Equity Crowdfunding

Andrea Ippolito is a lecturer in the Engineering Management Program at Cornell University as well as the founder and Director of Women Entrepreneurs Cornell (W.E. Cornell). She is also the founder and CEO of SimpliFed, a company supporting every family on the baby-feeding journey.

Prior to joining Cornell, Ms. Ippolito served as the Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs Innovators Network within the VA Center for Innovation. She completed her M.S. in Engineering and Management at MIT. Prior to MIT, Ms. Ippolito worked as a research scientist within the Corporate Technology Development group at Boston Scientific. She obtained both her B.S. in Biological Engineering in 2006 and Master’s of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering in 2007 from Cornell University.

Brooke Robbins is a Senior Investment Associate on the Investment Team at Republic. She is also a co-founder at CLIFF Network, a former Fulbright ETA in Taiwan, a freelance writer for IESE Business School, and the United Nations PRME. Brooke has a B.A. from Columbia University.

Jonny Price is the director of fundraising at Wefunder. He is originally from the UK, where he started his career in strategy consulting with Oliver Wyman. In 2011, he joined the non-profit Kiva.org as the Founder and Director of its U.S. lending division, leading that team for seven years. In early 2018, he joined Wefunder as Director of Business Development. His primary role is recruiting great companies that are excited to use crowdfunding to raise capital and gain customers.

Krishan Arora is the CEO and Founder of The Arora Project. The Arora Project is a growth marketing agency with one goal in mind: to help entrepreneurs launch and scale their ventures globally. Its core mission is to help high-growth ventures from all around the world scale via crowdfunding campaigns and growth marketing campaigns. The Arora Project has raised over $50,000,000 (and counting) on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and various equity crowdfunding platforms, as well as via B2C/B2B digital marketing campaigns across many global businesses.

Serdar Mizrakci is co-founder and CEO of Element Farms. When he moved to the U.S. from Turkey, Serdar was struck by the lack of access to tasty, local, and fresh produce, particularly greens. Never one to pass up a challenge, Serdar combined his aptitude for engineering and entrepreneurship with his appetite for really good food to found Element Farms. Serdar earned a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial engineering from Sabanci University in Istanbul and an MBA from Cornell University. Prior to founding Element Farms, Serdar founded an industrial robotics startup that improved industrial packaging processes.