Sam Molyneux

Worth knowing

Sam has taken research out of a university lab and turned it into products institutions actually buy, first for scientific publishing and now for buildings, where he helps operators measure air changes per hour and prove compliance with a brand new standard. He knows how to sell deep tech into slow, regulated markets and how a mission-aligned acquirer thinks.

Story

Sam was a PhD student in biomedical physics at the University of Toronto, doing cancer genomics research, when the problem of finding relevant papers became bigger than the papers. In 2010 he and his sister Amy founded Meta to fix it, building a discovery engine that researchers at thousands of institutes came to rely on and that Wired and TechCrunch covered closely. After the 2017 acquisition he turned to a different invisible problem: what people breathe indoors. Poppy, which he runs as co-CEO from Toronto and San Francisco, measures ventilation in real buildings, with an air tracer system, BreatheScore test kits, a partnership with Ainsworth and a measurement toolkit built with CerroZone.

Highlights

• Co-founder, Meta (acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, 2017)
• Co-CEO and co-founder, Poppy, indoor air safety monitoring
• ASHRAE Standard 241 committee, commissioning and maintenance subgroup
• Named to Canada's Top 40 Under 40
• Fast Company Most Creative People in Business