Vivian Lan

Vivian Lan is a Mexican social entrepreneur, innovation strategist, and one of Latin America’s most compelling voices on exponential technology and its potential to reshape business, education, and society. Her career is defined by a rare combination: the rigour of someone trained at Singularity University alongside NASA’s finest minds, and the humanity of a leader who has spent decades directing that knowledge toward real-world impact in some of the world’s most underserved communities.

Raised in Mexico City, Lan studied graphic design at Universidad Iberoamericana before deepening her creative practice in fine arts and packaging design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. It was her work with marginalized communities in Mexico, Israel, and Kenya that revealed the limits of conventional approaches to social change — and pointed her toward technology as the missing lever. In 2011, she put that insight to work, launching a zero-budget social media campaign to address the African famine. In ten days, the campaign raised $100,000, mobilised 57 international volunteers, and delivered 40 tons of food and medical assistance to 20,000 people — a result that demonstrated, with striking clarity, how exponential thinking could compress impact that once took years into days.

That experience led her to Singularity University at NASA in 2013, where she studied nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, neuroscience, and 3D manufacturing. She graduated as Singularity University’s Ambassador for Mexico and went on to serve as Director of the Innovation Ecosystem at the Presidency of Mexico and Exponential Growth Director at ExO Works, before becoming Director of SingularityU Mexico, helping organisations apply exponential frameworks to their most complex growth challenges. Through her leadership of the SingularityU Mexico Summit, she has reached more than 2,000 people in person and over 100,000 virtually, generating more than $9 million in measurable business and economic value for Mexico.

Building the Future Through Education

In 2023, Lan co-founded Uma School, a Montessori institution pioneering a model of conscious-based education designed to help students discover their purpose, cultivate self-knowledge, and develop the adaptive mindset that an exponential world demands. The school reflects her conviction that technology alone cannot change the world — that lasting transformation begins with how we educate the humans who will wield it.

As a futurist speaker, Vivian Lan brings to the stage a perspective that is both globally informed and deeply rooted in Latin America’s unique innovation landscape. She helps organisations understand how exponential technologies — from AI and robotics to biotechnology and blockchain — are not distant forces but present realities that require immediate strategic response. Audiences leave not just inspired, but equipped with practical frameworks to lead their organisations through a world that no longer changes in straight lines.