Bio

David Brown is the Founding Managing Partner of Impellent Ventures, a preseed / seed stage venture capital firm based in UNY that invests nationally. In addition to capital, the firm focuses on connecting startups with the nation’s best founders, mentors, and downstream capital resources.

Mr. Brown has been a community builder, startup investor and operator, and mentor for over a decade. He has supported hundreds of companies, held events for over 14,000 tech leaders per annum, and has applied venture principles to both for profit and nonprofit entities. Mr. Brown’s work has been affiliated with programs such as Techstars, MassChallenge, Harvard iLab, and Babson College and has been covered in many national publications.

Mr. Brown is a boomerang to Rochester from Boston, where he held roles as the Vice President of Innovation Leadership for the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, Director of Partnerships at ZappRx, a healthcare IT startup that has raised $42M before sale, and as the Executive Director of Technology Underwriting Greater Good (TUGG), the philanthropic arm of Boston’s technology startup ecosystem. He is also a Venture Partner and Limited Partner in several prominent national venture funds, and the co-founder of the Finger Lakes Summit.

Mr. Brown graduated with a BA in psychology and leadership studies, from Williams College. He also holds an MBA in entrepreneurship, summa cum laude, from Babson College.

In his spare time, aside from chasing around his two young boys, he sits on numerous nonprofit boards and economic development counsels and is an avid skier and golfer.

Sharon Samjitsingh is a global technology commercialization leader with more than 25 years of experience bringing complex innovations to market across sustainability, advanced manufacturing, and healthcare. She believes climate and health are inseparable because sustainability is ultimately about protecting human life and reducing harm at scale. Sharon is known for thinking and building in systems: navigating real-world constraints, externalities, and unintended consequences to turn breakthrough ideas into scalable solutions with measurable human impact.

Previously, Sharon served as Director of Commercialization at Sweetwater Energy, where she invented and developed the world’s first biomass processing system proven at commercial scale; technology now operating internationally. She holds three patents in sustainability and several in healthcare, and has led large-scale commercialization efforts across multiple sectors, including managing a $150M innovation and capital portfolio spanning 14 industries. Her work also includes international trade and economic development, having led a joint venture between two multinational conglomerates that helped create a free trade zone leveraging global treaty frameworks.

Sharon is currently the CEO of Health Care Originals (HCO), where she leading a team committed to transforming chronic respiratory care with proprietary sensing, care and AI, applying the same commercialization rigor required to scale sustainability innovation in regulated markets. She has been featured in Forbes, named Technology Woman of the Year, and honored in The Names Dress, a sustainable 3D-printed installation celebrating the Top 300 women in STEAM across all time.