Eric Berridge is a 23-year Salesforce ecosystem veteran and CEO of Coastal, a premier Salesforce consultancy he joined in 2020 and took the helm of in September 2023. He previously co-founded Bluewolf in 2000 - one of the first Salesforce-focused consulting firms - and built it to a major acquisition by IBM in 2016. A TED speaker, two-time author, and MFA-holder in creative writing who never studied computer science, Berridge argues that the humanities are tech's most underrated competitive advantage. Under his leadership, Coastal was acquired by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for $700 million in January 2026, the largest professional services acquisition in Salesforce ecosystem history.
Ben Casselman is the Chief Economics Correspondent for The New York Times, where he turns labor reports, Fed decisions and inflation prints into stories people actually read. A self-described 'unapologetic econ nerd,' he built his name on evidence-first, data-driven reporting at The Wall Street Journal and FiveThirtyEight before joining the Times in 2017. He shared a Gerald Loeb Award and a Pulitzer finalist nod for Deepwater Horizon coverage, is a frequent voice on the NYT podcast The Daily, and teaches economics reporting at the CUNY Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
Pieter de Villiers is the Co-Founder and CEO of Clickatell, the company that invented the world's first SMS API in 2000 with four lines of code and went on to pioneer chat banking and chat commerce globally. Based in Stellenbosch, South Africa, he led Clickatell to become the first African startup backed by Sequoia Capital, raised over $118 million in total funding, and built a platform that processes roughly 9 billion messages monthly for more than 10,000 enterprise clients across 220+ countries. He also chairs SiMODiSA, a non-profit focused on digital skills development and startup acceleration in Africa.
Preston Hopkin is an enterprise sales leader at Adobe, currently serving as AVP of Enterprise Sales for Adobe's Content Supply Chain practice. Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, he has built his career bridging financial services and enterprise software — progressing from business banking at Wells Fargo to leading global sales teams across Latin America and Asia-Pacific at Workfront before its acquisition by Adobe. Today he drives client growth for Adobe's AI-powered content operations platform, helping large organizations orchestrate the end-to-end lifecycle of marketing content at scale.
Rachel Chen is a corporate communications specialist at eBay in San Jose, where she works on CEO communications and the global content team. A Princeton graduate from Philadelphia, she blends press-release craft with editorial storytelling and a data-driven instinct for what readers actually want.
Alex Shan is the 22-year-old co-founder and CEO of Judgment Labs, a San Francisco startup building the continuous-improvement stack for AI agents. A former Stanford NLP researcher under Chris Manning who pioneered autonomous networking agents at Juniper Networks, Shan started Judgment with two childhood best friends to give teams tools that understand what their agents are actually doing - not just their inputs and outputs. In May 2026 the company closed $32 million in combined seed and Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Alex De Simone is the CEO and co-founder of Avochato, a business messaging platform that lets sales, support, and operations teams talk to customers over text. He launched it the summer after his first year at Stanford GSB, grew it to seven-figure revenue in under a year, and raised a $5M Series A led by Amity Ventures in 2018. Before Avochato he co-founded Jobr, a Tinder-style job-search app acquired by Monster.com. A self-taught coder with a mechanical engineering background, he turned a side project into a product used by 1,000+ businesses for millions of two-way conversations.
Alex Wiltschko is the founder and CEO of Osmo, a company teaching computers to read and write smell. An olfactory neuroscientist who spent roughly 18 years studying scent, he led the team at Google Brain that built an AI model predicting how a molecule smells from its chemical structure - work published in Science in 2023 as the Principal Odor Map. Osmo spun out of Google in 2022, and in 2024 it pulled off 'scent teleportation,' digitally capturing a fresh-cut summer plum and reprinting its smell in another room. In February 2026 the company raised a $70 million Series B led by Two Sigma Ventures.
Amanda Greenberg is the CEO and co-founder of Balloon, a SaaS platform that eliminates groupthink and cognitive bias from team collaboration through anonymous idea submission and merit-based voting. A former public health researcher who developed behavior-change campaigns for the CDC, EPA, and DOE, Greenberg pivoted to tech entrepreneurship after observing how social dynamics suppress good decision-making in rooms full of smart people. She co-founded Balloon in 2015 with her husband and CTO Noah Bornstein, bootstrapped to a Fortune 50 client within 11 months, raised $2.6M in seed funding from investors including Jason Calacanis and Matt Mullenweg, and was named to Inc. Magazine's Female Founders 100 list in 2022. Balloon's advisory board includes Adam Grant, Amy Edmondson, and Daniel Pink.
Amanda Luke is the CEO of Bonafide Provisions, the family-founded California maker of organic, traditionally-prepared bone broth. A UC Berkeley and Columbia-trained marketer, she spent years building health-and-wellness brands at Safeway and Luvo before joining the small Carlsbad broth company in 2018, rising from VP of Marketing to CEO within roughly a year. Under her leadership the women-led brand pushed beyond frozen broth into keto cups, cooking broths, and shelf-stable pantry products, positioning Bonafide as one of the most recognizable clean-label bone broth names in the United States.
Alexander Casdin is the Chief Executive Officer of Epirium Bio, a San Diego biotechnology company developing small-molecule therapies to improve muscle function. A healthcare executive and institutional investor with more than 25 years in the industry, he stepped up from CFO and COO to CEO on January 1, 2025, the same month Epirium's lead drug MF-300 - a first-in-class oral 15-PGDH inhibitor for sarcopenia - cleared the FDA to begin human trials. Before Epirium he founded and ran Reneo Capital Management, was CFO of Sophiris Bio, and ran VP of Finance at Amylin Pharmaceuticals, and he sits on the board of Erasca as audit committee chair.
Alexander Kates is the cofounder and CEO of Vetcove, the free ordering platform that lets veterinary practices, zoos, aquariums and animal welfare groups shop every supplier at once - think Kayak, but for the stuff that keeps animals healthy. He built it with his brother Mitch after watching the inventory manager at their father's equine veterinary practice juggle 30-40 vendor tabs by hand. Before veterinary supply chains, Kates was a digital strategist who advised Fortune 500 companies, taught executives on four continents, and co-wrote a bestselling marketing textbook. Vetcove now employs hundreds and serves a large slice of US veterinary hospitals.
Alexandra Mysoor is the co-founder and CEO of Alix, an AI-powered estate settlement platform built to guide families through the 600-900 hours of paperwork that follow a death. After 20 years launching and scaling consumer brands and running her own global manufacturing and investment firm, Mysoor Industries, she started Alix in 2022 when settling a best friend's mother's estate consumed 900 hours of her life. Alix raised a $20M Series A in July 2025 from Acrew Capital, Charles Schwab and Edward Jones Ventures. She also sits on the board of Security National Financial Corporation.
Alexey 'Alex' Lugovskoy is the co-founder and CEO of Diagonal Therapeutics, a Watertown/Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech building 'clustering' antibodies that switch cellular signaling back on rather than block it. A Harvard-trained biophysicist who left physics after deciding green leaves were more interesting than tau neutrinos, he spent two decades in antibody R&D at Biogen, Merrimack, Morphic, and Dragonfly before launching Diagonal in 2022. He has co-invented an FDA-approved cancer drug, authored more than 100 patents and papers, and edits the antibody journal mAbs. In January 2026 Diagonal closed an oversubscribed $125M Series B co-led by Sanofi Ventures and Janus Henderson to push its lead program, DIAG723, into human trials for hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia.
Alfredo Andere is the co-founder and CEO of LatchBio, a San Francisco company building cloud and machine-learning infrastructure for biology. Born in Mexico City and raised in Guadalajara, he studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley, worked at Google on the TensorFlow-NumPy framework and as a data engineer at Facebook, then dropped out of Berkeley in early 2021 with two college friends to start LatchBio. The trio conducted roughly 300 customer interviews before writing code, raised an oversubscribed $5M seed led by Lux Capital, and have since scaled the company through a $28M Series A and a 2026 Series B, bringing total funding to $163M. Andere is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
Ali Akhtar is the co-founder and CEO of Letter AI, a Chicago-based, AI-native revenue enablement platform that helps B2B sales teams build training, content, coaching, and live deal guidance with generative AI. A University of Chicago and Michigan Ross graduate, he spent roughly a decade leading machine learning and product teams at Samsara, project44, and McKinsey before launching Letter AI through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch. By early 2026 the company had raised more than $52 million, including a $40 million Series B led by Battery Ventures, and counted Lenovo, Adobe, Novo Nordisk, Plaid, and SolarWinds among its customers.
Ali Hussain is the CEO and co-founder of Tabs, a New York based startup building AI agents that automate the messy contract-to-cash side of B2B finance: billing, collections, and revenue recognition. He founded the company in 2023 after watching accounts receivable break at scale as COO of Latch (later DOOR), and earlier worked at Boston Consulting Group, Google, and the U.S. Congress. In September 2025 Tabs raised a $55M Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to launch its first Billing and Collections agents, bringing total funding to roughly $92M.
Alice Zhang is the CEO and co-founder of Verge Genomics (now Verge Labs), a San Francisco biotech she started in 2015 after walking away from an MD/PhD program at UCLA. She built a company that pairs machine learning with one of the largest collections of human brain tissue to find drug targets for diseases like ALS, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. A Princeton molecular biology graduate, Soros Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Zhang turned her inexperience into what she calls a 'superpower,' raising more than $130 million and partnering with Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca before pivoting the company toward selling its data and insights to pharma in 2025.
Alison Richards is the CEO of Surest, a UnitedHealthcare company (formerly Bind) that builds a health plan with no deductibles and upfront prices people can see before they book care. A UnitedHealthcare veteran since 2012, she has turned the company's most contrarian benefits idea - let members shop for care the way they shop for everything else - into its fastest-growing employer plan.
Alla Zamarayeva is the co-founder and CEO of CellFE, a Bay Area biotech building a non-viral, microfluidics-based platform for engineering human cells. A UC Berkeley engineering PhD and former Goldwater Scholar, she spun a piece of academic research she stumbled onto during her doctorate into a company aiming to make cell therapies cheaper, gentler, and eventually available at the point of care. In 2023 she led CellFE to a $22 million Series A backed by M Ventures, and she is steering the company toward redefining how gene-edited cell therapies are manufactured.
Allen Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Fitbod, the San Francisco strength-training app that uses machine learning to design a fresh, personalized workout every time you open it. A UCLA computer science grad and former Wall Street high-frequency trading strategist, Chen swapped optimizing stock portfolios for optimizing sets and reps, building an algorithm that picks exercises the way he once picked trades. Since launching in 2015 with co-founder Jesse Venticinque, Fitbod has grown to more than 300,000 paid subscribers while staying lean and profitable.
Allison Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Revive, a New York fashion-tech company that helps brands recover value from returned and unsellable inventory through AI-driven inspection, refurbishment, and resale. A Korean immigrant who arrived in the U.S. at 13 and studied psychology at UC Berkeley, she first built Hemster, a SaaS tailoring platform, in 2017. When the pandemic stalled in-store tailoring, she pivoted the underlying fit-data infrastructure into Revive, which she has grown 46x in under a year and which has processed roughly $23M in merchandise. She is a 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
Alvin Luk is a biotech executive, neuroscientist and entrepreneur with more than three decades in global drug development. He is President & Chief Medical Officer (Group) and U.S. CEO of HanchorBio, a clinical-stage immunology and immuno-oncology company building Fc-based designer biologics, and co-founder and CEO of CRISPR gene-editing company HuidaGene Therapeutics. Across his career he has contributed to roughly two dozen approved products and more than 250 global regulatory submissions, including LUXTURNA, the first FDA-approved gene therapy. A 2025 TIME100 Health honoree, he wants to turn HanchorBio into the 'Genentech of Asia.'
Amanda Rees is the co-founder and CEO of Bold, a Los Angeles based digital fitness platform that delivers personalized, science-based exercise programs to help older adults build strength, ease pain, and prevent falls. A Princeton-trained chemical and biological engineer who is also a longtime dance and tai chi instructor, Rees built Bold after spending most of her twenties caring for her grandmother and discovering how few preventive tools existed for aging well. Bold partners with Medicare Advantage plans and has raised about $27 million in total funding, including a $17 million Series A.
Amaury Ciurana is the co-founder and CEO of REEV, a wearable-robotics company building intelligent motorized orthoses for people with neurological gait disorders. A French aerospace engineer trained at ISAE-SUPAERO and the X-HEC entrepreneurship track, he relocated to Boston in 2023 to lead REEV's US expansion. The company pairs DREEVEN, an AI-powered robotic knee orthosis, with REEV SENSE, a wearable gait-analysis system, and has raised roughly $14M total including a $9.2M round in 2025.
Amelia Degenkolb is the CEO and co-founder of Novocuff, a Mountain View medical device company building the Cervical Control System, a device designed to stabilize the cervix, retain amniotic fluid and prolong pregnancies threatened by preterm premature rupture of membranes. A biomedical engineer who spent seven years as the first employee and lead engineer at Alydia Health, she helped bring the Jada System for postpartum hemorrhage to market before that company's $240M acquisition by Organon. In July 2024 she raised an oversubscribed $26M Series A to fund a U.S. pivotal trial aimed at reducing preterm births, the leading cause of infant mortality worldwide.
Amin Nikoozadeh is the founder and CEO of Vave Health, a San Jose company building affordable, wireless handheld ultrasound. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who spent years shrinking an entire imaging system onto the tip of a 3mm catheter, he started Vave in 2015 after confronting a stark fact: roughly two-thirds of the world's population has no access to medical imaging. The company's pocket-sized probe earned FDA 510(k) clearance in 2019 and now powers millions of scans across hospitals, medical schools, and underserved clinics.
Amit Jhawar is the CEO of Attentive, the AI-powered SMS and mobile marketing platform. Before martech, he spent a decade building payments: he was among the first 30 employees at Braintree, served as its CFO and COO, engineered the acquisition of Venmo, and then ran Venmo as CEO after PayPal bought the business. A former Accel partner, he joined Attentive as President in 2021 and was promoted to CEO in June 2023, where he has steered the company from SMS marketing into a broader AI-driven customer engagement platform.
Amit Kapur is co-CEO of Flawless, the London-based AI filmmaking company building 'assistive AI' tools for visual dubbing, performance editing and film localization. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer who grew up in South Dakota, Kapur rose to COO of MySpace at its 125-million-user peak, co-founded the AI personalization startup Gravity (acquired by AOL in 2014), ran AOL's publisher platform, and later worked as an executive in residence at Redpoint Ventures. He advised and sat on Flawless's board for two years before stepping into the co-CEO seat alongside filmmaker Scott Mann, drawn by what he calls the company's ethical-AI approach to amplifying filmmakers rather than replacing them.
Anastasia Leng is the founder and CEO of CreativeX, a New York technology company that uses AI and computer vision to measure the quality, consistency, and effectiveness of the images and videos brands put into the world. Fortune 500 giants like Unilever, Heineken, Mondelez, Nestle, and Google use it to bring data to the one part of marketing that has always resisted measurement: the creative itself. A lifelong nomad raised across seven countries and a former Google product lead who co-founded the celebrated ecommerce startup Hatch, Leng has built CreativeX into one of the defining companies in the emerging field of creative data, raising about $30 million along the way.