Meet the team behind Aura
Everyone knows it takes a great team to build a world changing product—so we’re excited to share ours with you!
Gabriel Schillinger
Co-Founder & CEO
Gabriel has been a serial entrepreneur since 16 years old when he started For Darfur, a non-profit that organized concerts and events to raise funds to aid those affected by the genocide in Darfur. Most notably, For Darfur produced and promoted Kanye West’s Glow in the Dark, which raised record amounts of donations for Doctors Without Borders’ efforts in Darfur.
Gabriel helped build BIM Networks, a mobile ACH payments system for big box retailers like MCX/Walmart—one of BIM Network’s first customers. In 2014, Gabriel sold his stake in BIM and started his next startup, Kurator, with Aura Network co-founder, Sam Snyder. Kurator, a messenger app for luxury retail, had a successful Beta with several top brands in NYC—like Dior and Homme. Unfortunately, Kurator was too early for the market and it eventually shut down.
Following Kurator, Gabriel assisted Lars Rasmussen, the creator of Google Maps, in raising a seed round for Weav Music. While working on Weav, he met Zhi Huang—now co-founder of Aura Network.
Sam Snyder
Co-Founder & COO
Sam’s passion is creating products and experiences that millions of people can enjoy. At 21, Sam dropped out of The New School and started his eponymous product studio called Sam H. Snyder. He’s a product visionary and has extensive experience in fashion, technology, and blockchain industries.
Sam and Gabriel have known and been working together for over 8 years.
Zhi Huang
Co-Founder & CTO
Zhi’s a genius—but he’s too modest to admit it. He’s an expert at turning a concept into an expertly crafted product. Having met Gabriel almost four years ago, Zhi has been advising the Aura team since the projects inception and joined as the CTO at the beginning of 2018. Prior to Aura, Zhi has worked for several startups—including Weav Music—and companies like Helix and Goldman Sachs.
Our product & engineering team come from a variety of backgrounds that compliment what we’re building Aura Network. Our members have worked at some of the top game studios in the world, like Zynga, and have spent their careers building successful tech products.
Arix King
Product Designer
Arix is a Product Designer passionate about building positive experiences for emerging technology. With interests in eSports and Blockchain technology, Aura was the sweet spot to exercise the skills he’s developed over the last five years as a UI/UX designer. Most recently, Arix was a Lead Designer at Lumenary, a NYC-based design agency, where his focus was spent on early stage startups, such as BlockFi and CariClub.
Anshul Dhawan
Project Manager & Game Designer
Anshul spent 8 years at Zynga as a Lead Product Manager and Senior Engineer. He led the growth team to explore new emerging gaming platforms and worked on games like Words with Friends and Poker Teams while at Zynga.
Benjamin Prieto
Game Developer
Ben is a videogame developer with 15 years of professional experience, and over 30 published games. He comes from an engineering background, taking different key roles as programmer, technical director and studio senior producer. His experience includes developing for PC, gaming consoles, web, mobile devices and live teams. Benjamin holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering, and his skills includes graphics programming, physics simulation, AI, back end systems, project and studio management.
Maxim Kupriianov
Blockchain Developer
Max has more than 8 years of experience as a software developer. He has 3 years as a Go backend engineer. Max is passionate about creating and contributing to open-source projects. Max also has a patent for a Turing Machine Emulator.
Aleksander Didorenko
Blockchain Developer
Alex has more than 12 years as a full stack web developer. He has practical software engineering experience, including database and applications architecture design and development.
Thanks — now, back to building!
Our team is growing rapidly and we are looking forward to having more team members join as we grow. If you are interested in working with us, drop us a line.
