Alexandra McManus, MBA 02, Co-founder and CEO, Eyrus

From an early age, Alexandra McManus demonstrated her entrepreneurial drive. She was often starting businesses, including neighborhood fairs with games, rides, and prizes. Years later, she and her brother, who did his postdoc at UC Berkeley, started discussing more adult ventures. “We were always kicking around ideas for companies to start,” she says. 

In 2012, they hit on a winner with Connora Technologies, which developed the pioneering technology Recyclamine—a method to make industrial plastic recyclable. “There are a lot of expensive materials in plastic parts,” McManus explains. “All these other materials that are incredibly valuable get stuck inside that plastic.” 

Connora commercialized the world’s first recyclable epoxy resin systems, which are used in snowboards, surfboards, automotive products, and wind turbine blades. The zero-landfill manufacturing process allows valuable materials, like carbon fiber, to be recovered in near-virgin form.

The company was sold in 2019, but by that point McManus, who had worked as a management consultant in construction since the late 1990s, was already on to her next venture. She founded and now leads Eyrus, a data and analytics platform that simplifies workforce data for large construction and development projects. 

“I saw a massive hole when it came to visibility and data in the field while the project was going on,” she says. 

Over the past 10 years, more than 10,000 contractors have used the platform, saving 500,000 hours in site administration and more than $51 million in workforce management on projects ranging from the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C., to EverBank Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida.

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