Roham Gharegozlou
Playmaker
Skills
Product design
Corporate strategy
Go-to-market
Find Roham at
Roham Gharegozlou
Playmaker
You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop. - Rumi

Roham is founder and CEO of Axiom Zen, an award-winning venture studio that specializes in applying emerging technologies to unsolved business problems. Axiom Zen was named first among Canada’s Most Innovative Companies by Canadian Business.

Products developed by Axiom Zen have touched 200+ million consumers and are used by the world’s leading companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, and NASA, as well as by eminent academic institutions and government organizations. They pride themselves in diversity of talent: a team of ~80 creatives includes published authors, over a dozen former founders, diversity from 20+ national origins, and decades of collective experience at startups and Fortune 500s alike.

Axiom Zen has been working with bitcoin and various forms of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies since 2014. Currently the company has two public projects in development: Cornerstone, a real estate transaction platform developed in partnership with Ross McCredie, former founder and CEO of Sotheby’s Canada, and Dave Carson, former COO at Sotheby’s Global; and CryptoKitties, the world's most successful blockchain game.

Prior to founding Axiom Zen, Roham served with the Rising Tide Fund based in Silicon Valley as a partner focused on seed-stage investments including AdStage, ZOZI (acquired by Peek), and Lucibel (IPO:Euronext). Rising Tide has since pioneered investments in several leaders in the blockchain space including Brave and Blockstack. Before Rising Tide, Roham worked with Newbury Ventures, a technology-focused venture fund with success stories including ZONG (acquired by PayPal), Sentillion (acquired by Microsoft), and NextBio (acquired by Illumina).

Roham's seed investment portfolio includes customer communication leader Intercom, mobile photography marketplace Twenty20, and financial technology provider TeamPay, as well as sales technology platform Tout (acquired by Marketo), messaging app Blink (acquired by Yahoo!), sports media startup KYCK (acquired by NBC Sports), healthy living commerce startup Ecomom (acquired by Greencupboards), and location-based social network Urbantag (acquired by Tagged).

Roham splits his time between San Francisco and Vancouver. He holds a bachelor's degree in Economics and dual bachelor's and master's degrees in Biological Sciences from Stanford University. He speaks regularly at conferences and to private audiences worldwide on topics including blockchain and distributed ledger technology, cryptoeconomics, innovation and corporate strategy, and the role of technology in health and sports.

Roham enjoys:
Solving interesting problems / Working with amazing people / Blockchain