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Santh Sathya Founder and CEO Santh Sathya founded LuftCar - an autonomous air and road mobility eVTOL mobility company in March 2021. He is also the CEO of LuftCar and serves on its board of directors. Santh deeply cares for environment sustainability and is a relentless innovator of technologies that solve complex problems, improve lives, build social equity and fuel progress. Before launching LuftCar, Santh served as the Director of Strategy for L3Harris, managing $ 2B P&L for the Sector CEO. Santh was head of systems engineering at Boeing - Insitu drones, and led Model Based Systems Engineering and digital twin development. He held a position as Vice President of Strategy for Johnson Controls joint venture in Asia Pacific, where he laid out a five year strategy for EVs, Electrification and Smart Cities, increasing revenue by 25% in energy and transportation markets. Santh managed operations for a $ 1B P&L at GE Energy, where he pioneered lean product development. Santh's greatest accomplishment was in developing and building 300 hydrogen fuel cell cars for Ford Motor Company. Santh has core expertise in hydrogen fuel cells, propulsion, AI architectures and lean start up. Santh has a MBA from the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, MS in mechanical engineering from Ohio University and BS in Mechanical Engineering from College of Engineering, Guindy. Santh also holds an Artificial Intelligence Strategy Certification from MIT. |
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Alan Spring
VP - Design Engineering As an avid sailor, scuba diver and private pilot, Mr. Spring has combined his excitement of fluid dynamics, engineering, and business development in both his personal and professional lives. Prior to joining LuftCar, Mr. Spring provided consulting for BarberWind Turbines before joining them as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Engineer, bringing a novel wind turbine design from concept to prototype development in 2017. Alan brings a strong entrepreneurial spirit to LuftCar. Leaving the large corporate environment, he joined a three-person engineering start-up in 1995. Thanks to the success and growth of the business, the company was soon acquired by QuEST Global, where Alan continued his career growth leading the successful integration of the two offices, and the continued growth and maturity of the engineering teams and the company as a whole. During his tenure, Alan served as the Engineering Director and Chief Engineer working in the Aviation and Power Generation Sectors covering diverse engineering programs, including multiple new product introductions. Alan holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Aerospace from The Ohio State University. |
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Doug Lampe
VP - Customer / Investor Relations and Digital Systems Doug Lampe is a member of our Executive Leadership Team at LuftCar. Doug puts his leadership qualities into marketing the LuftCar concept and building customer relations. Doug spent the previous six years with Deloitte Consulting as Vice President of Technical Architecture and Chief Architect leading multiple technology platforms. While serving with Deloitte, Mr. Lampe served as a leader within their Delivery Center practice through a time of growth from 400 to over 2,000 employees. Before joining Deloitte, Doug had a distinguished career at Lockheed Martin holding many technology-focused roles and leading teams performing both system integration and application development. His time at Lockheed provided insight into Supply Chain Management, Manufacturing, Quality Management, Product Support, and Engineering. Doug’s leadership in the area of data analytics was instrumental in Lockheed Martin becoming the first Department of Defense contractor to win the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Doug holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Florida and an M.S. in Engineering Management and Industrial Engineering from the University of Florida. He is also a graduate of Lockheed Martin's Operations Leadership Development Program. |
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Daphne Dixon
VP – Business Development – Americas Daphne is responsible for growing markets, customer acquisition, government relations and community engagement in the United States. Daphne has over ten years of experience working directly with municipal and community decision makers. Through her work as Executive Director of Live Green, she has implemented several metric driven programs and initiatives that support the 17 Global Sustainable Development Goals. Daphne has received Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training as well as Transformational Facilitation and Coaching training. Her key strengths are community outreach, facilitating community engagement discussions, developing trusted relationships with municipalities, businesses and community leaders, sharing information about the air quality and workforce benefits of hydrogen and air mobility technologies, and developing customer and investor relations globally. Daphne .is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles Nilesh Yagnik
VP - Growth and Investment For 30+ years, Nilesh has collaborated with the titans of FinTech including Amazon, PayPal and Venmo to create new experiences and products. As a member of the LuftCar leadership team, Nilesh will partner with municipalities, investors, and green energy champions to introduce revolutionary solutions and services. |
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Mini Suri
Advisor - Customer Discovery Mini is currently an advisory board member to LUFTCAR, where she assists in discovering customers and the team to understand customer expectations from a vehicle like LuftCar to make LuftCar a market fit product. Mini is the Co-founder and CEO of Velmeni, which is a visionary tech health startup that is pioneering AI-driven patient care. Mini was also Chief Customer Success Officer at Kore AI, where she led, managed, and scaled 100+ enterprise customers to adopt conversational AI solutions. She is also a board member of TiE Silicon Valley where she supports TiE’s mission of fostering tech entrepreneurship globally, and specifically, to build successful futures for empowering youths and young women. In the past, Mini has played the role as Uber’s COE Lead for Intelligent Automation, where she was responsible for automating manual processes to support business functions across Uber to help bend the cost curve. Prior to Uber, she drove Services Strategy 2020 at Citi as a Senior Vice President. A MBA from MIT, Sloan School of management and Master’s in Information technology from New Jersey Institute of Technology are few of her academic accomplishments. |
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Manzoor Ali
VP - Business Development for MENA Manzoor Ali is leading the marketing and business development team in Middle East region, responsible for LuftCar business growth and to increase the market presence in key markets in the region but not limited to KSA, UAE and Oman. He will be based in Dubai, UAE, main hub in connecting business to internationally and In his capacity he is responsible for connecting the partners in the Middle East Region. Ali is a coming with strong track record of 30 years. He served in different Telecom and IT verticals including Manufacturing, Telcom Operators, Systems, and solutions integration business. He was a part of major technology projects in India and ME region. His vast experience and leadership skills in technology, he aims to work towards LuftCar's growth plan and to build a strong bridge between regional partners and international team. Manzoor Ali is an alumni of Indian Institute of Management Jammu, holds a master’s degree in international business and Bachelor’s Degree in Electronics and Communication. |
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Gao Lio PhD
Technology Advisor He currently is the Lead for the group of Applied Energy Materials at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and his current research focuses on lithium battery R&D. He is the Principal Investigator in the U.S. DOE Battery for Advanced Transportation Technologies Program (BATT) and Solid-State Lighting Program (SSL). He also has been technical advisor and collaborator for General Motors, The Dow Chemical Company, 3M and many other leading global companies since 2001. His work has been published in Advanced Materials, Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Natural Communications etc, and received national and international awards including R&D 100 Award in 2013, International Meeting on Lithium Batteries (IMLB) most excellent paper award, University of California discovery grant award, and lately FMC Scientific Achievement Award. Gao has a PhD in Chemistry from Michigan State University and B.Sc. in Chemistry from Peking University. |
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Saleem Ahmed
President - MENA region The Middle East especially UAE and KSA are attracting pioneers in the field of aviation, especially green aviation. In his role at LuftCar, Saleem is keen to create LuftCar partnership with Government bodies and the private sector in the Middle East to revolutionize transportation (in ways not thought possible) while contributing to a better and cleaner world. Saleem is responsible for strategic growth of LuftCar market in the Middle East and North African region. Saleem has an educational background in Mechanical Engineering and brings a wealth of experience spanning over 25 years in banking and FinTech from the Middle East. He understands the strategic aspirations of governments in the Middle East and is highly knowledgeable about AAM markets in the MENA region. |
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Jan-Frederic Kulow
Advisor - European Markets LuftCar Advisory Board Member Jan-Frederic Kulow is the LuftCar representative for the European market, guiding LuftCar business growth in Europe and acting as a touch point for European partners. Jan is a strong aviation professional with managerial and piloting experience. He helped building up one German airline start-up by setting up a business intelligence department and being responsible for the airline’s strategy assessment, controlling, reporting and data management. He has piloted aircrafts for the Airbus A320 Family. Jan supported the development of aerospace industry with governmental mandate from North Rhine Westphalia, Germany. Currently, he is managing operational risks and safety for a large consulting firm in Aachen, Germany. Jan-Frederic holds a master’s degree in International Management- Aviation Business form the German International University (former IUBH) and bachelor’s degree in Aviation Business and Piloting from the HTW Saar, Germany. In addition, Jan has secured various certificates with aviation reference and data management. |
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Mary Olson
Startup Consultant Mary Olson joined LuftCar's team with great enthusiasm for engaging the category-defining brand and start-up venture. Mary says that it is a privilege to share her experience and insights and help shape the messaging. Mary finds herself thoroughly engaged in building investor relations, specifically with those who have deep tech in their portfolio. She is committed to LuftCar’s goal to build a hydrogen-powered modular autonomous air and road mobility (AARM) vehicle predestined to outpace the industry. As the co-founder of Brand Intelligence, an award-winning design, web development, and marketing consulting group, Mary and her team care deeply about environmental sustainability and providing marketing leadership to select organizations ranging from LuftCar and Sumitomo Chemical Company of America to help better the world. |
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