Buck Watia VP Corporate Development, Iridia

Iridia Inc. welcomes Buck Watia as the VP of corporate development.

This newly established role is a strategic addition to the leadership team as the company looks to solve critical challenges for partners and customers with its DNA storage technology.

He brings deep expertise in collaborating with customers to address their mission-critical, unmet needs while working closely with product teams and partners to conceive and deliver solutions that drive growth. With a demonstrated history of accelerating tech start-ups to success and launching impactful ventures within leading software, infrastructure, and cloud companies, he is poised to drive significant transformation at his firm.

“We have been laser focused on developing our DNA storage platform and have made significant advances in our proprietary technology over the past year. The company is now ready to commercialize those advances and pursue strategic alliances,” said Murali K. Prahalad, Ph.D., president and CEO. “I am excited to welcome Buck to our team at this significant juncture. His deep expertise in transformative product development, team building, and strategic partnerships will enable us to capitalize on our progress and deliver commercially viable solutions to address the rapidly expanding, critical storage problem.“

Iridia’s patented method of storage integrates semiconductor and nanofluidic technology with a disruptive enzyme-based chemistry to add DNA-based bits representing “0s” and “1s” in a programmable fashion. This offers the potential to add orders of magnitude more storage capacity compared to current archival technologies such as tape and HDDs paving the way for commercially viable DNA-based storage solutions.

“As the need for secure and sustainable storage intensifies, the approach adopted by Iridia shifts from simply being attractive to being fundamentally necessary. We’re at a pivotal stage where next-gen strategies have become key in harnessing the boundless potential of data, both now and in the future. Humanity’s current methods aren’t sustainable economically, technically, or environmentally. Data preservation isn’t just a tech challenge; it’s potentially a requisite step to achieve the potential of new technologies such as AI,” said Watia. “I am excited to join the dynamic team at Iridia. We’re focused on developing applications to meet customer needs, catalyzing opportunities for our partners and collectively redefining the storage industry.“

He has focused his career on building the perspective, experiences and relationships needed to bring new ideas to market and scale them for exponential growth. He has developed teams, processes, strategy, and culture to help several start-ups transform their respective industries. With a versatile background leading teams in sales, marketing, business development, product, and partnerships, he has consistently demonstrated his ability to help start-ups become market leaders.

Before joining Iridia, he held a key role as the head of strategy and growth at Microsoft, within the security, cloud and AI business. He led the business and corporate development functions at CyberX, guiding it towards a strategic acquisition by Microsoft in 2020. At Rapid7, his efforts influenced the company’s growth trajectory, propelling it through an expansion phase and towards an IPO. In earlier roles, he developed his go-to-market expertise at ArcSight and iDEFENSE, acquired by HP and VeriSign, respectively.

He received his Bachelor of Business Administration at Boise State University and completed Executive Programs at both Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management.