Rey Banatao

Rey Banatao is a materials scientist and serial entrepreneur who grew up in Cupertino, California, where he and his brother Desi were drawn to skateboarding, surfing and the outdoors — a passion for action sports that later shaped their work in performance composite materials. He holds a BA in Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in Computational Biology from the University of California, San Francisco, and completed postdoctoral work at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. He is part of the prominent Banatao family in Silicon Valley; semiconductor pioneer and Tallwood Venture Capital managing partner Dado Banatao is a relative.

In 2010 Rey co-founded Entropy Resins with his brother Desi, building a cleantech company that developed bio-based epoxy resins for sporting goods (surfboards, skis, snowboards), advanced composites and building materials, helping manufacturers cut the carbon footprint of their products with renewable feedstocks. Entropy Resins was acquired in 2018 by Gougeon Brothers, Inc. (the West System epoxy maker the Banataos had admired). In parallel, Rey co-founded and served as CEO of Connora Technologies with chemist Stefan Pastine, developing the "Recyclamine" programmable-chemistry platform — among the first technologies to make thermoset polymers and composites truly recyclable. Connora's recyclable-thermoset technology was acquired by Aditya Birla Chemicals in 2019.

Today Rey leads circular-economy efforts at X, The Moonshot Factory (Alphabet's moonshot lab), where he serves as a Director and General Manager driving the company's "Moonshot for Circularity," using AI, robotics and molecular data to reinvent recycling and keep materials in use. His materials work has been commercialized across sporting goods, the built environment and renewable energy, including contributing to the world's first recyclable wind turbine blade (with Siemens Gamesa).

Beyond his operating roles, Banatao was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (2013). He serves as an industry advisor to the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Development Unit at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, sits on the Scientific Advisory Board of the BioP2P (BioProcess to Product) Network, has advised the Philippine-California Advanced Research Institutes (PCARI), and mentors startups through Google for Startups' circular-economy accelerator. He is also an active angel investor and advisor to sustainable-materials startups.

• Invests as an angel at the earliest, ideation-stage of a company — he describes himself as "a scientist and entrepreneur specializing in the earliest stages of ideation."
• Strong gravitational pull toward sustainable materials, recyclable polymers/composites, cleantech and circular-economy ventures, mirroring his own operating background.
• Brings a deep technical/scientific lens: as a PhD materials scientist who has founded and scaled chemistry companies, he can evaluate hard-science risk that generalist angels can't, and tends to back founder-scientists.
• Favors a hands-on, collaborative style — partnering closely with companies on innovation and sustainability rather than passive capital.
• Public deal history is light (a small number of disclosed angel investments), consistent with selective, conviction-based checks rather than high-volume investing.