Nick Bunick wanted a conversation with Alex Hejnosz. He sent an email. Then he sent more. Over the course of a year, the NewView Capital partner sent 15 cold emails before getting a response. He also spoke with Inspiren’s customers and assembled a presentation of what they told him. As opening gambits go, this was considerably more laborious than “just circling back.”
The episode is a useful way into Hejnosz’s story because it puts the usual fundraising choreography in reverse. Here was an investor doing the pursuing, gathering evidence, and making the case for a meeting. In September 2026, NewView led Inspiren’s $70 million Series C. The long correspondence had become a business relationship.
It would be tempting to turn the unanswered emails into a theory of Hejnosz’s personality. That would ask an inbox to do rather too much biographical work. What the episode establishes is simpler: someone wanted access to the company badly enough to spend a year working for it. Customers, rather than an especially elegant introductory note, became part of the argument.
For Hejnosz, the chief executive of Inspiren and previously a co-founder of CipherHealth, that customer-centered pursuit makes an apt opening scene. His earlier responsibilities included leading sales and developing strategic partnerships. Before an investor was interviewing his customers, he had spent years in the business of winning customers himself.
Nick Bunick’s pursuit of a conversation with Hejnosz.
Before the CEO title, the sales work
Hejnosz graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in biology. His subsequent career took him into company building. At CipherHealth, he was a co-founder and later chief strategy officer, with responsibilities spanning sales, business development, and partnerships. The job placed him at the point where a product has to persuade an organization to change how it works. It was a role with an external audience: prospective customers, existing customers, and businesses that might become partners.
That part of a founder’s career rarely photographs well. A sales organization has to be built. Potential partners have to be identified. A promising introduction has to become an agreement, then an ongoing relationship. In Hejnosz’s case, those duties were explicit parts of the role. They give his biography more texture than a succession of senior titles would on its own.
His fellow CipherHealth founders included Randy Cheung and Zach Silverzweig. In 2018, the company announced a $37.5 million investment from JMI Equity. Hejnosz was therefore part of a company that had already experienced the transition from founding team to a business supported by institutional capital. Inspiren would bring another version of that transition, with a different product and a different leadership position.
The continuity is commercial. At CipherHealth, Hejnosz worked on distribution and strategic relationships. At Inspiren, he became responsible for the whole company. There is a substantial distance between helping lead a sales team and serving as chief executive, but there is also a recognizable connection: both jobs require other people to commit time, money, and trust to something they have not built themselves.
An existing company, a new chapter
Hejnosz joined Inspiren as CEO in late 2022. Michael Wang had founded the company in 2016. Those dates matter. This was a leadership chapter in an existing business, with a product history already behind it. Primary Venture Partners also lists Hejnosz among Inspiren’s founders. The two descriptions appear in his public record; his arrival as chief executive provides the clearest point from which to follow his operating story.
Wang and Hejnosz now appear together in the company’s story: the founder and the chief executive, working on the same business from different positions. A photograph of the pair catches a warmer version of that relationship than an organizational chart can manage. Wang stands on the left, Hejnosz on the right, both smiling. Corporate photography occasionally remembers that companies contain people.
The working vocabulary around the team has a similarly practical streak. In a public comment celebrating a 2024 deployment, Wang described a culture of “getting on the ladder.” His explanation emphasized rolling up sleeves and leading by example. The phrase belongs to Wang, but it offers a concrete glimpse of the company Hejnosz leads: installation is part of the work, and seniority is no reason to float above it.
That physical aspect distinguishes the operating challenge. Inspiren combines hardware and software. A device has to arrive, be installed, and work alongside the software people use. The business therefore asks for several kinds of competence at once. A persuasive pitch may start the relationship; delivery, deployment, and support have to keep it going.
The wall has a vote
By September 2025, Scale Venture Partners was backing Inspiren’s $100 million Series B. Its investment account described an initial meeting with Hejnosz the previous fall and a market that had been skeptical of earlier technology promises. Over roughly eight months, the firm said, sentiment changed. Its explanation centered on the combination of hardware, software, and a design that takes privacy seriously.
That is an investor’s assessment, and the perspective matters. Still, the details identify the questions around Hejnosz’s business: Will customers trust the product? Can the pieces work together? Can the company deliver enough value while making its own economics work? These are operating questions with engineering consequences, rather than questions a financing announcement can settle.
Primary’s account of its relationship with Inspiren adds another angle. The firm describes a team aiming beyond an individual device toward a connected collection of products. For a chief executive, that expansion changes the assignment. Each additional component creates a new obligation to customers and a new dependency inside the company. A broader offering has to remain understandable to the people buying and using it.
There is a wonderfully unromantic phrase in Primary’s discussion: getting devices “on walls.” It brings the venture language back to a place where someone needs a ladder. For Hejnosz, company growth includes that last stretch between a signed contract and a working installation. However sophisticated the software becomes, the wall still gets a vote.
“Getting on the ladder.”
Michael Wang’s phrase for rolling up sleeves and leading by example.
Growth needs a people department, too
Inspiren’s June 2026 workplace announcement supplies an unusually specific look inside the organization. The company said it had more than doubled its product and engineering investment over the preceding year. It described recruiting experienced leaders from businesses including Anduril, Peloton, Shopify, Affinity, and Udemy. Building the next stage meant bringing different operating experiences into the same team.
The announcement also described twice-yearly performance reviews, clear criteria for levels, and dedicated manager training. These are modest-looking details beside a funding total, but they tell us something about the work of scaling. A growing company needs ways to explain expectations and help managers develop people. An expanding payroll does not automatically produce an organization that knows how to function.
Inspiren was included among 507 companies on Inc.’s 2026 Best Workplaces list. The selection process involved an employee survey and a benefits audit. The recognition belongs to the company and its employees. It provides a different view of Hejnosz’s tenure from the capital announcements: alongside raising money and broadening the product, the business was formalizing how it managed its own team.
The human connections have a less procedural side as well. When Royce Brunson announced he was joining Inspiren in 2025, he described Wang and Hejnosz as friends and mentors he had admired for years. That is one colleague’s account, rather than a personality verdict. It is nevertheless a useful detail in a career otherwise described through financing rounds and executive responsibilities.
A larger balance sheet, the same test
The September 2026 Series C brought Inspiren’s total funding to $225 million. Alongside NewView, participants included Insight Partners, Primary Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Vintage Investment Partners, Lightbank, Avenir Growth Capital, Story Ventures, and Camber Creek. It was a substantial group of firms signing up for the next stage of the business Hejnosz leads.
The announced plans were concrete: expand the go-to-market operation, develop the hardware offering, and deepen the AI platform. Those priorities connect directly to his route into the job. Commercial expansion calls back to his sales and partnership experience. Hardware expansion demands coordination across functions. Product development requires a team capable of turning capital into something a customer can actually use.
The three named rounds tell the recent sequence clearly: $35 million in Series A funding announced in March 2025, $100 million in Series B later that year, and $70 million in Series C in September 2026. These are company financing figures. Their value as biography lies in the change of responsibility they represent for the chief executive overseeing that period.
The unanswered-email story looks different after that sequence. Bunick had gone looking for customers’ opinions before the investment. He had prepared his own presentation. The pursuit began outside Hejnosz’s organization, but it was concerned with the same thing that had occupied his earlier commercial work: whether people who had bought the product believed in it enough to make the next conversation worthwhile.
Hejnosz’s public career has moved from co-founder and strategy executive to chief executive, from building commercial relationships to leading an expanding hardware-and-software company. The story has room for a large funding round and an ordinary ladder. It also has room for an investor willing to write again. Fifteen messages made an amusing opening. What happened with the customers gave the correspondence somewhere to go.