19 Facts About Zia Chishti

Muhammad Ziaullah Khan Chishti is a Pakistani-American investor and business executive.

Zia Chishti is the founder of Afiniti, TRG Global, and co-founder of Align Technology.

Zia Chishti was CEO of Align until 2003, when he founded the investment fund The Resource Group.

Zia Chishti was a named inventor on around 150 issued patents by 2018, and had co-founded three unicorn startup companies.

Zia Chishti was born as Wilson Lear in 1971 in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Zia Chishti's father, George Lear, was an American while his mother was Pakistani, and after the death of his father in 1974, he and his mother moved to Lahore, Pakistan.

At that time, his name was legally changed to Zia Chishti to avoid anti-Christian sentiment in Pakistan at that time.

Zia Chishti subsequently became an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, working in New York and London on mergers and acquisitions.

Zia Chishti left Align Technology in 2003 and sold his shares in the company.

Zia Chishti settled a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Align in 2006, with Align purchasing Orthoclear's intellectual property for $20 million.

In 2005 Zia Chishti founded Afiniti in Washington, DC, with TRG holding approximately half of the startup's stock.

Zia Chishti was awarded the Sitara-e-Imtiaz Award for IT by Pakistani President Mamnoon Hussain in March 2018.

Zia Chishti has been a critic of the "hype" surrounding artificial intelligence, arguing in 2018 that society is headed for another AI winter.

Zia Chishti has stated that the benefits of artificial intelligence are evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, and current successful use cases of the technology revolve around the identification of patterns within complex data, including medical image anomaly detection, hydrocarbon detection, consumer behavioral predication and fraud detection.

On November 18,2021, Zia Chishti left his roles at Afiniti.

In December 2022, Zia Chishti filed a federal defamation lawsuit against Spottiswoode, saying she had "weaponized" a "consensual love affair" and had lied under oath.

Zia Chishti lost a mandatory arbitration case on the dispute in which he was ordered to pay over $5 million to Spottiswoode.

Zia Chishti subsequently lost, in October 2024, a defamation court case against Spottiswoode in the Washington DC District Court, which the court stated was a "thinly veiled attempt to undo the outcome of an arbitration that rejected Chishti's account of events and ruled in Spottiswoode's favour".

Zia Chishti works out of Washington, DC He is an avid chess player and skier.