Shivon Zilis

Shivon Alice Zilis (born February 8, 1986) is a Canadian venture capitalist who works in the technology and artificial intelligence fields. Early life and education Shivon Alice Zilis was born in Markham, Ontario, Canada on 8 February 1986 to Sharda, a Punjabi Indian, and Richard, a white Canadian. Zilis graduated from Markham's Unionville High School. She attended Yale University, graduating in 2008 with degrees in economics and philosophy. She played on Yale's ice hockey team as a goaltender, and is the school's all-time leader in goals-against average. Career After graduating from Yale, Zilis started her career at IBM in New York, working in financial technologies in developing countries, especially Peru and Indonesia. From 2012 to 2018, she was one of the founding investors and partner of Bloomberg Beta, funded by Bloomberg L.P., utilizing what she calls "machine intelligence". She was named among LinkedIn's 35 Under 35. In 2015, Zilis was listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for venture capital. Zilis serves as director of operations and special projects at Neuralink and reports directly to Elon Musk. Zilis met Musk through her non-profit work at OpenAI, of which she was a board member until 2023. From 2017 to 2019, she served as a project director for Tesla, Inc.'s Autopilot product and chip design team.