Catherine Liao

Chief Strategy Officer CardieX

A passionate technologist and entrepreneur known for her intuition, hustle and know how, Catherine Liao has an uncanny ability to recognize the white space where technology can be used to solve unmet needs. At age 19, Catherine got her start in tech working as a systems engineer for one of the first Internet conferencing services in the 90s. That eventually led her to the World Health Organization, where she successfully scaled WHO’s web infrastructure during the peak of the SARS epidemic, when demand for content exploded 20x overnight, topping over 14 million hits a day. As the Chief Strategy of CardieX, Catherine now leads the go-to-market strategy for an innovative global medical devices company specializing in heart health.

Prior to CardieX, Catherine served as the co-founder and CEO of Blumio, a venture-backed startup that developed a wearable sensor for blood pressure monitoring. The company was acquired by CardieX in 2022. Before embarking on her entrepreneurial journey, Catherine worked with some of the world’s largest enterprises, leveraging technology to drive business outcomes for over a decade. At Cisco, she helped commercialize technologies that enhanced the efficiency of business-critical applications, including the timely transmission of medical images, a breakthrough that allowed physicians to make medical decisions without delays. Leading a solutions marketing team at Riverbed, she spearheaded the go-to-market strategy of the company’s application performance platform.

An active leader in the startup community with an MBA from Imperial College London and MSc in Health Economics from London School of Economics, Catherine provides guidance and mentorship to other entrepreneurs as an Executive Mentor for Santa Cruz Accelerates and a Program Lead for the Startup Leadership Program. In her downtime, you’ll likely find Catherine at her favorite wine bar where she is serves as an investor—and chief glass washer.