Board of Directors
Kang Sun
Kang Sun is President and Chief Executive Officer of Amprius. Kang has over 20 years business creation and management experience in various industries. He has led business at Fortune 500 companies as well as startup ventures.
Kang was President & Chief Operating Officer of JA Solar (NASDAQ:JASO), Managing Director and Chief Strategy Officer of New Business and New Products Division at Applied Materials, Vice President of New Venture Business and General Manager of Optical Device Business at Honeywell, and Vice President of New Business and Technology at Oce. Among his venture activities, he was Chief Executive Officer of RayTracker Inc, Chief Executive Officer of Index Technologies Inc., Vice President of FlexICs and Microfabrica. Kang received his Ph.D. degree in Materials Science from Brown University.
Yi Cui
Yi Cui is the co-founder of Amprius and leads a research group focused on exploring nanoscale phenomena for energy conversion, electronics, and nanobiotechnology at Stanford University. His group develops nanowire and nanocrystal materials for energy storage, solar cell and memory devices. Their expertise includes nanomaterials synthesis, characterization, single nanostructure property measurement, device fabrication and testing.
Prof. Cui is the first person to demonstrate nanowire field effect biosensors. He has 32 publications related to nanowires and nanocrystals including seven in Science and Nature. His most recent breakthrough is in nanowire Li-ion battery electrodes with ultrahigh energy density (Nature Nanotechnology 3, 31-35 (2008). He has presented his work in over 70 invited talks at conferences, universities, and research centers around the world.
Mark Platshon
Mark co-founded Amprius with Dr. Cui and joined VantagePoint after serving as a Venture Partner at Trident Capital and at XSeed Capital. Mark has over 20 years of experience as CEO of several Silicon Valley companies including Idetek, an environmental and food diagnostics company, ELO, the pioneer and leader in touchscreens, Zing, an online photography company, and most recently, Capnia, a specialty pharmaceutical company. Mark earned a B.S.E. in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering from the University of Michigan, did graduate work in Nuclear Engineering at the Westinghouse Naval Reactor School and received his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. As a Navy lieutenant, Mark had a joint Navy and Department of Energy appointment to the staff of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover.
Don Dixon
Don Dixon is a co-founder of Trident Capital and has been a Managing Director since 1993. From 1988 to 1993, Don was Co-President of Partech International, a private equity fund manager associated with Banque Paribas. From 1983 to 1988, he was a Managing Director of Alex. Brown & Sons. Earlier in his career, Don was a Vice President of Morgan Stanley & Co. and a Senior Account Officer at Citibank, N.A.
Don serves as a director of AccountNow, Advanced Payment Solutions, ByteMobile, Clarus Systems, Merchant e-Solutions, Neohapsis, Profex, Qualys, RoyaltyShare, Solexant and Syndero. He is also on the investment committee of Mustang Ventures, an affiliated China fund of Trident Capital Fund VI.
Mike Danaher
Michael Danaher is a partner in the corporate and securities practice at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where he has practiced for 20 years. He provides general corporate representation to public and private companies in technology and life sciences industries. Mike's transactional work includes private financings, public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate partnerships, both domestic and cross-border.
Mike has one of the most active practices in the country representing venture-backed companies. He chairs the committee responsible for promoting innovation in the firm's venture capital practice and also serves on the investment committee for the firm's affiliated fund, the WS Investment Company. In addition, Mike previously served as a member of the firm's Policy Committee.