Laura Montoya
Role: Associate
Site: CDL-Wisconsin
Streams: Health & Wellness, Risk
Laura is the founder and Managing Partner of Accel Impact Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in pre-seed/seed startups that leverage AI and Deeptech to solve impact problems without sacrificing returns.
She has over eight years of experience in leading tech social impact and ethical AI development, as well as launching and scaling new ventures in the AI and ML space, including the Accel AI Institute, and Latinx in AI (LXAI) organization. These initiatives foster education, innovation, and inclusion in the AI community.
Her academic background is in Biology, Physical Science, and Human Development. She relocated to the San Francisco Bay area to work at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute before jump-starting her career in software engineering at Intuit revamping their Quickbooks online platform. She is a director with Women Who Code, she has been an advisor for Udacity’s AI and Data Nano degree and an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law. With the Berkman Klein Center, Laura has published research with several collaborative teams on Ethical AI and Data Sovereignty topics.
She chairs and serves on Program Committees for research workshops at AI and ML conferences including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, and ACM FAccT. Recent research areas include reducing bias data representations in machine learning models, the effects of artificial intelligence development for developing countries, and paralleling biological and synthetic neural networks seen in mycology, entomology, and computational science.
She has led sessions on social impact, tech diversity, and ethical AI development for Creative Mornings, Katapult Future Fest, Silicon Valley Future Forum, Tech Inclusion Conference, Thrival Summit, Global Hive Summit, and keynoted the “Future of Work” for the Data and Society Conference at UC Berkeley. Laura has given guest lectures and technical workshops at Google, Santa Clara University Law, Stanford University Computational Social Science, and GTC Deep Learning School. Recently she spoke at TEDx Santa Barbara and has been featured in WITtalks and CIIS podcasts, Xconomy, Verizon News, and Forbes Leadership.