Company Info for discoverelement.com | IcebreakerMembers
Barbara Iyayi is an experienced entrepreneur and investor with 20 years’ experience spanning venture capital, private equity, investment banking/M&A and technology. Barbara has founded, invested in, advised and taken board roles in FinTech, financial services and blockchain companies, in addition to VC and growth equity platforms globally.
She is the CEO and Co-Founder of Liquid Credit, an institutional-grade stablecoin payment liquidity platform for FinTechs in emerging markets global trade. She is also the Founder & Managing Partner of Unicorn Growth Capital, a pioneer VC fund for the future of finance, investing in blockchain-powered financial infrastructure. Unicorn Growth has invested in early-stage companies across stablecoin payments, real world asset tokenization and embedded finance, helping them scale across Africa and emerging markets with high crypto adoption. Barbara is also the Board Chair of Green Flare, that aims to transform gas flares into clean energy to power data centers (Bitcoin Mining & AI) backed by CMT Digital and Luxor.
Barbara was on the board of the Web Foundation, an international non-profit focused on digital equality, founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Previously, she was the Board Chair of Appzone, a leading regulated blockchain payments platform in Africa. She was also the Chief Growth Officer of Element, Inc - a pioneer of mobile deep learning (AI) and co-founded by Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Facebook and Turing Award Laureate, where she partnered with financial service providers and FinTechs across US, Southeast Asia and Africa.
Previously, Barbara was part of the founding team of Atlas Mara, an LSE listed financial services platform co-founded by Bob Diamond, ex-CEO of Barclays Bank, which was the first ever entity to raise over $1bn to invest in, operate and manage financial institutions in Africa. As the Regional Head for M&A & Investments, Barbara led acquisitions, investments and FinTech in banks in 7 countries in Africa.
Prior to Atlas Mara, Barbara worked on global transactions of over $15bn at various financial institutions, including as Vice President, Investment Banking at JPMorgan, New York, where amongst other transactions, she led IPOs for Delphi Automative (Aptiv PLC) and Nord Anglia Education. Prior to that, she worked at UBS Investment Bank and JPMorgan Private Bank in New York. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Columbia University, and an MBA at Harvard Business School. 
My main interests are in applied machine learning. My scientific methodology includes hypotheses prioritization, back testing, pre-post testing, AB testing and offline analysis. I have 8+ years technical management experience and another 8+ years doing individual contributor work in the field of machine learning.
Leading the Search Engine Marketing Applied Research team for 3+ years at Expedia Group, my team optimized our bidding algorithm to increase marketing revenue by an average of USD$17 million / year, measured by AB tests. As an machine learning scientist working with the Fraud and Risk department, I was involved in various Generative AI projects, including agentic AI, and demonstrated gains by implementing advanced deep learning models to better detect Fraud. My tech stack was PyTorch, Databricks (AWS, MLFlow, Notebooks), SQL, PySpark, and Apache Airflow.
At Twitter, I developed and maintained Lua Torch and Tensorflow deep learning and decision forest libraries, including unit testing, documentation, tutorials and ML Ops. I also improved hate speech detection and advertising models.
Working in New York City for a deep learning startup, I was a top active contributor to Lua Torch (the predecessor of PyTorch). As part of the Torch ecosystem, I developed and maintained the Torch RNN package for many years, as well as other packages. I worked with CUDA, C and Lua.
I was trained as an Signals Officer in the Canadian Forces. I served 9 years and retired a Captain in the Canadian Army. I never got deployed oversees, but I worked in IT for many years, leading large teams of 20+. I oversaw layoffs, promotions and many spreadsheets. I even had the opportunity to consult briefly at the Canadian Space Agency to develop a information security plan for the RADARSAT constellation project. 
Rebecca is an impact-driven public health leader working at the nexus of AI, digital technology, and global healthcare. For over a decade, she has worked with technology companies, foundations, non-profits, and governments to advance health equity across low resource communities. This multi-stakeholder approach informs her work at the intersection of AI, public health, and policy, including the use of AI in health systems in low- and middle-income countries.
Rebecca currently leads strategic health partnerships at OpenAI. She previously built and led the AI & Digital Health portfolio at the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, a philanthropy committed to bridging the frontiers of AI and social impact, and served as Director of Global Health Initiatives at Element, a deep learning company co-founded by Yann LeCun. Throughout her career, Rebecca has partnered with organizations such as the World Health Organization, the Global Fund, Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Wellcome to advance innovation in public health.
Rebecca holds a Masters in Health Policy and Global Health from the Yale School of Public Health and a BA in Political Science from Yale University. She is a Carnegie Ethics Fellow, a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations, an alumni World Economic Forum Global Shaper, and was previously selected as an AI XPRIZE Semi-Finalist and Gavi INFUSE Pacesetter. 
➤ More than 9 years of experience in software development, ranging from on-premise endpoint products to SaaS Cloud services.
➤ Familiar with large-scale/high-concurrency microservices architecture, Java, Spring Boot, Kotlin, Scala, Python, C#, C++, SQL, NoSQL, AWS, GCP, Azure, K8s, Jenkins, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Scrum in Agile development, TDD and SSDLC.
➤ Deliver solutions with extensibility, stability, and reliability for sustainable development and to create win-win situations with customers.
➤ Enjoy taking initiative and working on a cross-functional team. 
