Co-Founder, former CEO, and Chairman of Carbon, Inc

Steve Nelson is Co-Founder, was launch CEO, and Chairman of Carbon, Inc., a digital 3D manufacturing company, founded in 2013. 

In his CEO role, Steve raised the start-up funding from Sequoia Capital. Carbon’s mission is to reinvent how products are designed, engineered, and manufactured. Carbon has raised $743 million in venture funding. Its investors include Sequoia, Silver Lake, and Google Ventures.

Steve is a Founding Advisor & Founding Investor in PinPrint, Carbon’s first spinout company, launched to transform the patient experience in vaccinations, drug therapies, and health monitoring. At the core of PinPrint’s platform is unique access to Carbon’s IP estate—379 patents—enabling the company to leverage Carbon’s world-class 3D manufacturing technologies, to produce high-resolution microneedle array patches (MAPs) at scale.

PinPrint has foundational innovations in high-resolution printing, MAP design, and technologies for interstitial fluid (ISF) collection. This expands the company’s market potential beyond drug delivery into noninvasive diagnostics, where ISF serves as a promising medium for real-time biomarker monitoring and liquid biopsies.

Steve is a founding advisor of the Whole Health Institute (WHI), to its leadership team, and founder, visionary, and legend, Alice Walton.  And was an original board member of the new Alice L. Walton School of Medicine (AWSOM) and is now on the board of her Heartland Whole Health Institute (HWHI).

Steve concluded a term as Chairman of Blue Cross of North Carolina, and 17 years on the board of the State’s largest health insurer.

Steve was or is founding investor in numerous private companies. Among those, Howso, a groundbreaking company dedicated to keeping the humanity in AI. Howso believes in Responsible AI, meaning machines ought to preserve, amplify, and empower the best intentions of humanity.

Steve Nelson had been at Wakefield Group as Managing Partner for 15 years. He established and ran the venture capital firm’s Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina office. 

Before Wakefield, Steve was at Quokka Sports, a vc -backed, digital sports media company. He served as Senior VP & GM, and created and led the team that envisioned, and produced two official sites for the Olympics, one for the International Olympic Committee, and a second for the NBC official site of the Olympic Games.

Steve worked in Silicon Valley as VP for Informix Software. His first business experience was 14 years at IBM including executive positions as VP and General Manager in San Francisco.

Steve received his B.S. in Business from Wake Forest University. He is a former member of the Board at Wake Forest and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.