Mike Moradi

Mike was born in Iran, to an Iranian father and a Hispanic-American (Tejana) mother, and is the youngest of 3 brothers.  Their family fled Iran before the revolution, and he mostly grew up between Denton, TX and Bartlesville/Tulsa, OK. His wife Jennifer is a real estate attorney who is “funemployed” and they have two children, Macy (13 y/o) and Isaac (15 y/o).  They live in Norman, OK and can frequently be found traveling abroad. Mike is also very active with the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders program as an alumnus, and regularly helps fund and organize YGL educational programs around startups, VC, entrepreneurship, and DE&I initiatives.

Mr. Moradi is a healthcare-focused VC investor and entrepreneur, who left dental school to start his first company. That company failed, but was followed by many successful ventures in the nanotech and biopharma industries. Mike is a co-founder and general partner at Cortado Ventures, a top-decile early-stage VC firm with over $110m AUM across two funds. Mike is a co-founder of Sensulin, a diabetes-focused biopharma company, and was previously a co-founder and CEO of a pharmaceutical company targeting ocular complications of diabetes, and a specialty Contract Research Organization (eyeCRO), which was the #264 fastest growing private company in the Inc. 500. He co-founded Nanopolaris (now Unidym), which was acquired in 2011 by a publicly traded South Korean company for $145M USD, and NanoSource, which was acquired by DuPont in 2002, largely considered the first major acquisition in the nanotech space. Mike was a trustee for the $13B USD Oklahoma Pension Employees Retirement System (OPERS), and a member of the audit committee. He is an advisory board member for the Health Finance Institute, a director of Grand Founders, a regular attendee of the flagship TED conference, and the World Economic Forum in Davos. He holds a degree in biochemistry from the University of Oklahoma, with additional coursework from the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University, Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, Cambridge University’s Judge Business School, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, and the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business. Mike was named to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2017-2022 class of Young Global Leaders (YGL).