Cyriac Roeding
Cyriac Roeding is a Silicon Valley–based German–American entrepreneur and investor. He serves as the co-founder and CEO of Earli, an early cancer detection and treatment firm based in Redwood City, California. Earli is based on forcing cancer to turn against itself with a genetic construct that switches on only in cancer cells and activates the immune system to attack and kill the cancer. The concept originated at Stanford University and has substantially evolved through AI and extensive bioengineering. Earli raised >$100M from by Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Perceptive Advisors, Casdin Capital, Sands Capital, Menlo Ventures, ZhenFund and Marc Benioff. Roeding is also a co-founder and chairman of the board of Rewind Co., a diabetes type 2 reversal company. Roeding's venture investing focuses on AI, brain-to-machine interfaces, consumer businesses, biology meeting software and engineering, and consumer robotics. He served as EVP at Paramount Global / CBS, where he started the division CBS Mobile and brought it to profitability, and as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins and its iFund with Apple Inc., where he co-founded and led mobile shopping app shopkick with $22M of venture capital to a $250 million cash acquisition by SK Telecom/SK Planet and 20 million users. Shopkick rewards users for just walking into retail stores such as Target Corporation, Best Buy, Macy's and Walmart and engaging with products from Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, L'Oreal etc., driving over $1 billion in sales annually for its partners. Fast Company ranked shopkick one of the world's 10 Most Innovative Companies In Retail, alongside Apple and Starbucks, and Entrepreneur Magazine placed Roeding on its cover.
The World Economic Forum named Roeding a Tech Pioneer in 2013 and a Global Innovator in 2021. In 2023, he was named a Member of World.Minds, a global community of 1,000 of the world's most successful scientists, entrepreneurs and state leaders.
Roeding is a Limited Partner in venture capital funds Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Bond, Coatue Management, Greylock Partners, KPCB, IVP, Atomic VC, Breakthrough Ventures, Olive Capital, Script Capital, Silicon Valley Bank. He is a direct investor and advisor in over a dozen startups, including OpenAI, LTSE, Science Inc., Karma Science, Cardspring, Visby Medical, Cars24, Blinkit, Curbside, Zumper.
He is frequently included on innovation topics such as Chinese vs Silicon Valley startups on CNBC, Bloomberg, CNN, has published on these topics e.g. on Vox/Recode, and has been a speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, at Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Program, the CTIA Wireless Summit and Money 2020.
Early years and education
Roeding was born in Constance, Germany, and grew up in a small village north of Frankfurt, Germany. His father is a physicist and his mother worked with under-privileged children. Roeding went to high school in the U.S. and Germany.He sold his first computer program to a local newspaper at the age of 15 in an effort to make his job obsolete, and succeeded. Roeding then became a programmer for Hewlett Packard, while still in high school. He went on to university in Germany and in Tokyo.
Roeding received a degree summa cum laude in engineering and business administration from Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. In 1994, he went to Tokyo to study Japanese management at Sophia University, and there first became exposed to mobile phones that had just become available in Japan.