Speakers

Dr. Leon Alkalai is a retired Technical Fellow of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology, where he spent 32 years following the completion of his Ph.D. at UCLA in 1989. At JPL, he held several senior leadership roles, including capture lead for the GRAIL mission to the Moon (2007) and the InSight lander on Mars (2012), earning NASA Distinguished Individual Achievement Medals in 2011 and 2019. He also led JPL’s strategic partnerships and long-range planning initiatives.

In 2021, Dr. Alkalai founded Mandala Space Ventures, a Pasadena-based incubator dedicated to launching and scaling start-ups in the emerging space economy. He also serves as a General Partner at the Explorer-1 Venture Fund, which is affiliated with the incubator. Mandala is now expanding its investment platform with the launch of a new fund, Mariner 2, to further support innovation and commercialization in space.

Mandala’s portfolio includes Continuum Space Systems, a SaaS company for digital space operations; Viridian Space Corporation; Specter Aerospace; and Sophia Space Inc., which is developing sustainable data centers in orbit.