The Team
The people behind MEVA bring together rare combinations of business expertise, clinical depth, technical precision, enterprise experience, and a shared conviction that human readiness has always deserved a better signal.
Core Team
Jeff leads MEVA’s vision, institutional partnerships, and capital formation. His path to MEVA is unlike most founders in the AI space. As a professional musician signed to a major label at 18, Jeff performed thousands of shows across every state and multiple countries, nearly 3 million albums sold, and 12 number 1 singles. That career built something most executives never develop: the ability to read a room, move an audience, earn trust at scale, and nurture meaningful relationships. He carried that into entrepreneurship, founding his agency, Ambassadeurs, that contributed to over $100 million raised for nonprofit organizations primarily through crowd-funded subscription based donations. He then expanded to a partnership in Goodness, Inc, building a technology platform to capture fan data and increase audience opt-in, achieving 50% participation rates in its first year. He has spoken on thousands of stages in front of more than one million people, partnering with some of the most recognized artists and organizations in the world. The relational network he built over 25 years across media, entertainment, and philanthropy is now what opens institutional doors for MEVA. Jeff brings to this company a career defined by one thing: the ability to find the signal in people and build something real around it.
Patrick is a results-driven technology executive with over 20 years of experience transforming ambitious visions into scalable, secure, and dependable platforms. He holds 19 patents and publications, and has built high-performing engineering teams across Fortune 500 companies, mid-market firms, and startups. Patrick co-founded Agemini, leading it from inception through a private equity exit at 8x EBITDA, capturing approximately 90% of its market. He later scaled operations and technology at National MedTrans, enabling a strategic acquisition by UnitedHealth Group. He now directs MEVA’s full technical architecture of the multi-modal inference engine, cloud infrastructure, and AI scoring system bringing a combination of deep engineering expertise and proven exit experience.
Doug is a serial entrepreneur and venture capital leader with a career built on co-founding and funding high-growth, life-changing technology companies. He co-founded Life Ventures, which returned over $211 million to limited partners on $8.8 million of invested capital, with portfolio exits including Prometheus Biosciences (acquired by Merck for $10.8 billion), Daylight Solutions (acquired for $150 million), and Alastin Skincare (acquired by Galderma for $650 million). He also co-founded Mission Ventures ($470M fund), Shepherd Ventures ($300M fund), Light Ventures, Light Innovation Platform, and the Tech Coast Angels. Doug’s founding question "how do we help people move from fear-based to love-driven living" is the originating vision at the heart of MEVA. He brings to the company decades of capital strategy, enterprise growth experience, and a network built across the life sciences, technology, and venture capital ecosystems.
Dr. McQuoid is a licensed clinical psychologist and recognized expert in SPECT brain imaging — a neurological diagnostic tool that maps brain activity patterns associated with emotional and behavioral function. He leads MEVA’s clinical validation framework, ensuring that the scoring methodology is grounded in rigorous psychological science and defensible against academic and institutional scrutiny. Dr. McQuoid’s expertise bridges the gap between clinical practice and computational measurement, providing the human expert judgment that trains and calibrates MEVA’s AI scoring engine. His involvement is what separates MEVA from a technology product — and positions it as a clinically anchored readiness platform.
Advisory Board
Steve is MEVA’s lead investor and Chairman of the Board, and one of the few people on the advisory team who sits on both sides of the table — as an educator and as an entrepreneur. He is an Associate Professor of Management at Point Loma Nazarene University, where he teaches entrepreneurial creativity, innovation, and strategic management. He co-founded Curvo, a B2B software company built to help hospitals manage medical device costs, a company he built and scaled to a successful exit — giving him firsthand experience navigating a highly regulated institutional market from founding through acquisition. Before his entrepreneurial career, Steve served as a US Navy Officer — a foundation that informs his disciplined, mission-driven approach to leadership. He holds an MBA from San Diego State University and a BS from Vanderbilt University. His combination of academic institutional knowledge, startup execution, and deep familiarity with how universities think about adoption and investment makes him a uniquely positioned asset at every stage of MEVA’s growth.
Justin is the founder and CEO of GrowthIQ Partners and the founder of BioIQ — the first digital health platform for home diagnostics. At BioIQ, he raised over $50 million, scaled to 20 million lives impacted, achieved 500%+ revenue growth in the company’s final two years, and led a successful exit. His work was published in the journal Science. Justin’s commercialization model — building a validated data platform and licensing it to enterprise partners at scale — mirrors MEVA’s strategy precisely. He advises on growth architecture, commercialization sequencing, and capital strategy.
Peter brings deep expertise at the intersection of AI, medical, and institutional research relationships. He is actively building the UCI Next Center — a hub for applied innovation at the University of California, Irvine — and advises MEVA on AI strategy, investor engagement, and research collaboration pathways. Peter’s approach to fundraising is systematic and relationship-driven: he emphasizes consistent outreach, CRM discipline, and the importance of the second conversation over the first close.
David is Founding General Partner of the Global Innovation Labs (SRI-GIL) and former Regional Managing Partner at Kairos Ventures, which commercializes technology and IP from top U.S. and U.K. universities. His portfolio includes companies acquired by Apple (Siri, Drishti), Google (Redwood Robotics), Microsoft (Nuance — $19.7B), Samsung, Salesforce, and DoorDash. David advises MEVA on deep tech investment strategy, university technology transfer, and global institutional partnerships across government and enterprise channels.
Bill is CEO of Everest Advisors and brings 30+ years of experience in corporate governance, financial strategy, and M&A across Fortune 500 and high-growth companies. He served as CFO of Medtronic’s $2.5B Brain Therapies business unit, CFO of Calyxt (securing $31M in public equity and executing a reverse merger at 300%+ premium), and VP of Finance at General Mills, where he delivered $280M in operating profit for a $2B segment. Earlier, Bill was a Partner at KPMG for 14 years. He advises MEVA on capital structure, investor positioning, financial operations, and the governance frameworks that institutional and private equity acquirers evaluate when assessing AI data companies.
Richard is Scientific Advisor and Co-founder of Mirador Therapeutics, and Chairman and Co-founder of TruTechnologies. He held senior leadership roles in clinical pharmacology and translational medicine at GlaxoSmithKline, Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Genentech, and Theravance Biopharma, contributing to the FDA approval of five major therapeutics including Erivedge, Perjeta, Kyprolis, Kadcyla, and Yupelri. His work contributed to landmark M&A events including Amgen’s acquisition of Onyx ($10.4B) and Roche’s acquisition of Genentech ($46.8B). Richard earned his Ph.D. in Molecular Pharmaceutics from UNC Chapel Hill and continues to mentor graduate students at UNC’s Eshelman School of Pharmacy — the same institution where MEVA is developing its research collaboration. His intersection of pharmaceutical science, institutional relationships, and UNC proximity makes him a uniquely strategic advisor for MEVA.
Dr. Henslin is an internationally recognized neuroscience expert whose clinical and research background strengthens MEVA’s scientific credibility. His expertise in brain-based behavioral patterns directly informs the neuroscientific grounding of MEVA’s emotional readiness framework.
Jim is a Founding Partner at Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth LLP and serves as MEVA’s legal and IP counsel. He advises on corporate structure, investor agreements, intellectual property protection, and the legal frameworks governing MEVA’s institutional partnerships and capital formation.
Josh advises MEVA on mission integrity and organizational culture — ensuring that as MEVA scales, the human and values-centered foundation of the platform remains at the center of everything it builds and delivers.
Dr. Arena is Dean of the Crowell School of Business at Biola University and one of the most credentialed voices at the intersection of organizational science, human networks, and AI. He served as Chief Talent Officer at General Motors, VP of Talent & Development at Amazon Web Services — where he helped grow AWS from $26B to nearly $75B in revenue — and Senior VP of Leadership Development at Bank of America. A Visiting Scientist at MIT’s Media Lab, Dr. Arena co-authored the foundational Honest Signals research with Sandy Pentland (MIT, 2010), which demonstrated that nonverbal signals — tone, cadence, energy, and consistency — predict the outcomes of human interactions with expert-level accuracy. That research is a direct scientific pillar of MEVA’s multi-modal inference engine. He also teaches in the Masters in Organizational Dynamics program at the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of Adaptive Space, based on a decade of research at GM. Dr. Arena brings to MEVA the rare combination of Fortune 100 executive experience, published behavioral science, and deep institutional credibility — and is actively engaged as a pilot supporter at Biola University.