Meet the Team
Founders
Bryan Guido Hassin
Co-Founder and CEO
Bryan has spent 25 years building hardware and deep technology companies. He has founded or led eight startups across four continents, five of which were acquired, and raised more than $100M across them. He joined DexMat's board in 2022 and became CEO in 2023. Since then DexMat has raised $11M in equity, secured more than $10M in non-dilutive federal funding, scaled production capacity 20x and cut cost 96%.
Before DexMat he co-founded Third Derivative, the climate technology accelerator that mobilized more than $4B into early-stage companies. He holds degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from Rice University and an MBA from IMD.
Matteo Pasquali, PhD
Founder and Chief Science Advisor
Matteo co-invented the fiber-spinning technology behind Galvorn with Nobel laureate Rick Smalley at Rice University and led the work after Smalley's death in 2005. His lab laid the scientific foundation for making continuous carbon nanotube fiber at industrial scale, and he leads DexMat's science today. He is the A. J. Hartsook Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice and founding director of the Carbon Hub, a partnership of more than 20 organizations across four continents. He and his students have published more than 230 articles and more than 30 patents and patent applications, cited over 20,000 times. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dmitri Tsentalovich, PhD
Co-Founder and Director of Product Innovation
Dmitri's doctoral work at Rice University established how the properties of individual nanotubes translate into the performance of a spun fiber, the understanding DexMat's production still rests on. In 17 years on this material he has led the technical team that scaled production and cut cost, and he has secured more than $7M in grant and SBIR funding from the U.S. Air Force, NASA, the NSF and the Department of Energy. Today he works directly with strategic customers to design Galvorn into their products and to structure multi-year supply agreements. He has more than 30 publications cited over 4,700 times and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Manufacturing and Industry.
Leadership
Oliver Dewey, PhD
Chief Technology Officer
Oliver co-invented the scalable version of the spinning process in the Pasquali lab at Rice University and, as one of DexMat's early hires, carried it out of the university and onto the factory floor. As CTO he leads the technology roadmap, the Houston manufacturing site and the R&D program. Before his PhD he ran brewing and packaging production at Anheuser-Busch. He has more than 20 peer-reviewed publications on fiber formation, property control and manufacturing.
Jill Dupré
Chief of Staff and General Counsel
Jill runs day-to-day operations, board governance and the legal function across IP, contracts and corporate matters. She ran DexMat's seed fundraising end to end, negotiated the company's IP licenses with Rice University, and negotiated DexMat's first commercial offtake agreement and its first joint development agreement with a Tier 1 global wire and cable manufacturer. Before DexMat she was Associate Director of the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she ran operations and taught graduate courses in technology law. She holds a JD from the University of Colorado School of Law and is a member of the Colorado bar.
Asena Hertz
Chief Marketing Officer
Asena leads brand, go-to-market strategy and the commercial pipeline, managing DexMat's sales and marketing functions. Before DexMat she spent eight years at Turbonomic, rising to VP of Product Marketing and building the cloud native segment that became a material factor in IBM's acquisition of the company for about $2 billion. She stayed through the integration as Program Director at IBM, adding product marketing for a second IBM acquisition. She graduated with honors from Middlebury College.
Team
Colin Young, PhD
Senior Research Scientist
Sofia Izaguirre
Technical Product Manager
Barivure Norbana
Production Technician
Cody Jones
Mechanical Engineer
Tyler Harris
Production Engineer
Will Toth
Technical Sales Engineer