Introducing the Long Journey Residents

We’re excited to share the fourteen builders who will be participating in the Long Journey Residency at Edge Esmeralda 2025. This one-month program is a launchpad for people building ambitious, unconventional ideas, created in collaboration with Long Journey VC (early backers of companies like SpaceX, Notion, and DeepMind)

From synthetic biology to neural interfaces, fertility tech to agentic infrastructure, this year’s residents are tackling frontier problems across science, health, AI, and hardware. Over the next month, they’ll live and build together in Healdsburg, supported by Long Journey mentors, founder dinners, weekly demos, and the full Edge Esmeralda village.

We’re so excited to see what they build!

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Avery Krieger

Avery is building Constellation, a foundation-model platform that learns directly from neural, physiological, and behavioral streams to cure mental illness and power next-gen brain-computer interfaces.

At Edge Esmeralda, Avery will pilot a Living Lab to collect multimodal behavioral, physiological, and neural data, grounding a model that learns from real people in real life. Avery holds a PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford.

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Ayushi Sinha

Ayushi is building Turmerik, an AI-powered infrastructure platform to improve global clinical trial recruitment and protocol optimization. Validated across multiple countries, Turmerik aims to make clinical trials more equitable, faster, and radically effective by automating high-friction decisions in healthcare.

Ayushi received her MBA from Harvard Business School and graduated Cum Laude from Princeton University with a degree in Computer Science.

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Eleanor Junru Ye

Eleanor is building Stratium, a causal world model that transforms the firehose of global information into a living, LLM-leveraged graph of cause and effect.

She studied Applied Math and CS at Brown University with a focus on probabilistic inference and machine learning, beginning her career as a quant researcher at a hedge fund. Outside her work, Eleanor trains as a boxer, paints, dives, and ponders how meaning is made.

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Faheem Kajee

Faheem is building toward a vision of personal AI twins creating parallel worlds where digital versions of ourselves interact and surface opportunities back to their human counterparts.

He is a multi-time founder, previously launching ventures like Moment and Seen, and is deeply interested in how AI twins can interact with each other to provide relevant information to human users.

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Gigi Gotz

Gigi is building Upstream, a platform helping men improve their fertility and epigenetic health through personalized, gamified protocols.

Her 10-week bootcamp for men examines 100+ health metrics and 30+ biomarkers, resulting in a ~3x increase in fertility. Previously, Gigi co-founded Batelle, a product for parents to solve their children's sleep issues, and studied Jurisprudence at Oxford.

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Keoni Gandall

Keoni is building a software-defined biology lab to automate wet-lab experiments at low cost.

This platform unlocks biotech innovation for independent researchers and startups by massively lowering the barrier to entry. For the past 2 years, Keoni has been building synthetic DNA assembly robots in his bedroom, previously working in directed evolution and mitochondrial engineering at UCI and leading the FreeGenes Project at Stanford.

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Laura Turner

Laura is building a next-gen synthetic biology platform to reprogram flowers into health-enhancing biofactories, starting with domesticated saffron.

With a degree in chemistry from Oxford and experience supporting over $200M in early-stage climate and life science investments, Laura is focused on unlocking a new frontier at the intersection of longevity, natural therapeutics, and onshored bioproduction.

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Matteo Vinao Carl

Matteo is developing a scalable, non-invasive neural interface to detect brain structural changes using off-the-shelf EEG. His work seeks to radically lower the cost of early detection for dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases, replacing expensive MRI scans.

As a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London and neuroimaging analyst at Connectome Health, he develops algorithms to detect traveling waves and explore how they shape cognition.

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Max Heald

Max is building Refs, an open lattice of micro-personal websites that act as digital calling cards and self-assemble into a people-powered map of the internet. No feeds, no gatekeepers, just pure reference.

Max has spent time at Union Square Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, and is also a filmmaker.

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Meg McNulty

Meg is building Cosmic Labs, which is rethinking the network stack for AGI-era systems where agentic infrastructure needs to make real-time decisions under pressure.

Before Cosmic, Meg led operations and go-to-market across AI, quantum, and national security in both startups and government.

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Miles Segal

Miles is building a lightning-fast ASIC foundry that repurposes vintage nanofabrication gear to deliver custom digital chips in 24 hours across New York City, and within 48 hours anywhere in the U.S.

He spends his days perfecting old-school lithography, deposition, and etch recipes between Columbia University’s cleanroom and a garage lab in Brooklyn, turning yesterday’s processes into tomorrow’s just-in-time silicon service.

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Neha Desaraju

Neha and Mackay are building Squaretower Markets, a synthetic derivatives platform enabling speculation and hedging on the price of on-demand GPU compute.

The platform offers cash-settled futures contracts denominated in USDC, designed for AI startups, GPU renters, and traders. Neha is a recent CS graduate from UT Austin who trained large vision and language models.

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Mackay Grant

Mackay (with Neha above) is building the market microstructure behind Squaretower Markets, drawing on a past life as trader, painter, nonprofit lead, and lifelong tinkerer while living full-time in an SF hacker house.

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Sunir Kishan Manandhar

Sunir is building autonomous systems to bring full autonomy to American ports.

Born in Kathmandu and a junior national swimmer for Nepal, Sunir moved to the United States alone at 16 with $700 to found Meridian, backed by Emergent Ventures and other investors. He built a self-driving car from scratch using a Raspberry Pi, servo drivers, and deep-learning autopilot, and is now tackling container-tracking infrastructure.

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Want to follow their progress? We’ll be sharing updates from the Long Journey cohort throughout the month. Make sure to follow along on X @JoinEdgeCity.

— Edge Esmeralda Team ☀️