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Mary Jepsen
Founder and CEO at Openwater (openwater.cc)
Mary Lou Jepsen is a visionary technologist known for her groundbreaking work in consumer electronics, virtual reality, wearables, healthcare, and software.
With a strong background in optical physics and electrical engineering, Mary Lou has held key roles at major tech companies like Google and Facebook, as well as founded innovative startups such as Openwater.
Her remarkable career highlights include co-founding One Laptop per Child, leading advanced consumer electronics and virtual reality divisions at Facebook and Oculus, and being a trusted advisor to Sergey Brin at Google.
Mary Lou Jepsen holds a PhD in Optical Physics from Brown University, along with multiple other degrees and honorary doctorates in related fields from reputable institutions worldwide.
She is an inventor with over 250 patents to her name and has received numerous awards for her contributions to optics, display technology, and electronics.
In addition to her industry work, Mary Lou serves on the board of directors at Lear Corporation and has provided advisory services to various governments and organizations globally.
Her passion for pushing the boundaries of technology and creating impactful innovations continues to inspire and shape the future of multiple industries.
Highlights
Yesterday on stage at Wired Health in Boston, I did something I’ve never done before: I used a radical new medical device live on myself—while speaking. No hospital. No implants. No hole drilled in my skull. Just a lightweight headset, registered to my head using nothing more than a smartphone camera.
With the flick of a switch, I stimulated a cluster of neurons in my anterior cingulate cortex—two inches behind my forehead—while continuing to walk and talk. I could feel the effect: calm, focused, and pain-free.
This wasn’t magic. It’s physics.
The device uses focused ultrasound—but not the expensive, room-sized machines that burn holes in deep tissue to destroy tumors. Ours is small, low-intensity, and radically affordable. It uses sound intensities lower than those used on pregnant women and their fetuses for decades.
Here’s the breakthrough: many types of cells have something akin to a resonant frequency. Just as an opera singer can shatter a wine glass by singing the right note without disturbing anything else in the room, our system can vibrate specific cells at their frequency—neurons, cancer cells, stem cells, even pathogens—while leaving everything else untouched.
Yesterday, I was pinging neurons. But in clinical trials, we’ve gone much further.
In a clinical trial with patients suffering severe, treatment-resistant depression, two hours of therapy with this device has put a large percentage into lasting remission—without drugs.
By tuning the frequency differently, we’ve destroyed cancer cells without harming nearby healthy tissue. We’ve dissolved amyloid microclots—tiny blockages implicated in long Covid, diabetes, neurodegenerative disease, and aging—removing 95% of them in preclinical studies.
In brain organoids seeded with glioblastoma, one of the deadliest cancers, our treatment outperformed chemotherapy. In mice, it shrank tumors dramatically. Human trials are next.
We’re even exploring stimulation of stem cells, rejuvenation of aging cells, and deactivation of viruses like COVID directly in the bloodstream. A universal therapeutic device—built not for one disease, but for many.
Why does this matter? Because healthcare is broken. A single new medical device typically runs $650 million in capitalized costs and takes 13 years to get through regulatory approval. That’s one disease, one device, one at a time. It’s too slow, too expensive—and meanwhile, patients suffer and patients die.
Our approach flips the standard model. We built a universal semiconductor platform—like a smartphone—where the “apps” can be the FDA approvals for different diseases. The upfront cost was higher, but the payoff is a device that’s small, reliable, and reconfigurable via software.
After years of building room-sized prototypes, we compressed a phone-booth-sized laser onto a single chip. We collapsed entire carts of analog electronics into miniaturized PCBs. And we designed slim, easy-to-register ultrasound systems using novel semiconductor–ultrasonic transducer arrays with unprecedented software reconfigurability.
The result: a device no longer $1M but with the cost structure of a smartphone, ISO 13485 certification this year, and availability for purchase today.
Through our partners worldwide—eager to access these systems at a fraction of traditional cost—hundreds of trials are now poised to run in parallel across a dizzying array of diseases, generating safety and efficacy data at unprecedented scale with the promise of rapid and low cost FDA approvals.
We made the system open-source. That means every group using the device can modify it, adopt innovations from others, and rely on us to deliver hardware and services at reasonable cost.
Oh, and we also made a diagnostic device. Our holographic infrared blood-flow system measures blood flow, by some measures with twenty times the accuracy of multi-million-dollar MRI machines, in a portable unit. We’ve already demonstrated LVO stroke detection with excellent sensitivity in hospitals. We hope it will soon ride in ambulances, cutting treatment delays for stroke victims worldwide. It’s a versatile device that can measure local blood flow and blood volume, as well as perhaps local blood pressure. This may be useful for monitoring the effect of treatment for many diseases from microclot treatment therapy, to cancer treatments, to neuro-modulation.
As trials scale, so does the data. We envision decentralized clinical trials on the blockchain, where patients can choose whether to share their data, retract it, or even receive micropayments for contributing. If you become the next Henrietta Lacks, you or your family could actually financially benefit on a large scale.
This is the fourth hard-tech startup I’ve founded. I’ve spent my career building products that seemed impossible like the $100 laptop from One Laptop per Child— and led hardware at Facebook, Google, Intel and Oculus. I hold more than 300 patents and have shipped hardware that’s generated billions in revenue. But Openwater is the most ambitious project of my life.
Our mission is simple to state, hard to achieve:
1/ A universal device to treat many diseases. 2/ A path to deliver it quickly and affordably to everyone.
Healthcare is too expensive. It’s too slow. And it’s too often anti-innovation. By making the tools open, shared, and low cost, we can change that.
This is part of the solution.
NOTE: reposting this today (3 days after my talk) per requests to put it all in post instead of 10 fragments. Link to the publications to support the claims here: https://t.co/chxOTVq25K
"Kerr county lost out on a bid to secure a $1 million grant to fund the [flood warning sirens] project. " from NYT:https://t.co/36B7eusJmG
I wonder if inexpensive radio/alarms like these were considered -- may have awoken many people hours before the flood peaked. https://t.co/zqcoaRZHtO
!["Kerr county lost out on a bid to secure a $1 million grant to fund the [flood warning sirens] pro](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GvStA5saQAAmMRX.jpg)
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Clay works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Clay offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
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Clay is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Clay is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Clay as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Clay offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
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Clay is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Clay is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Clay offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Clay offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Clay for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Clay accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Clay offers extensive integration capabilities. Clay introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Clay supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Clay also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
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Clay is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Clay stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Clay excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Clay is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Clay offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Clay's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Clay has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Clay is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Clay beneficial.
Clay offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Clay offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Clay's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Clay offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Clay focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Clay also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Clay offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
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Clay is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
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Clay's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Clay's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Clay has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
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