Volodymyr (Vlad) Silchenko is the founder and CEO of OMNIA AI, a Silicon Valley startup developing next-generation AI systems for drones in GPS-denied and contested environments. He is an MBA Candidate at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business (#6 MBA program globally), where he serves as Vice President of the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Association. At Berkeley, he won the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Cup and is one of the few recipients of the school’s entrepreneurship fellowship recognizing outstanding entrepreneurial achievement and leadership. Silchenko was also selected as a Perplexity AI Business Fellow and is one of only 80 invited global mentors for the Startup World Cup, the world’s largest startup pitch competition. Previously, he built and scaled a hospitality group in Kyiv, introducing Europe’s first facial payment system in partnership with Visa and AWS. He kept the company growing through both the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. His story has been featured in leading global MBA publications, including Poets&Quants and Clear Admit, as well as the Berkeley Haas Newsroom.