Philipp Gschöpf
Chicago Booth
Venture name Phinorm
Date of founding: 2026
Program: Chicago Booth Sokolov Executive MBA – Chicago, London, Hong Kong
Tell us about your career background: I have spent the last 15 years in AI. I went into finance and healthcare, which provided me with very useful knowledge about working at the intersection of highly sensitive data. Having started before AI became mainstream allowed me to see the evolution of the field up close. In the early days we were constructing new forms of AI from scratch. This gave us a lot of freedom to use our superpowers to the betterment of humanity. I was a pioneer in the creation of the first facial video health-check. It’s encouraging to see that this tech is now used by several startups and a small industry has sprung up around it. Having been early to the party also had the advantage that I had opportunities to build up and own large enterprise-wide functions from scratch. Due to the nature of the tech, I owned a lot of moonshots in my project portfolio. That we still achieved a 4x ROI on a portfolio investment in excess of $100 million is an encouraging sign that firms can take a leap and achieve great success if the right people are there and the risks are managed well.
What is your business/venture? Phinorm is providing an “HD upgrade” for radars. In the age of drones, air defences are getting overloaded with too many threats arriving at once. When you go and ask soldiers in the field, it’s clear that better detection and more range of detection are key to saving lives. We made a series of scientific discoveries that allow us to dramatically increase the signal-to-noise ratio of radar data. We are talking about a game-changing uplift in performance here and we are happy to share more details with qualified parties. The exciting thing about it is that it’s purely changing the processing of the data. We don’t need to change the hardware, which means many decades-old radars suddenly become viable to defend us again. It’s also very nimble and versatile. While we work with radars due to the urgent need, the tech is even suitable to be deployed on consumer-grade cellphones.
What inspired you to found this business? Part of my family lives in Kyiv. When I turn on the TV and see the pictures of what’s happening I know that they are hearing bomb explosions every few minutes at night. There is simply nothing else that’s as important as solving this right now. Seeing how many people want to do the right thing and support us… that has been truly heart-warming!
Why did you enrol on the EMBA? Part of why I achieved such high ROI in delivering AI projects was that I set things up not as technical teams, but as people connecting to help. The key is to understand that the value is moving away more and more from solving things. As we get more powerful tools, the differentiator of success moves towards being able to find the right questions and focus on what has great impact. The key to that is doing your rounds and talking with the people that work at the front-line and in management of the departments you want to enable. With this setup I was diving into teams that were so different from my background, that it felt like they were all speaking different languages. I was so curious to understand their goals and ways of working on a deeper level. The EMBA is a fantastic way of doing this. It dives into all the different functional areas of a firm, and on top of that you get to explore that with the best and brightest in their fields. I still remember fondly a case study on hospital operations, where I had the Director of Operations of a large hospital in my study group.
How has the EMBA helped you/your business? I would not have had the guts to become an entrepreneur without the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The network is amazing. We leveraged this into an all-star founder team, which was really important to me as a people-person. It also gave us the right doors to knock on, and I can now ring up several billionaires that pledged their support for the firm. The coursework itself also helped. Scott Meadow’s class on venture capital was a standout for me personally. It provided us with a manual how to navigate the VC world and helped us understand early on where we needed to focus our efforts to de-risk the enterprise most efficiently.
What’s the one thing about the EMBA that you think is undervalued? Your study peers. They are a second teacher with incredible experience depth. You come to this classroom and there’s just so much experience that’s been brought together. They also stay with you for the rest of your life. No matter what curveball is thrown my way, there’s someone I can tap that has the relevant expertise. Booth is also great because the network is so international. That was very important to me, and it has paid off big time now that we have established the firm in several NATO countries.
What’s next for your business? We are in the last stages of an important field test. This is one of the moments in life where you plunge into the deep end of uncertainty. What’s interesting about uncertainty is that it can go two ways. In our case it looks like our product is performing a lot better in the actual field environment than in a lab setting. That’s really encouraging since better performance means we can save more people. We have lined up several hardware firms that want to give the tech a test-run and we are looking forward to bringing the products of our collaborations to special forces that committed up to work with us.
Would you recommend the EMBA to other potential entrepreneurs? If yes, why? 100% yes. This is the best EMBA in the world for you if you want to connect with a truly international network where the best are coming to connect and grow together. Chicago boasts the highest ROI percentage for VC returns and my experience shows this is because the University of Chicago Booth School of Business approach brings a strong rigour that translates into better tested product-market-fit. The culture of the university will teach you to be honest to yourself and to truly value diverse opinions. Top this up with the professors and the curriculum. Imagine the person you will become when you were are able to go grab a coffee with a Nobel prize laureate, develop true personal leadership capabilities with behavioural science superstars such as Linda Ginzel and associate yourself with renowned finance and entrepreneurship figures such as Steve Kaplan or Waverley Deutsch.
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