Shannon Knee is the co-founder and CEO of Cetos Water, overseeing the commercialization of the TSSE technology.

Shannon brings deep expertise in commercializing products and technologies through her career as a private and public markets investor at Goldman Sachs’s Principal Investment Area, Glenview Capital and Cornell Capital. Through these roles, she was responsible for deploying over $1.5bn of capital across the industrials, healthcare, and media and telecom landscapes, driving significant value creation through active collaboration with management teams. Prior to Cetos, she operated an independent consulting firm helping growth companies commercialize their best-in-class products across the tech, consumer, and health & wellness landscapes. Shannon also worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, advising large institutional clients on mergers and acquisitions, capital raising, and strategic financial planning strategies.

Shannon has a BSE with concentrations in finance and management from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania where she held distinctions as a Joseph Wharton Scholar and Benjamin Franklin Scholar.

Dr. Ngai Yin Yip is a co-founder and CTO of Cetos Water, and is the inventor of the TSSE technology who continues to push the technology forward.

Dr. Ngai Yin Yip received his Ph.D., M.S., and M.Ph. in Chemical and Environmental Engineering from Yale University, and B.Eng. in Civil and Environmental Engineering (Minor in Business Administration) from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He joined Columbia University in 2015 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering.

Dr. Yip’s research interest is in advancing technologies and innovations to address challenges at the nexus of water, energy, and the environment. Currently, the research in his group is focused on i) desalination of ultrahigh salinity brines, ii) zero-liquid discharge technologies, iii) advancing more sustainable decentralized wastewater management approaches, iv) efficient conversion of low-grade heat to useful work, and v) development of better membranes for environmental applications.

His dissertation work on novel membrane technologies for the sustainable production of energy and water earned the CH2M Hill/AEESP Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award and the Henry Prentiss Becton Graduate Prize in 2015. He has authored over 20 peer-reviewed publications and has won the ES&T Best Papers (second runner-up in 2013).

Sarah Cone is a co-founder of Cetos Water and the President.

She is also the founder and Managing Partner of Social Impact Capital, a venture capital firm that produces top decile returns by investing in the earliest stages in companies that are solving the world’s most difficult problems. Cetos Water was incubated at Social Impact Capital, in collaboration with DCVC, due to the pressing need for widespread, low-cost desalination solutions and emerged from a comprehensive review of all of the desalination technology in the world.

Earlier in her career, Sarah worked for the consulting firm CTI, helping to restructure the R&D departments of large Japanese corporations. Sarah has also been an Associate at Illuminate Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital fund investing in B2B SaaS. She got her start in venture capital working for the “emerging technologies” venture capital group at Omidyar Network. Sarah has also worked in the legal department of Google, at the technology law firm Fenwick & West, Amazon.com, and at the technology policy non-profit Public Knowledge.

Sarah has a BA in interdisciplinary studies from the Evergreen State College and a JD from UC Berkeley. At UC Berkeley, Sarah won the Advocacy Award for persuasive writing, the Jurisprudence Award for academic excellence, and her thesis “Reforming Federal Tax Policy to Support Social Entrepreneurs” received honors.