Cresta

Zayd Enam moved from Pakistan to the US on a scholarship at 17, earned a double major in EECS from UC Berkeley with high honors, and co-founded MediConnect, a healthcare marketplace in Pakistan, before beginning a PhD at Stanford's AI Lab in 2015. Working under Sebastian Thrun, he developed the conviction that AI should augment rather than replace human expertise. That thesis became Cresta, which he co-founded in 2017 and led as CEO, growing it to a $1.6 billion valuation and $270 million in funding before transitioning to an advisory role in 2023.

Tim Shi holds a BS in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, completed an exchange at MIT, and began a PhD in AI at Stanford in 2015 before leaving to focus on building. He was among OpenAI's earliest members in 2016, contributing to reinforcement learning research, and also worked as a Deep Learning Researcher at DJI and a Software Engineer at Dropbox before co-founding Cresta alongside Zayd Enam and Sebastian Thrun. He now serves as a co-founder and board member after stepping out of day-to-day operations.

Sebastian Thrun holds a PhD in Computer Science and Statistics from the University of Bonn and is a Professor at Stanford's AI Lab. He led the team that built Stanley, winner of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, then joined Google as VP and Fellow, founding Google X in 2009 and the autonomous vehicle project that became Waymo. He also co-founded Udacity, Google Brain (now Gemini), and Kittyhawk, and is one of the youngest inductees to the US National Academy of Engineering. He co-founded Cresta after encouraging his Stanford PhD students Zayd Enam and Tim Shi to commercialize their AI research.

Andre Esteva is an Engineering Valedictorian from UT-Austin who earned a PhD in Computer Vision from Stanford's AI Lab. He was Co-Founder and COO of Cresta from 2017 to 2019 before departing to found additional ventures. He later served as Head of Medical AI at Salesforce Research and has held engineering roles at Google Research, Sandia National Labs, and GE Healthcare. He is currently Co-Founder and CEO of ArteraAI, a medical AI company whose cancer-therapy personalization model is codified in NCCN Guidelines and reimbursed by Medicare.