Luciano Cheng

Engineering leader, founder and angel investor | Google, Schrödinger, Stride Health, Gallup

I've spent twenty years building software and the teams that ship it: engineer at Google, creator and tech lead of LiveDesign at Schrödinger, director of engineering at Stride Health, and co-founder and CTO of Benny, which Stride acquired. I also spent a stretch as an early engineer at Airtable.

That work runs through my own firm, Floc Media, a data cleaning and engineering consultancy that also owns a portfolio of products. The common thread is data. Every job, whatever the domain, has come down to getting it clean and usable. The products are now built and run largely by AI agents.

Since 2024 I've worked in Gallup's Office of the CTO. I started on technology strategy, then served a stint as interim head of their growth organization, and now advise the CFO. Alongside that: Select Star, where I built the engineering leveling framework and advised the CEO through the Snowflake acquisition, and Cognitive Space, where I led an ML effort on satellite-constellation routing.

Before any of that: Penn, where I wrote scientific-visualization software for structural biology. The through-line since has been data, science and software, and which one leads has changed every few years.

Angel investor since 2018: early in Select Star (acquired by Snowflake), Nextmv (acquired by FICO) and Cquence (acquired by Spekit), plus Maestro, Ternary, Keeper Tax and others.