Meet Camilla Olson, MBA'80 Serial entrepreneur, inventor and former fashion designer
Congratulations to our 2025 The PINNACLE Society Honoree
Born in Alaska and currently in California, Camilla is a serial entrepreneur, inventor and former fashion designer. She started her career in venture capital as one of the few women working in the industry at the time before going on to found two big data predictive modeling companies in the pharmaceutical industry. One of these companies had its IPO. The other was acquired for $95M a year after its founding. After these exits, Camilla returned to graduate school to learn fashion design. Her first fashion collection was selected to be shown at Lincoln Center as part of Mercedes Benz Fashion Week in New York. Designs from her eponymous collection have appeared on the red carpets of the Academy Awards, Met Gala and the White House.
Camilla’s last company, Savitude, scaled designers’ creativity with the aid of artificial intelligence. Using Savitude AI solutions, designers and design teams spend more time focusing on creating and less on the analysis and technical work required to revise collections from concept so they match real body types across diverse customer populations and geographic markets. The result was increased customer satisfaction, significantly reduced fit-based returns and the ability to efficiently serve today’s rapidly diversifying consumer populations. Savitude has been listed in Forbes as one of 60 Women-Led Startups That Are Shaking Up Tech Across The Globe, placed in the top 12 of Project Entrepreneur 2017, competed on the stage of Techcrunch Disrupt Battlefield NY 2017 and participated in Techstars 2017.
In 2019, the company recently completed the Nasdaq Milestone Makers program, WXR-Verizon 5G accelerator and was selected to be in the the Samsung | Verizon NEXTG showcase.
A lifelong inventor, Camilla holds two U.S. patents and has three more pending. In 2011, she received the Distinguished Alumna Award from the University of Maryland and Honorable Mention as “Best Second Act Reinvention” on the website SecondAct.com. She was a TEDx speaker January 2016 and has been recognized as of the top 10 entrepreneurs over 60 by Seniorly magazine.
The company was shut down when she was diagnosed with a terminal neurodegenerative disease.