Guest Speaker - Oliver Gunasekara, Founder of Impossible Metals

Oliver is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and led three technology companies. His top achievements include:

• Founder of Impossible Metals, recruited co-founders and closed over $12M funding
• Founder and CEO of NGCodec until its successful 5x exit to Xilinx in 2019
• Sponsored and executed the 2006 acquisition of Falanx (Mali GPU) at ARM
• Co-founder of the non-profit MIPI Alliance in 2003
• Grew ARM’s mobile market share from 0% to 95%

In 1994 when he joined ARM it was a 60-person startup in the UK. Initially he pioneered the segment marketing activity by leading the mobile marketing team and grew its market share from 0% to over 90%. He lived and worked in Japan for two and half years. In his last role at ARM as VP of Corporate Business Development and M&A, Oliver championed the acquisition of Falanx in 2006, whose technology (Mali) became the number one shipping GPU in the world.In 2016 Softbank acquired ARM for $32 billion. 

In 2012, Oliver founded NGCodec, a startup focused on next-generation cloud video acceleration, leveraging programmable hardware. As CEO he raised over $15M, grew the team to ~40 people and won SaaS business with Amazon/Twitch.In 2019 the company was acquired by Xilinx data center group, returning over 5x to his investors. 

In 2020, Oliver founded Impossible Metals to provide responsible seabed mining and refinement of battery metals, enabling the world’s transition to sustainable energy. Impossible Metals is building underwater robotics vehicles to collect battery metals from the seabed without harming the environment, as well as using bacteria to refine battery metals without generating tailings. Patents have been filed for these ground-breaking technologies. 

Oliver holds a Bachelor's degree with honors in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Greenwich London, UK, and a Mini-MBA from the AeA/Executive Institute, Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Palo Alto, CA, USA. He is the inventor of three patents. 

For more information please see: Oliver Gunakekara LinkedIn

Moderator - Dr. Alex Barnard, MTS

Alex Barnard 

Alex Barnard is a scientist, father, and educator. He has a PhD in Marine Geoscience from the University of Houston and works in both industry and academia. He is the founder of an online education company, and serves as a review board member for two academic journals.

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