooling with automated hardware, so it operates with a fraction of the staff a conventional lab requires.

Abraham is a licensed pilot and keeps a library at the office.