Organizing Team

Anoosheh Kalantari is the Founder and CEO of Crimson Founders, a platform connecting MIT and Harvard-affiliated startups with global investors and industry partners. She serves as the COO and a board member at Six Star Bulk Bag, a leading packaging manufacturing company in the Middle East. She founded one of the largest Manufacturing Industry Associations in the region and is an investor and board member at Guofu Hydrogen Energy Equipment Technologies.

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Anoosheh has played an integral role in various MIT initiatives. She is one of the founders and organizers of The Annual MIT Female Founders Pitch Competition in New York City. Her efforts have also included organizing distinguished speaker events at MIT featuring influential figures such as General David Petraeus, Dr. Jordan Peterson, and Dr. Andrew Lo. Anoosheh holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, a BASc in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto, and an AAS in Fashion Design from Parsons School of Design. She pursued a BFA in Fashion Design from Parsons School of Design.

Karen has spent the last 15 years of her career building and scaling mission-driven, high-impact start-ups in healthcare, environmental sustainability, education, and agriculture. She has been a part of 3 early-stage teams that went on to make successful exits (two through acquisition and one through IPO). Karen built the first claims team at Oscar Health (IPO 2021), led product development and go-to-market launch for Ecological (acquired 2013) and most recently led product and go-to-market strategy for Springtide Child Developement  (acquired 2023).

 

She is currently supporting Trehaus to lead the launch of their Edtech platform as a fractional CPO and is working as a founder on a stealth B2B Saas platform.  Karen is passionate about building teams and crafting products that will solve meaningful problems. She is a graduate of MIT’s Sloan Fellows MBA program as well as NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

After graduation from MIT, Peter founded a technology consulting company which he grew to over 120 employees. He was responsible for operations, finance, managing enterprise projects, winning marquis clients, and selling over $120M in services. During that time he managed numerous global, enterprise engagements as well as helping 50+ founders launch their startups. He incubated one startup to a successful exit and took another from an idea on a napkin all the way through to an IPO. 

 

After exiting, he moved more deeply into the NY entrepreneurship ecosystem, managing a venture fund, and co-founding several startups, including Lausanne-based SaMD startup Biospectal. Peter is the Chairman of the MIT Sloan Club of NY and co-founder and chair of the MIT Female Founders Pitch Competition. He is an advisor to startups, helping with fundraising, product roadmap, customer acquisition, technology and operational strategies.

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