MEET Thao
Thao is a Portfolio Program Associate at TDK Ventures, where she is working closely with the Portfolio Program Manager to enable strategic engagements between Portfolio Companies and global TDK business groups. Thao is dedicated to identifying and building the bridge between deep-tech entrepreneurs with industry experts at TDK to create a collaborative ecosystem that fosters creativity and accelerates breakthrough solutions.
Prior to TDK Ventures, Thao was a Technology Manager at Clark Street Associates, where she led deep tech clients in pursuing non-dilutive government funding. In this role, Thao leveraged her technical background to dive into clients’ core technology and develop approaches to address critical defense and commercial needs. Her most impactful project resulted in $30M in federal funding for a healthcare client to commercialize a COVID-19 testing platform.
Thao holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BSE in Chemical Engineering from Arizona State University. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, foraging, hiking, and spending time with her family.
Portfolio Companies Served
Novalith’s technology solutions capture and leverage carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere to isolate and extract higher quality – battery grade – lithium from resource deposits, with no harmful by-products. Their process uses less water, smaller infrastructure, and is a lower cost than current industry standards.
Infinite Uptime’s Predictive Maintenance (PdM) platform offers two key capabilities within a single platform: Diagnostics as a Service (DaaS), which monitors critical equipment 24/7 and notifies the presence of any faults, and Digital Reliability Service (DRS), which provides prescriptive actions/interventions and downtime savings.
“Believe you can and you’re halfway there.”
- Theodore Roosevelt