About us

Kazem Zandi has been the founder and CEO of OSCP since the company was founded. As an entrepreneur, he has led business development, strategic partnerships and funding activities while maturing the technology and putting together the core team. Prior to OSCP he worked at C2MI as a senior process engineer for 3 years and at Defence R&D Canada as a senior optoelectronics devices engineer for two years.

He holds a Ph.D. degree in Engineering Physics in the field of Micro-Photonics from Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal university, where his research focus was on the development of Integrated-Optics based Inertial Sensors (Accelerometers and Gyroscopes). He also holds a Master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in Applied Physics in the field of Photonics.

Holding 12 patents, he has over 20 years of industrial experience in Lasers, Photonics, Optoelectronics and MEMS devices, with hands-on experience in MEMS and microsystems.

Tech executive passionate about building and growing innovative businesses from ideation to mass adoption. Akram started his career in Silicon Valley in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, then Merrill Lynch and UBS where he was a VP of Investments. In 2009, founded Social IQ, one of the world's first influence marketing startups. As a head of product strategy and business development at Quanergy, Akram established the company's business in mapping, robotics and mobility markets. He also pioneered the use of 3D Lidar technology for smart cities mainly in intelligent traffic solutions, and security, and took its commercialization globally. In 2019 Akram joined AEye as a VP of business development and strategic initiatives, where he built and grew the Industrial and mobility Lidar global business from pre-product to IPO.

During his investment banking career, Akram led investments in the semiconductor and clean tech industries including RMI (Sold to Netlogic), Force10 (Sold to DELL), Peregrine Semiconductor, and Bloom Energy (NYSE: BE). Currently Akram is an investor in Averroes. AI, Journify, and other AI startups in stealth mode. Akram holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and an MBA from University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business.

Danny has joined the OSCP team as a Commercial Consultant, helping to shape the commercial strategy of the business and drive exponential growth in the coming years.

Previously, he has held a range of commercial leadership and general management positions in Fortune500 and FTSE100 businesses. From 2010 through to 2020, Danny built and lead large teams at DHL Supplychain, RS Components and Schneider Electric, where he was responsible for scaling the Electric Vehicle Charging business across UK, Ireland & Netherlands.

Following a successful decade in corporate, he moved into the SaaS start up space, leading at AMFG as Chief Revenue Officer, through a pivotal growth phase, achieving a $100m+ company valuation, securing investment from Intel.

He has operated in the blockchain industry as a CEO of a WEB3 trading business, having successfully raised over $4m in early stage rounds, and launching the first on-chain proprietary trading platform, a b2b-2c application with over $500m USD in trading volume achieved.

Ziad Shukri is the Director of Engineering at OSCP, bringing more than 25+ years of extensive experience in semiconductor devices development and commercialization scale up. He has brought to market multiple products from conception to high volume production.

Working for 9 years at Teledyne DALSA, Ziad was responsible for new product introduction of custom CCD image sensors for high-speed imaging for aerospace and industrial applications, with the focus on foundry process integration, yield, and reliability. While there, he also managed automotive MEMS pressure sensors and accelerometers foundry product introduction and product yield. Earlier in his career, Ziad was fab manager at Group VI Semiconductor, and manufacturing manager at Redlen Technologies and Anrad corporation (now Analogic). He also consulted for 5NPlus and Hologic.

Ziad holds a Masters and a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering (in the field of Materials and Devices) both from McGill University.

Richard Williston is the Director of Operations for OSCP, with 30+ years of experience with start-ups in microsystems, compound semiconductors, MEMS and advanced materials, and has extensive manufacturing and test experience in Ring Laser Gyroscope (RLG) production.

He has held Director Level positions with Nemsor Technology (CTO), Advanced Diamond Technologies, Microbridge Technologies, BigBangwidth, Crystalline Manufacturing Ltd., as well as senior process development roles with Nortel Networks, Com Dev International, Delphax Systems and Litton Systems. He has led business development activities for Bluewater Technology Access Centre and in North America for INEX Microsystems (UK). He has held board positions with Edmonton Council for Advanced Technology, Groupe NanoXplore and Tech-Access Canada.

He holds an MSc degree in Materials Engineering from the University of Western Ontario studying RIE kinetics and a BSc in Applied Physics from the University of Waterloo in solid-state physics.

Cornel is the founding partner of 2050 Capital and focuses on the UK/EU market. Among other deals, Cornel led the seed investment rounds in Hadean (distributed HPC), AMFG (digital factory software), Vaticle (knowledge graph type db and query language), and Origin Sciences (DNA sequencing cancer diagnostics). Cornel serves on several boards and advisory committees.

Complementary to 2050 Capital, Cornel heads the Chicago Booth Angels London chapter, was instrumental to scaling the investment group globally, and is involved with various University of Chicago venture initiatives.

In his earlier career Cornel built and scaled two ventures in the USA to multi-million exits, was a strategy and deal consultant with L.E.K. in London, and a corporate VC with the World Gold Council. Cornel also worked on energy transition engagements with Fieldstone Capital. Prior to settling in London, Cornel lived and worked in the USA for over a decade and in China & South-East Asia for four years. Cornel holds a MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Mr. Gambacorta joined the OSCP Board of Directors in October 2023. Mr. Gambacorta currently serves as the General Manager for Cognyte Software (CGNT-NASDAQ) a publicly traded data analytics company. Mr. Gambacorta also served on the Board of Directors of Leddartech an automotive ADAS and AD software company. He also was Vice President of Sales and Business Development at Immervision, as well as Vice President of Sales, Business Development and Support for Octasic from 2001 to 2021. He also held several leadership positions at NMS Communications (NMSS-NASDAQ), including as Director of Business Development. He holds a B. degree in Electrical Engineering from Ecole Polytechnique (University of Montreal) and a Master of Business Administration degree from Cornell University.