40-under-40
(14)
Chirag Jain
Chirag Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Get My Parking, a smart parking technology company he started in 2015 with Rasik Pansare after the two met on the Jagriti Yatra train journey across India. An IIT Madras graduate who spent two years in the automotive industry, Jain set out to digitize the largely unorganized parking sector with affordable, white-labeled, IoT-driven software. Under his leadership Get My Parking has grown to serve tens of millions of parking transactions across more than a dozen countries, raised multiple rounds of venture funding, and pushed into AI-powered products like license plate recognition and the AVA voice support agent. He was named to Business World's Disrupt 40 Under 40 in 2017.
Mahesh Devalla
Mahesh Devalla is the Chief Technology Officer of Players Health, a Minneapolis-based sports insurance and risk-management company that protects youth athletes and sports organizations. He leads product and engineering strategy and applies human-centered, ethical AI to athlete safety and real-time decision support. Before Players Health, where he rose from Director of Engineering, he architected enterprise-scale AI platforms across finance, utilities and software at firms including Citi, Bank of America, American Water, Hexagon and App Orchid. He holds a master's in computer science and artificial intelligence from Dartmouth College, authored the book 'The AI Dilemma: Why Businesses Still Fail to Embrace AI,' and has been named a USA 40 Under 40 honoree and ranked among global top AI leaders.
Sam Ryan
Sam Ryan is the co-founder and CEO of Zeelo, a smart bus platform that runs shuttle routes for frontline workers and independent schools across the UK and US. He founded the company in 2016 with Barney Williams and Dani Ruiz after selling their student ride-share app JumpIn to Addison Lee, and has since grown Zeelo into a business moving roughly 150,000 riders a month with a fleet of more than 10,000 vehicles.
Vishal Sunak
Vishal Sunak is a Boston software founder best known for co-founding LinkSquares in 2015 and running it as CEO for a decade, building an AI-powered contract-management platform for in-house legal and finance teams that raised roughly $161 million and grew to around 450 employees. Born in Brazil to Indian parents and raised in Rhode Island, he trained as an engineer, worked on military RF electronics, and cut his teeth in Boston B2B software at Backupify and InsightSquared before starting LinkSquares. He stepped back from the CEO role in early 2025, stayed on as a founding board member and advisor, and is now building a new, largely stealth venture called Joyride (joyride.ai).
Amber Nigam
Amber Nigam is the co-founder and CEO of basys.ai, a Harvard-born healthcare AI company teaching software to navigate one of medicine's most despised rituals: prior authorization. Trained on more than 10 million patient records and claims, basys.ai's engine encodes payer policy and automates up to 90% of authorization requests, aiming to give clinicians their time back and patients faster answers. A Harvard Health Data Science graduate, three-time patent inventor, and published researcher at venues like NeurIPS and ACL, Nigam came to Boston from Bareilly, India, after first building an ed-tech startup, kydots.ai. He has spoken at TEDx, Mayo Clinic, Harvard, and MIT, and has been named to multiple 40 Under 40 lists.
Gaurav Khandelwal
Gaurav Khandelwal is the founder and CEO of Velostics, a Houston-based logistics SaaS company that automates appointment scheduling, dock and yard management, and the gate in/out process for shippers and carriers. The son of a tea blender from India, he came to the US for college at tiny Goshen College in Indiana, built the behavioral-science software studio ChaiOne into a multi-million-dollar firm starting in 2009, then turned his attention to the friction-filled 'middle mile' of commerce. He launched Velostics to digitize the antiquated handoffs between warehouses and trucks, raised a $2.5M seed round led by Flyover Capital, and is a fixture of Houston's startup ecosystem as the founder of START co-working space and a Houston Exponential board member.
Marco Lobba
Marco Lobba is a chemist turned CEO who co-founded CatenaBio (Catena Biosciences), a UC Berkeley spinout building a new way to staple proteins together. Trained in the labs of Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna and chemist Matthew Francis, he turned a graduate-school enzyme trick into the CysTyr platform, where an engineered enzyme called Catenase forges a durable tyrosine-cysteine bond - the C-Y Bond - to assemble multi-payload conjugates that single-molecule chemistry could not. He was named to the San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40 in 2025.
Qian Li
Qian Li is the co-founder and CEO of DBOS, Inc., a Cambridge- and San Francisco-based company turning a once-academic idea into infrastructure: store a program's execution state inside Postgres so crashed apps and AI agents resume exactly where they left off. A Stanford computer science PhD, she co-founded DBOS in 2023 out of a joint Stanford-MIT research project led by Postgres creator Mike Stonebraker and Spark co-creator Matei Zaharia. She was named to the Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40 in 2025, won a USENIX ATC Best Paper award for INFaaS, and is a regular voice on systems podcasts and conference stages on durable, observable, scalable software.
Shaurya Saluja
Shaurya Saluja is the co-founder and CEO of Fleet, a San Francisco commuter-benefits platform he spun out of research at Stanford in 2018. He turned a Bay Area gripe - the Big Tech shuttle buses crowding the freeways - into a company that hands the commuting superpowers of giant employers to companies of any size. Fleet automates pre-tax transit benefits, employer subsidies, government grants, and rewards across every mode of transport, and raised over $5 million led by Congruent Ventures. A Stanford computer scientist and data analyst, Saluja brought peer-to-peer carsharing to Eastern Europe and launched demand-responsive carpooling in the Bay Area before Fleet, and was named to the Association for Commuter Transportation's 2023 40 Under 40.
Benjamin Chesler
Benjamin Chesler is the CEO of North Spore, a Portland, Maine company that sells mushroom grow kits, spawn, sterile substrates and fungi wellness products to home and commercial growers. Before mushrooms, he co-founded Imperfect Foods, the grocery delivery startup that rescued cosmetically imperfect produce and recovered more than 250 million pounds of food. A Brown graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he is a self-described systems thinker who got his start co-founding the Food Recovery Network as a college student and later helped build startup programs at Northeastern's Roux Institute.
Jeremy Beaver
Jeremy Beaver is the CEO of Del Grande Dealer Group (DGDG), Northern California's largest family-owned automotive retailer. He started in the business at sixteen, cold-calling from a Dodge BDC, and now runs roughly 17 dealerships moving 25,000-30,000 cars a year at about $1.3 billion in revenue. He is known for building dealerships that operate like tech companies, treating data, culture, and team experience as the operating system of car retail.
Satoshi Sugie
Satoshi Sugie is the Co-founder and CEO of WHILL, a San Mateo-based personal mobility company that has reimagined the electric wheelchair as a design-forward consumer product. Drawing on his automotive design background at Nissan, Sugie co-founded WHILL in 2012 with a mission to redefine how people perceive and use mobility devices. Under his leadership, WHILL has grown to 350 employees, expanded to 30+ countries, raised over $153 million in funding, and deployed nearly one million autonomous rides at airports worldwide including Tokyo's Haneda, Rome Fiumicino, and Narita. Named to Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40 in 2017 and recognized by TIME Magazine's 50 Best Inventions, Sugie's approach treats mobility not as a medical necessity but as an aspirational lifestyle product.
Jennifer Lee
Jennifer Kristen Lee is the General Counsel and Operating Partner at Basis Set Ventures, the AI-native venture fund that closed a $250 million Fund IV in January 2026. A third-generation San Franciscan whose great-great-grandfather worked on the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, Jennifer spent over 15 years advising founders and investors at global law firm DLA Piper - rising to partner and co-chairing its Corporate Venture Capital practice - before crossing over to the other side of the cap table. She brings a rare dual lens to venture: over 15 years guiding startups from formation to exit, combined with operational depth that makes her the firm's internal compass on legal strategy, deals, and governance. Named to the Silicon Valley Business Journal's 2022 40 Under 40 list, she holds a BA in Political Science from UC Berkeley and a JD/MBA from Santa Clara University.
Silvia Mahan
Silvia Scandar Mahan is the President and CEO of Cristo Rey San José Jesuit High School, a Catholic college-preparatory institution in San Jose's East Side that integrates professional work experience into its curriculum for students from underserved communities. A Harvard economics graduate and Georgetown Law alumna, she came to education through a winding path that took her from Skadden Arps to e-commerce entrepreneurship to social impact filmmaking, before finding her calling advocating for educational equity. Named a 2022 Silicon Valley Business Journal 40 Under 40 honoree and Woman of Influence, she leads a school where 98% of students enroll in college and 100+ corporate partners — from Cisco to NVIDIA to Kaiser Permanente — employ students one day per week to fund up to 50% of their tuition.