UC San Diego Horizon First Light 2026
Horizon First Light 2026 opens the academic year by bringing UC San Diego Horizon's strategic advisor community, faculty innovators, and venture builders into the same room. The morning session covers advisor engagement and best practices with Balu Masti, an overview of UC San Diego's Open Flow Innovation licensing program with Anthony Rezavi, and a very special presentation of the latest in Horizon's portfolio.
Balu Masti is a technology leader and startup ecosystem builder with over three decades of experience across DeepTech, spanning twelve years in the Bay Area and Bangalore startup scenes. He spent nearly 20 years in the wireless semiconductor industry at Qualcomm and Intel before co-founding Vigyanlabs, a power optimization startup. Today he works across UC Berkeley SkyDeck, Carnegie Mellon's Venture Bridge Fund, and NSF I-Corps, mentoring founders on go-to-market strategy, product scalability, and building teams that hold up under growth. Learn more here: https://balumasti.com/
Anthony Razavi is Associate Director, Life Sciences Innovations at UC San Diego, where he leads commercialization strategy across more than 300 innovations a year, including licensing, venture creation, and investor engagement. He oversees the licensing team and guides startup formation and fundraising strategy for faculty and founders moving technology out of the lab.
Before UC San Diego, Anthony spent nearly a decade in oncology biotech leadership, co-leading a $254M Series A/B raise and advancing six biologics from discovery to clinic as SVP of Operations and Business Development at TORL BioTherapeutics. He also led IND-enabling strategy and business development at 1200 Pharma, and managed corporate partnerships at Caltech, structuring multi-million-dollar research and licensing agreements between academic labs and industry.
Founders join for lunch immediately after, giving advisors and builders a direct connection point as the fall term gets underway.
What we're built for: Horizon runs on a rolling model: three-month sprints with a one-year path to traction, no equity conversations or service sales during an advisor's tenure. Advisors get early access to lab-to-market technology and time with the people building it, as part of the mission of the Office of Innovation & Commercialization.
Lunch and refreshments will be served. RSVP required.