David Bender
Senior Associate
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDavid Bender is a deep-tech venture investor and former chemical engineering researcher with 16 years of experience spanning startups, strategy consulting, and industrial R&D. At Fathom Fund he leads technical and financial diligence, sourcing, and portfolio management, drawing on hands-on materials development from a PhD candidacy at USC where he designed fast-cure, field-repairable composite processes later presented to Boeing and the US Navy. Previously at BCG he shaped growth and operations for energy and aerospace clients, and as a founder won the MIT/USC entrepreneurship prize to commercialize advanced materials. His early career at TOTAL, Shell, Baker Hughes and TETRA combined lab innovation with data-driven tooling that delivered measurable cost and productivity gains. David blends rigorous technical modeling, program leadership, and go-to-market sensibility—unusually bridging military, academic, and commercial ecosystems to accelerate deep-tech commercialization.
16 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Chemical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Chemical Engineering at University of Southern CaliforniaBachelor of Science (B.S.), Chemical Engineering, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Chemical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyLondon School of Economics and Political Science
English, French
Github Skills (91)
recovery10
webserver10
routers10
3d-models10
protobuf10
qualcomm10
gcode10
3d-printer10
bootloader9
u-boot9
fill9
beagleboard9
cpp9
hardware9
parsing9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
codehero/benejson
Feb 2010 - Nov 2021
benejson JSON parsing library
Contributions:68 commits, 2 PRs, 13 pushes in 11 years 11 months
parsing
codehero/OpenTaxFormFiller
Apr 2012 - Feb 2013
Contributions:57 commits, 2 comments, 1 issue in 10 months
filltax-formspdfprogrammaticallytax
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