inventures General Partner

Melissa Chalfant

Melissa is a venture-backed hard tech / deep tech strategist and product builder with a proven track record in scaling businesses through strategic funding and operational excellence.

With her start in Semiconductor and Irradiation Services for Fortune 100 Defense Contractors, she honed her financial and marketing skills to specialize in validation, deal-structure, growth strategies, and operations. She identifies opportunities, closes high-value deals, and leads teams to execute with precision. Her focus is on driving sustainable growth through strong unit economics and optimizing top to bottom capital stacking strategies for long-term success.

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Chief Financial officer

Barry Kostiner

Barry is a capital markets and impact investment strategist focused on partnering with family offices, structuring investment vehicles, and advancing opportunities across AI, infrastructure, energy, biotech, media, and emerging international markets.

His career spans more than 15 years in energy and financial markets, including roles with Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and their affiliates, where he led power trading and managed significant energy-market portfolios. Barry has also served as CEO of two SPACs and CFO of a Nasdaq-listed company, with experience spanning public-market transactions, corporate restructurings, technology services, biotech, and data analytics.

Barry holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Operations Research from MIT. His graduate research on the mathematics of electric-industry deregulation was sponsored by Harvard Kennedy School.

inventures General PArtner

Ben Marquart

Ben brings experience driving frontier innovation at the intersection of mobility, defense, power systems and electrification. A true hands-on and visionary systems engineer turned founder & venture-builder, he has led programs from clean-sheet ideation & concept through production, specializing in advanced systems, and vehicle architectures. From humble northern Midwestern means to multi-industry executive, Ben’s track record spans startups and legacy corporations alike, where he has bridged deep engineering insight with commercial, go-to-market and financial execution to deliver scalable results.

inventures General Partner

Brent Clayton

Brent is a creative problem solver. His friends call him MacGyver. His background in construction and safety and his love of engineering drive his passion for innovation. He is both a founder and an inventor. The struggles and trials of entrepreneurship are familiar and all too real to him and inform his focus on helping others avoid the pitfalls he has faced along the way. Brent joined the InVentures team to use his experience and passion to inspire, motivate, support, encourage, and guide others on their journey from idea to IP to IPO. 

inventures General Partner

Trevor Mann

A capital markets operator focused on defense, dual-use, aerospace, energy, deep tech, and digital infrastructure, Trevor works at the intersection of institutional capital, family offices, and government funding. He leads capital strategy, transaction structuring, and cross-border advisory to position post-revenue, Seed to Series A companies for scalable growth in regulated and strategic markets.

He is skilled at integrating venture capital, private equity, non-dilutive funding, and government contracts into cohesive capital stacks, pairing commercial traction with disciplined execution to accelerate growth and close complex transactions.

inventures Partner

Adrienne Ramsey

Adrienne Ramsay brings a rare combination of technical depth, legislative expertise, and private sector experience to InVentures. A physicist by training, she has spent two decades at the intersection of government, defense, and industry. As Senior Advisor to the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, she guided more than $250 billion annually in defense and intelligence programs. Through Delphi Strategies, she has helped clients align their offerings to funded government priorities and avoid costly strategic misalignment. At InVentures, she develops outreach strategy, positioning portfolio companies for non-dilutive federal funding.

inventures general partner

Gerardo Garza

A materials science engineer with over 20 years of experience in R&D and 5 patented technologies, Gerardo has spent his career turning deep scientific expertise into scalable ventures. He began by building and exiting a firm that helped companies commercialize their intellectual property and navigate research and development — work that gave him a front-row seat to how innovation actually moves from lab to market.

From there, he founded a protein design and expression company, which became the seed of something bigger: Gene Paradox, where he built an AI platform to help teams predict outcomes in synthetic biology — four years before that kind of thinking became mainstream.

Today, Gerardo focuses on what he knows best: helping founders with deep technology find their footing in the U.S. market. He works closely with Latin American biotech and medical companies, guiding them through mentorship and curating dealrooms that speak the language of serious investors. At InVentures, he brings that same lens to the medical and biotech vertical — helping founders not just tell their story, but structure it in a way that reflects the rigor, credibility, and commercial potential that top-tier investors are looking for. If you've built something real in biology or medicine, Gerardo has been exactly where you are and knows the path forward.

inventures general partner

H. Joseph Yoon, MD

Dr. Hojung Joseph Yoon is a board-certified physician, healthcare entrepreneur, and scientific advisor who integrates clinical excellence, translational research, health informatics, and strategic leadership.

He brings a rare multidisciplinary perspective to chronic disease as well as medical device innovation. His research experience spans Harvard University, the University of Minnesota, and Williams College, focusing on genetics and protein-based therapeutics targeting obesity. Dr. Yoon trained clinically at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and maintains membership in the Society for Neuroscience, with a focus on neurological reward pathways. He further specialized through a National Library of Medicine Health Informatics Fellowship.

Previously, as Director of U.S. Medical Affairs for a

Korean medical device startup, he spearheaded U.S. market expansion, overseeing scientific communications, marketing strategies, and the FDA approval process.

inventures - Advisor

Michael Kyle

Executive technology and market‐entry strategist with 20+ years leading innovation, commercialization, and large‐scale transformation across defense, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, data centers, and enterprise technology. Specializes in rapid U.S. market entry, advanced technology integration (AI, VR/XR, Network(s) Infrastructure, Robotics, Additive Manufacturing, Digital Twins), multi‐stakeholder orchestration, and guiding organizations through complex scaling, regulatory, and GTM environments.

His experiences with startups to fortune 100 companies has enabled him to advise C‑Suites in areas of accelerating product adoption and direction enabling growth in established and emerging markets.

Michael is passionate about bridging the gap between a founder’s technological vision and business requirements for commercialization in both the private and public sectors.

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