Sergiy Nesterenko is the founder and CEO of Quilter, a Los Angeles company building AI that designs printed circuit boards on its own. A former SpaceX avionics engineer who spent five years on Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy electronics, he watched one of his first boards literally burn up in his hands and decided manual PCB layout was a problem worth a decade. Quilter trains its system on physics and constraints rather than copying human designers, and in 2025 it produced the world's first fully functional computer laid out by AI.
Severence MacLaughlin is the founder and CEO of DeLorean Artificial Intelligence, a Palm Beach-based company building predictive AI products for healthcare and sales. A Cornell-trained scientist with a PhD from the University of Adelaide, he ran AI and data science practices at Cognizant and Capgemini Invent before bootstrapping DeLorean AI with his own savings. The company says its Medical AI was the first to be biologically validated by two independent laboratories, trained on tens of millions of patient records and backed by seven patents. He advises the United Nations and World Health Organization on AI.
Shafique Virani is a neurosurgeon-turned-biotech dealmaker who serves as Chief Business Officer of Noetik, an AI-native cancer therapeutics company in South San Francisco. He has spent two decades turning early-stage science into landmark partnerships, including one of the largest drug discovery deals ever struck at Recursion, and earlier built a neuroscience and rare-disease portfolio at Roche/Genentech that produced approved medicines like Risdiplam and Enspryng. At Noetik he is selling a new idea to pharma: not AI services, but licensable AI infrastructure for biology.
Shankar Ramaswamy is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Kriya Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company building one-time gene therapies for common, highly prevalent chronic diseases rather than only rare ones. A physician by training who started his career evaluating drug candidates at Roivant Sciences and helping launch Axovant's record biotech IPO, he founded Kriya in 2019 and has since raised more than $600 million to vertically integrate gene therapy design, computational biology and in-house GMP manufacturing.
Shanthi Shanmugam is the co-founder and CEO of Casap, a New York fintech that uses AI to automate payment disputes, chargebacks, and first-party fraud detection for banks, credit unions, and fintechs. A UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science graduate, she cut her teeth as a product manager at Facebook and spent roughly five years at Robinhood, where she launched the first crypto trading feature and later ran customer-care products. Watching back-office breakdowns erode consumer trust convinced her the dispute process was broken, so she reconnected with a former Facebook colleague, Saisi Peter, and started Casap in 2023. In August 2025 the company raised a $25M Series A led by Emergence Capital, bringing total funding to $33.5M.
Shashi Kori is a neurologist and neuro-oncologist turned biotech founder, and the co-founder and CEO of Novilla Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge-based company using a proprietary AI model to design transdermal formulations that deliver drugs to the site of action while minimizing systemic effects. Before Novilla, he spent decades building pain programs at Duke and the University of South Florida and led clinical development at GlaxoSmithKline, Allergan, MAP Pharmaceuticals and Autonomic Technologies. He partnered with Dr. Eric Fossel in 2019 to merge their drug-delivery innovations into Novilla's pipeline, led by lead candidate NOV-1776.
Shashi Shankar is the co-founder and CEO of Novellia, a New York-based, AI-enabled health data platform that turns patients' scattered medical records into clean, longitudinal stories that biopharma companies can actually use. After nearly a decade at Genentech and Roche, he started Novellia in response to his grandfather's death from cancer, when his family found there was no single place to see the man's complete medical history. The company raised an $18M Series A led by Spark Capital and Shankar was named to Worth Magazine's 2025 AI & Health Access Pioneer list.
Shauna Drumright runs Savage X Fenty, the inclusive lingerie brand Rihanna built. A subscription-commerce operator who cut her teeth at Procter & Gamble before spending years scaling TechStyle's JustFab and FabKids, she stepped into the CEO seat to turn a celebrity launch into a durable, data-driven retail machine. Her brief: keep the body-positive swagger that made the brand famous while making the math work across membership, stores, and a sprawling product range.
Shawn Manchester is the CEO of Triplebar, an Emeryville-and-Oakland based biotech building generative AI 'genome language models' paired with ultra-high-throughput phenotypic screening to slash the cost of biologic therapeutics and food proteins. A chemical engineer by training (BS Brown, PhD MIT), he was the lead scientist in the first AI-versus-human strain engineering contest at Zymergen before joining Triplebar in 2021, where he rose from VP of Product to COO to CEO in March 2025.
Shawn O'Neil is the CEO of ViaLase, a clinical-stage medtech company building FLIGHT, an incision-free femtosecond laser procedure for glaucoma. He spent more than two decades at Alcon rising to head of sales and marketing for surgical glaucoma, then ran commercial at Sight Sciences before joining ViaLase as Chief Commercial Officer and stepping up to CEO in July 2025. His career has been a running tour of the products that reshaped eye surgery: EX-PRESS, LenSx, CyPass, OMNI, TearCare, and now a laser that treats glaucoma without ever touching the eye with a blade.
Sheldon J.J. Kwok is the CEO and co-founder of LASE Innovation, a Boston-area techbio company turning microscopic lasers into cellular barcodes. He spent his PhD at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital building particles that emit pure laser light from inside living cells, then spun the work into a company aiming to give every cell a trackable identity and add a time dimension to flow cytometry.
Sherry A. William is the founder and managing attorney of Pacific Ivy Law Group, a Los Angeles-area corporate boutique that pairs Big-Law rigor with what she calls emotional IQ. Harvard Law educated and trained at three top-tier firms in New York and Los Angeles plus a stint in Tokyo, she negotiates deals for companies, individuals, governments, and financial institutions worldwide. Raised by an immigrant single mother in the Egyptian American community, she is fluent in Arabic, licensed to practice law in California and New York, holds real estate broker licenses in both states, and leads the Harvard Law School Association of Los Angeles and the League of Egyptian American Professionals.
Shilpa Sambashivan is the CEO and a co-founder of Nura Bio, a South San Francisco biotech building brain-penetrant small molecules that aim to stop nerves from dying. A protein biochemist by training, she helped spin the company out of academic labs in 2018, built its R&D engine as Chief Scientific Officer, and was elevated to CEO in September 2024 alongside a $68M Series A extension that pushed total funding past $140M. Her lead drug, NB-4746, blocks the SARM1 enzyme that triggers axon self-destruction.
Shimin Ooi is the CEO of Sleep Reset, a virtual sleep clinic that pairs licensed clinical care with a proprietary CBT-I program to treat insomnia without sleeping pills. A Princeton graduate who built her career across McKinsey, Pilot, and Index Ventures, she now runs a company arguing that a lot of what people call burnout is really untreated bad sleep. In 2025 she took Sleep Reset's pitch to the HLTH stage and walked away with the AARP AgeTech After Dark prize.
Shiva Suri is the founder and CEO of New Lantern, a San Francisco startup building an AI-native radiology platform that aims to automate roughly 90% of imaging workflows - dictation, report drafting, measurements, and worklist navigation. A University of Pennsylvania computer engineer and former Confluent software engineer, he started the company in 2021 after watching his radiologist mother burn most of her day on clerical busywork instead of reading scans. In November 2024 New Lantern raised a $19M Series A led by Benchmark's Eric Vishria, part of $22.6M total raised.
Shreya Murthy is the cofounder and CEO of Partiful, the text-first party invitation app that became Gen Z's default way to gather. Launched in 2020 during pandemic lockdowns, the New York company has grown past millions of users, raised a $20M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, won Google's Best App of 2024, and landed Murthy on the 2025 TIME100 Next list. A Princeton politics grad and ex-Palantir operator, she left mission-fatigued tech jobs to build the social layer for offline life, betting that parties are not frivolous but infrastructure for community.
Simon Jones is the founder and CEO of Fluid Efficiency, a Caltech spin-out commercializing 'megasupramolecules' (MSMs), self-assembling polymers that make fuels harder to ignite in a crash and oil cheaper to push through a pipeline. An Oxford-trained inorganic chemist who spent years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jones is the industrial chemist who took a decades-old academic dream of safer jet fuel and figured out how to actually manufacture it at scale. He has collaborated with the original Caltech research team behind the technology since 2008.
Siva Yellamraju is the co-founder and CEO of Fourier, a Palo Alto hydrogen startup building modular, software-controlled electrolyzers no bigger than two server racks. A four-time founder whose previous companies were acquired by Apple, Google, and Polycom, he spent a career in cameras and video before turning a 10-15% side exploration into a clean-energy company. Fourier treats hydrogen production as a data-optimization problem, aiming to deliver on-site hydrogen at $6-7/kg. The company raised an $18.5M Series A led by General Catalyst and Paramark Ventures in April 2025.
Soongyu Choi is the co-CEO and co-founder of Avelos Therapeutics, a Seoul-based clinical-stage precision oncology company chasing first-in-class small molecules in synthetic lethality, DNA damage response, and cell cycle control. A Harvard-trained chemist who spent a decade at PTC Therapeutics and led R&D at Yuhan and Hana Pharm, he co-founded Avelos in 2021 and was elevated from CTO to co-CEO in January 2024. His flagship program, AD1208, is a first-in-class MASTL kinase inhibitor he frames as a precise strike on cancers that have stopped responding to standard therapy.
Sophie Soowon Eom is the co-founder and CEO of Adriel, an AI-powered marketing intelligence and ad-reporting platform used by hundreds of brands and agencies across more than 20 countries. A HEC Paris finance grad turned two-time AI founder, she first built Solidware, a machine-learning credit-scoring startup that landed her on the 2017 Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list, then pivoted to fixing the chaos of cross-channel ad data. She has sat alongside Melinda Gates and Jack Ma on the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation and served on South Korea's Presidential Committee on the 4th Industrial Revolution.
Spencer Kimball is the co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, the company behind CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database built to survive almost anything you throw at it. Long before databases, he co-wrote GIMP as a Berkeley class project in 1995, spent roughly a decade as an engineer at Google working on its file-system guts, and built a photo startup that Square acquired. He named his database after the one creature famous for being nearly impossible to kill - which turned out to be the perfect pitch.
Srikanth Narayan is the founder and CEO of Cache, a San Francisco brokerage built for people who are dangerously over-invested in a single stock. A former engineer at Uber and Alphabet's Waymo, he discovered exchange funds while trying to untangle his own concentrated Uber equity, then spent a year in stealth turning a tool reserved for $10M-plus private bank clients into a product with a $100,000 minimum. Since launching in March 2024, Cache has crossed $600M+ in assets and raised a $12.5M Series A led by First Round Capital.
Stella Wu is the founder and CEO of Eano, a San Mateo construction-tech company that started as a way to fix the chaos of home renovation and grew into all-in-one software for contractors covering sales, project management, and payments. A UC Berkeley grad and the first marketing hire at Wish, where she managed $400M+ in annual ad spend, she built Eano after her own ADU project turned into 150 unanswered emails, a 350-day permit, and quotes that swung from $40K to $100K. Investors describe her as the opposite of the steel-toed-boots construction stereotype. Eano has raised over $20M.
Stephanie Trunzo is the CEO of MERGE, a hybrid marketing-and-technology firm working at the crossroads of health, consumerism, and storytelling. A 20-plus-year technology leader, she launched Oracle Health and steered the Cerner acquisition, scaled the IBM Garage across 16 co-creation studios worldwide, and earlier doubled revenue year over year as COO/CDO of PointSource before its acquisition by Globant. She holds more than 20 patents, is a certified yoga instructor, and is a vocal advocate for authentic leadership and women in technology.
Stephen Chao is the co-founder and CEO of WonderHowTo, the Santa Monica how-to video network he launched in 2008 after a combustible career in television. He created the reality formats America's Most Wanted and Cops at Fox, rose to president of Fox Television Stations, and was fired ten weeks later for hiring a model to strip during a speech about censorship in front of Rupert Murdoch. He later ran programming at USA Network. A Harvard classics major and former National Enquirer reporter, Chao built a second act around free, searchable tutorials covering everything from food hacks to augmented reality.
Stephen Rubino is the CEO of Sporos Bioventures, a Houston-based biotech that runs cancer drug development as a portfolio rather than a single bet. A Cornell-trained virologist with a Baruch MBA, he spent three decades in business development and commercial roles at Schering-Plough, Novartis, Celyad Oncology and Fortress Biotech before taking the helm at Sporos in 2022, where the lead program is SPR1, a next-generation TEAD inhibitor aimed at hard-to-drug cancers.
Steve Gilman is the co-founder and CEO of OneRange, a New York-based AI-powered upskilling platform that lets employees discover, get approval for, and buy the learning resources they need, with companies paying only when people actually learn. Before software, Gilman was drafted by the Detroit Tigers out of Yale and then served as a Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer working counterproliferation missions out of US embassies in Cairo and Abu Dhabi. He frames OneRange as importing the world-class skill-development methods of pro sports and the military into the corporate world, and the company now works with 25-plus enterprises including Google, Wasserman, and Caylent.
Steve Hoover is the CEO of Impossible Objects, the Northbrook, Illinois company commercializing CBAM (composite-based additive manufacturing), a from-the-ground-up 3D printing process that bonds carbon fiber and other composites into parts that are stronger, lighter and more heat-tolerant than conventional prints. A mechanical engineer with a Carnegie Mellon doctorate, he spent roughly two decades at Xerox, rising to corporate CTO and running PARC as CEO, before a stint leading RIT's Global Cybersecurity Institute and co-founding the art-recognition startup Artify.ai. He took the Impossible Objects helm in March 2023 to push composite 3D printing from prototypes into high-volume manufacturing.
Thomas (Tom) Arnold is the Chief Executive Officer of ViCentra, the Dutch maker of Kaleido, billed as one of the smallest, lightest and most precise insulin patch pumps in its class. Appointed in February 2025 after nearly 25 years across Medtronic, PROCEPT BioRobotics, Boston Scientific and Sorin Group, he is steering ViCentra's smartphone-controlled automated insulin delivery system into European markets and toward a US entry, backed by financing that has grown from $85M to $98M.
Steve Johnson is the co-founder and CEO of Notable Systems, a Denver-based company using AI, machine learning, and human-in-the-loop review to turn messy healthcare paperwork into clean, usable data. Three decades before that, he co-founded Johnson-Grace, whose patented compression algorithm delivered the first online pictures on America Online in 1993 - a building block of modern streaming media. AOL acquired the company in 1996 and made him a VP running software and technology development; he later founded the personalization pioneer ChoiceStream. In 2025 Notable Systems raised a $12M Series B to push beyond order intake into full revenue cycle automation.