Team – Pleno Inc.

Leadership Team

Pleno’s talented and dedicated leadership team has diverse experience across science and technology. With a strong track record of creating and bringing new and disruptive solutions to market, they together with our distinguished board members, are leading Pleno to break new ground in biotechnology.

Pieter has more than 30 years of experience inventing, developing and successfully commercializing technologies in industries including semiconductors, wireless, health care, life sciences, image processing and retail automation, with a portfolio of over 150 granted patents in these areas. His passion for bringing to market innovative technologies has led to the formation and funding of a number of technology start-ups with significant return to investors. Prior to founding Pleno, Pieter was co-founder of highly successful startup company Edico Genome that was acquired by Illumina in 2018 for $100 Million. Edico’s DRAGEN technology now forms a foundational part of all new sequencing instruments from Illumina, accelerating their data analysis from days to minutes. Pieter is also co-founder of Truvian Sciences that is developing a near-patient blood testing solution that will soon be deployed in retail and workplace clinics around the country. Prior to Edico Genome, Pieter was involved in the emerging mobile health industry, in which mobile phone technology enables innovative health care delivery in underdeveloped communities. Pieter also co-founded ecoATM (acquired in 2013 by Outerwall, Inc. (NASDAQ:OUTR) for $350 mil.) and Zyray Wireless (acquired in 2004 by Broadcom Corporation (NASDAQ:BRCM) for $100 mil. Pieter holds 160 granted US patents.

Lorenzo brings his deep experience, strong expertise and passion for scientific discovery and engineering innovation to our leadership team at Pleno. His love of taking on challenges and stewarding big ideas has endured from his early career in academics and research through his work at Element Biosciences leading a team that pushed the boundaries of surfaces, chemistries and hardware for DNA sequencing. Prior to Element, Lorenzo spent many years at Illumina working with world-leading research and product development teams, contributing many innovative technologies that deeply impacted the performance of today’s next generation sequencing (NGS) systems and consumables. Particularly, he was part of the HiSeqX chemistry development team that made the $1,000 genome a reality. He has successfully steered multiple advanced biotechnology products from concept to launch. While living in Italy, Lorenzo received a Laurea in Chemical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry, both from the University of Bologna. He was also appointed as a tenured researcher for the National Research Council where he worked on advanced nano biomolecular systems. In the United States, he furthered his academic career as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley working on new high-throughput DNA sequencing chemistries for the DOE Human Genome Project. As an adjunct faculty at both the Department of Oncology and Department of Molecular Medicine at UC Davis, he started, and successfully secured funding for, a research program to apply nanotechnologies to the development of new therapies for cancer treatment. Lorenzo has published 26 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters and has been awarded 9 patents. He was recipient of a Susan G. Komen for the Cure research grant for his early work on nanoparticles for targeted drug delivery and is recipient of the UC Davis Academic Federation Innovative Development Award.

Gavin is an electronic engineer by training who, over the past 25 years, has navigated his career into life sciences via the wireless communications and semiconductor industries. He has been with Pleno since its inception and leads product development activities as well as marketing and business development. Previously, Gavin worked at Illumina leading their software product marketing team after Illumina acquired Edico Genome in 2018 for $100 Million. At Edico, he was responsible for the startup company’s marketing, business development and corporate development activities. While at Edico, Gavin helped to set two Guinness World Records and spearheaded efforts to have their ground-breaking product, DRAGEN, be named The Scientist magazine’s number one innovation for 2014. Prior to that, he managed numerous high volume cellular products and software platforms at Broadcom after they acquired Zyray Wireless in 2004 for $100 Million. Gavin held key software development and later product marketing roles as part of the Zyray Wireless team that developed a 3G cellular processor. Gavin holds 10 granted US patents.

Jason Trachewsky was most recently the Chief Executive Officer of Aquifi, Inc., a provider of networked material inspection solutions using 3D cameras, and its founding Vice President of Engineering. Prior to Aquifi, Jason was founder, Chief Operating Officer and a key technology developer at Passif Semiconductor, a VC-backed startup developing extremely low-power wireless transceivers for portable devices. Passif Semiconductor was acquired by Apple, Inc. in April 2013. Jason came to Passif Semiconductor from Broadcom Corporation, where he co-founded and spent 11 years leading engineering for the WiFi Business Unit as well as contributing to the development of the IEEE 802.11n and 802.11ad standards. Jason entered Broadcom through its acquisition of Epigram, a VC-backed developer of home networking integrated circuits, in May 1999. Jason has authored over 100 patents and received his BSEE from Stanford University.