Sameer Soleja is the founder and CEO of Molecule, a Houston-based company that makes the world’s only modern risk software for commodities trading. Prior to founding Molecule in 2012, he spent a decade in consulting, working with SunGard, BearingPoint, and Stryve Advisors. Sameer holds MBA and Public Policy degrees from the University of Michigan, where he studied arcane capital markets theories and practices, such as sukuk and Turkish financial clearinghouses. He also holds a BBA from the University of Texas at Austin.

Molecule, a HATCH Pitch finalist and a SURGE Class 1 graduate, is the modern cloud leader in the $1.5bn global CTRM/ETRM industry, serving retail energy, financial services, and investment funds nationwide from its headquarters in Houston. Thousands of transactions and tens of millions of dollars in notional value are processed every day on Molecule’s platform, from US power options, to Chinese chemical futures and everything in between. Molecule is growing rapidly, and boasts more cloud customers than most of its competitors combined.

Ehud I. Ronn is a professor of Finance at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin. He has published articles on investments, interest rate instruments, and energy derivatives in the academic and practitioner literature.

Dr. Ronn received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. Prior to joining the University of Texas in July 1988, Dr. Ronn was a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. During 1991 – ‘93, Dr. Ronn served as Vice President, Trading Research Group at Merrill Lynch & Co., where he dealt with the valuation and hedging of interest-rate securities. Dr. Ronn served as the founding director of the University of Texas Center for Energy Finance from 1997 – 2009. From Jan. 2010 to Feb. 2011, Prof. Ronn was Commodity Market Modeling practice area manager at Morgan Stanley & Co.