329. Be a Learner not a Knower with Liran Belenzon

Liran Belenzon

After achieving his commerce and law degrees and selling his first startup, he immigrated to Canada to do his MBA at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. While at Rotman, he worked in the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), where he met three Ph.D. students—all immigrants like him—who were working to discover how AI could solve the declining productivity of drug discovery. Together, they founded BenchSci in 2015 and launched the ASCEND™ platform in 2023. Since their time at CDL, BenchSci has gone from four co-founders to a more than 350-employee operation that has raised more than $200 million from top investors, including Generation Investment Management, TCV, iNovia Capital, F-Prime, Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund), and Golden Ventures, and works with 16 of the world's top 20 pharma companies, over 4,500 academic institutions, and more than 50,000 scientists.

As CEO, Liran strives to inspire team members to be the best version of themselves and positively impact the world. Liran is a 2021 Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist and is passionate about using AI to exponentially increase the speed and quality of life-saving research.