Gwen Cheni ^{Top-Executive}

Gwen Cheni leads the $50M early-stage fund focused on artificial intelligence and quantum at Connecticut Innovations, and cofounder of a stealth AI startup. She was previously a Partner on the investment team at Khosla Ventures, and a Partner at IndieBio/SOSV covering bio and AI. Prior to IndieBio, Gwen was the founder and Managing Partner of Galapagos Ventures, an early stage venture fund focused on applied AI/ML. Prior to Galapagos Ventures, she was a Director at StudioX (machine learning venture studio funded by Shell and Boston Consulting Group) and a Venture Partner at Fusion Fund (early stage fund focused on AI/ML, robotics and devices). Gwen was on the Board of Advisors at Singularity University Ventures, an impact-focused accelerator, and helped launch their first batch of startups in the Nordics.

Feel free to reach out directly: Gwen DOT Cheni AT ctinnovations DOT com

Prior to venture, Gwen spent eighteen years on Wall Street investing in public equities, started her career at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and was promoted to portfolio manager at a $300 million innovation-themed hedge fund.

On the computer science side, she received her bachelor’s degree in economics (math track) with a minor in computer science electrical engineering from Yale University, with a perfect 4.00 GPA, summa cum laude. One of her four MBA concentrations from the University of Chicago was econometrics/statistical learning. She graduated from University of Chicago in two years with honors, on a full scholarship, while working full-time as an associate at JPMorgan. She has completed thirty AI/ML programming courses: twenty machine learning certification courses by DeepLearning.ai, four reinforcement learning courses by the University of Alberta, and six genomic data science courses via Johns Hopkins. On the science side, Gwen spent two years at UCSF researching immunotherapy for glioblastomas, and was second author on two publications. She spent summers researching x-ray protein crystallography, nitric oxide as an oncology therapeutic, and image recognition of breast cancer histology. She currently sits on the Advisory Board of the Yale University School of Medicine.

Gwen is the author of a chapter in a Physics textbook on lasers, second author on two publications in immuno-oncology, and co-owner of a patent on magnetic resonance. Gwen has traveled to 70 countries, lived in five, attempted to learn six languages but speaks none of them (well).