Co-Founder & CEO of Sunthetics — the AI optimization platform that helps chemists reach breakthroughs in fewer experiments.
Daniela Blanco is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sunthetics, an AI-powered chemical R&D platform that reduces the number of lab experiments needed to optimize a reaction by up to 5x. She developed the core machine learning algorithms behind SuntheticsML and oversees both technology and business development.
Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, Daniela attended the country's highest-ranked science secondary school before earning her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Universidad Simón Bolívar. She moved to the United States in 2017 to pursue her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering, where she studied under Professor Miguel Modestino — who later became Sunthetics' Chief Technical Advisor. Her doctoral research focused on redesigning nylon production, one of the most energy-intensive industrial processes in existence, to run on renewable energy instead. That work gave the company its name: Sunthetics, short for solar-powered synthesis.
After winning NYU's Entrepreneurs Challenge, Daniela incorporated Sunthetics in 2018 alongside co-founder Myriam Sbeiti. She received her Ph.D. in 2020. The platform she built with her team now accelerates R&D cycles 2–6x, reduces lab waste and emissions by up to 97%, and works with as few as five initial data points — a critical advantage for pharmaceutical and specialty chemical companies working with expensive or rare compounds. Clients include Merck, Boehringer Ingelheim, Toyobo, and Biohaven Pharmaceuticals. In November 2024, Sunthetics raised a $4M seed round to expand the platform.
A co-author on 18 peer-reviewed papers and co-inventor on 3 patents, Daniela's research has been published in PNAS. She was featured in the 2021 Netflix documentary Own the Room, which follows young entrepreneurs from around the world. Her work has been recognized by Forbes (30 Under 30 — Energy, 2021), MIT Technology Review (Innovators Under 35 — Latin America, 2020), Inc. Magazine (Top Female Founder, 2020), and the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize (2020). In 2019, she was named Global Champion of the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards — winning $100,000 — as well as United States Student Entrepreneur of the Year and Brightest AI-CI Mind by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
"NYU Tandon made me into both a scientist and an entrepreneur...that's a combination I absorbed from day one."
