Crystal Rose Pierce

CEO and Founder MakeSense Labs

Crystal Rose Pierce is a prominent technologist, entrepreneur and investor and Forbes Top 10 Women in Blockchain. She is the CEO and Founder of MakeSense Labs, a communications company building Sense.Chat private messaging and decentralized applications on the blockchain. She raised over $30M in capital from prominent institutional VCs and completed a successful token sale for the SENSE digital token. Her company released the first provably secure messenger leveraging blockchain, achieving innovation in encryption, with the decentralized messaging application, Sense.Chat (http://sense.chat).

Crystal founded several companies and foundations across technology and media sectors, including blockchain, mobile, IT and artificial intelligence. She is a Co-Founder of shEOS, a female-run block producer on the EOS network and the shEOS Foundation, providing computer science scholarships to young women. She is the managing partner of Unicorn Ventures, a private investment fund. Crystal previously founded a digital interactive agency producing apps, enterprise applications and e-commerce solutions for brands. She then co-founded two technology startups and established an angel investment fund.

Crystal is passionate about uplifting humans through innovation and empowering entrepreneurs. Named a "Top ICO Influencer" by LimeICO, Crystal is on the board of ICO Governance Foundation and advises companies across several sectors. She is on the Board of Directors of the Restart Foundation and is the founder of Restart Week to carry out her philanthropic work, focusing on regenerative technology and social good. Along this mission she previously founded LA Startup Week, a 5-day series of events celebrating entrepreneurs and startups in Los Angeles. Crystal supports open government and previously spearheaded the Code for America Brigade in Los Angeles (Code for LA) supporting open data initiatives and civic hacking for the Mayor’s Office.