Richard Leu, PhD
Founder & Principal
Richard founded Cosmic Lens in 2014 to help early-stage companies turn promising technology into working businesses. Since then he has advised more than 15 startups from the idea stage onward, often stepping in as their CTO, CPO, or senior advisor and helping them raise capital. His recent consulting and advisory work spans legal tech, AI for manufacturing and defense, nonprofit technology, space weather prediction, and industrial manufacturing.
As a company president, technology executive, and board member, he has run businesses end to end, from product and engineering to operations and finance. He has built teams from zero, brought multiple products to market in under two years, and taken a company through SOC 2. He has helped lead companies that raised more than $33 million in government funding and more than $15 million in private investment, and he has been technical lead on five SBIR and STTR awards totaling $6.63 million, principal investigator on two. He also serves on the board of the Knudsen Institute as Director of Emerging Technology.
Richard is an inventor on four granted U.S. patents in two families: AI-driven routing for delivery fleets, and data-driven matching of manufacturing capabilities to part specifications. He has two peer-reviewed publications in statistics and AI.
He holds a PhD in physics, an MS in statistics, and bachelor's degrees in physics and aerospace engineering, all from the University of Texas at Austin.