Startups vs Big Corporations with CEO Tara Akhavan

Tara Akhavan went from developer to systems architect to analyst to Ph.D. student to CEO. She'll be sharing her journey from patenting a Perceptual Display Platform Vision (PDP Vision) technology, to founding Faurecia IRYStec Inc. (formerly known as IRYStec Inc.), an innovation center that got acquired by Faurecia in April 2020. Tara founded IRYStec in 2015 and served as CTO for 5 years to introduce eye-friendly display technology to the automotive industry.

Prior to founding IRYStec, she was awarded for scaling an Operations and Maintenance Center (OMC) product in the Telecommunications industry, all the way from analysis and design to deployment in a 3GPP mobile network with 20 Million subscribers. Tara obtained a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, a master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence and a Ph.D. in Image Processing and Computer Vision from Vienna University of Technology. Tara is the Canadian Committee member for International Committee for Illumination (CIE) and the Marketing Vice-Chair for the Society of Information Displays (SID).

Tara has been recognized as an Entrepreneur of the Year in 2019 by EoY Canada as well as the founder of top 20 Innovative start-ups in Canada in 2018 by CIX, the Canadian’s Largest Investor Conference.

We'll be speaking about how she built and sold her startup and about moving from startup to a big corporation.