Sonny Vu

I help founders build companies that will have a positive, lasting impact on a lot of people. This usually involves helping them get to market technology based on scientific breakthroughs. Current themes include materials science and chips that enable energy-related and other engineering breakthroughs and novel biotechnology that can massively scale synthetic biology for delicious, clean, affordable food production.

Most recently, I served as President and CTO of Fossil Group, Connected Devices, using fashion and design to make technology more beautiful and useful. Before that, I started: Elemental Machines (IoT for complex processes), Misfit (wearables for fashion; acquired by Fossil Group for $260m), AgaMatrix (biosensors and digital health for diabetes; ongoing partnership w/ Sanofi), FireSpout (natural language processing for information retrieval; acquired by Ask Jeeves). Before doing startups, I worked at Microsoft Research in NLP under Kai-Fu Lee, worked on a PhD in Linguistics at MIT under Noam Chomsky, and studied math at UIUC.