Linus Liang
| Linus Liang | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
August 16, 1981 Berkeley, California |
| Alma mater |
UC Berkeley (BA) Stanford University (MS) |
| Occupation | Co-founder at Embrace |
| Website | www |
Linus Liang is the co-founder of Embrace, a social enterprise startup that aims to help the 20 million premature and low birth-weight babies born every year, through a low-cost infant warmer. Liang also co-founded CLZ Concepts and was an early employee of Zynga.
Previously, Liang served as the Chief Operations Officer of Embrace Innovations, which has a mission to design and bring to market healthcare technologies for the developing world, starting with the infant warmer. The Embrace infant warmer costs about 1% of a traditional incubator, and is currently being distributed across clinics in India, with pilots being conducted in 10 countries. The Embrace infant warmer is estimated to have helped over 50,000 babies to date.
Liang also served as the first Chief Operations Officer of Embrace, the non-profit arm of the organization, before stepping into the COO role for Embrace Innovations, the for-profit social enterprise that was spun off in 2012.
Liang was born in Berkeley, California and raised in Saratoga, California. He attended Saratoga High School and graduated in 1999.
Liang holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Computer science (CS) from the University of California, Berkeley. He worked at Microsoft as a Program Manager for two years, and then attended Stanford University to further his CS studies, earning a Master of Science degree.
In 2007, Liang dropped out of Stanford to start a Facebook Application game company called CLZ Concepts with two fellow students. The games grew to having over 20 million users and CLZ Concepts was acquired shortly afterwards by Zynga.
Later, while finishing his degree at Stanford, Liang and a few other fellow graduate students were assigned a class project to create a low-cost infant incubator that could be used in rural areas. In 2008, they co-founded Embrace, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, to bring their project to life. In January 2012, Embrace moved into a hybrid structure. The non-profit entity, Embrace, donates infant warmers to the neediest areas through NGO partners, and provides educational programs on newborn health alongside the distribution of warmers. The for-profit social enterprise, Embrace Innovations, sells the warmers to paying entities, including governments and private clinics, all focusing on emerging markets. Embrace believes that this type of "hybrid" structure allows it to most effectively achieve its mission: to supply its infant warmers to every baby in need. Embrace Innovations, the for-profit social enterprise, raised its Series A round of financing in 2012 from Vinod Khosla's Impact Fund and Capricorn Investment Group.
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