Babak Parviz

Babak joined Madrona as a venture partner in 2023.
He brings deep knowledge of creating teams, products, and businesses from the ground up and then scaling them, and he has over two decades of experience at startups, academia, Google, and Amazon.
Journey to Madrona Before joining Madrona, Babak was a vice president at Amazon for eight and a half years.
He founded and led Amazon’s Grand Challenge — the organization responsible for identifying, investing in, and operationalizing substantial new areas for the company.
He led Amazon’s expansion into healthcare, including healthcare services, diagnostics, and implementing machine learning for health.
He built and led teams focused on wearables, experiential e-commerce, devices and services for childhood development, and machine learning for biotech, among other areas.
Before joining Amazon, Noteworthy Babak serves on the board of directors of the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), is a fellow of SPIE, and has received many recognitions, including the University of Michigan Bicentennial Alumni Award, IEEE CAS Society Industrial Pioneer Award, NSF CAREER Award, Rock Health Inventor of the Year, and MIT Technology Review 35 under 35.
His work has been displayed at the London Museum of Science and the Computer History Museum and has won Time magazine’s Best Invention of the Year twice.
He was recognized by Ad Age as one of the 50 most creative people in the United States.
Babak received a bachelor’s degree in literature from the University of Washington, a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, and master’s degrees in physics and electrical engineering and a Ph.D.
in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan.
He completed his postdoctoral fellowship in chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University.