Building Solutions Zero to One at early stage startups, scaleups, and
multi-national enterprises
Dr. Med Mehrbod approached technology from a different direction. From an early age, he had a natural inclination toward strategic thinking, systems thinking, and understanding how different pieces of a complex problem fit together.
But he also realized something early: To analyze people’s pain points, you need to understand how different people think. At 22, immediately after completing his BSc, he deliberately left his comfort zone and moved to Japan.
For two years, he immersed himself in Japanese culture, language, and ways of thinking. The experience reinforced a lesson that would become central to his career: Different people can look at the same problem and see entirely different patterns. That perspective became valuable when he was admitted to the joint UC Berkeley–UCSF Bioengineering program.
At Berkeley, he joined the computational research work of Professor Mohammad Mofrad, a world-class lab where life is modeled by machines, and worked on computational proteomics and multi-scale biological modeling. His research tackled a scientific problem involving integrin, a key protein with important implications for cancer biology.
Two highly respected research groups had produced apparently contradictory evidence about the protein. Mehrdad’s multi-scale modeling work helped reconcile those observations and provided a more coherent explanation of the underlying behavior.
It was an early lesson in something that would later define his product career: When apparently contradictory pieces of information exist, the answer is often not choosing one side. It is finding the system that explains both.
While at Berkeley, he also completed intensive training at Berkeley Haas. There, he encountered Professor Schwartz, a legendary management teacher whose influence changed the direction of his career.
Mehrdad realized that he did not want to spend his career isolated in a cubicle. He wanted to work with people. Different disciplines. Different ideas. Different problems. Different ways of thinking.
So after completing his PhD in 2014, he moved into the world of startups and product development. He joined a startup incubator as an AI product manager, working across multiple companies and industries and contributing to a patent.
Around the same time, he began working with Maziar on a nonprofit initiative mentoring students. The two were already developing a relationship that would eventually become part of Elementera’s foundation.
Then came his first entrepreneurial venture. Working with a co-founder, Mehrdad established a company focused on democratizing 3D bioprinting.
Within less than two years, the company had become one of the world’s highly recognized 3D bioprinting companies.
His next challenge came from financial technology. Working with a multinational asset management firm, he led the creation of a jargon-free robo-advisor designed to help ordinary people use mutual funds to set and achieve financial goals. He assembled and led a team of 12 developers, designers, and product managers to build the Bambo application. The app was later offered to millions of their customers. Later, after moving to Toronto, his relationship with Maziar and Mojtaba deepened further.
Mehrdad worked closely with Carl Rodriguez, founder and CEO of SOTI, the Canadian market leader in enterprise mobility management, to develop SOTI XSight, an enterprise operational efficiency platform.
His role sat directly between technology and the market: conducting discovery sessions, demonstrating the product, gathering enterprise feedback, and translating customer needs into product decisions.
Within nine months of its first public release, the product generated more than 350 enterprise sales, representing approximately 160,000 devices across 48 countries and securing approximately $6.6 million in revenue.
He then joined ZayZoon, a Deloitte Technology Fast company, where he established the company’s risk management practice. Within his first year, the work reduced the company’s total loss rate by more than 23% while maintaining its growth trajectory.
Across these experiences, Mehrdad developed a distinctive perspective: Technology alone does not create value.
Value comes from understanding a problem deeply, understanding the people experiencing it, and building a system that connects the two.
That perspective would eventually become critical to Elementera. Because the problem Elementera set out to solve was not simply a technical problem. It was a communication problem.