Parallel (Parallel Learning) is a New York-based special education company that connects school districts with licensed clinicians - school psychologists, speech-language pathologists, behavioral counselors, and specialized instructors - through a proprietary teletherapy and case-management platform. Founded in 2021 by Diana Heldfond, who was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia as a child, Parallel helps schools deliver legally required IEP services to students with learning and thinking differences when in-person staff are scarce. The company has raised about $48.9 million and reported that 98% of its students met or exceeded their IEP goals in the 2024-2025 school year.
Diana Heldfond DiGia is the founder and CEO of Parallel, the first tech-forward provider of special education care in the United States. Diagnosed with severe dyslexia and ADHD at seven, she built Parallel to deliver virtual psychoeducational assessments, teletherapy, and specialized instruction to K-12 school districts. The company now serves more than 10,000 students across 25 states, has raised $48.9M including a $20M Series B led by Valspring Capital, and reports that 98% of its students meet or exceed their IEP goals. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 (Education, 2024) honoree.
Malekeh Amini is the Founder and CEO of Trayt Health, a patient-centric behavioral health platform powering 25 statewide mental health programs and covering 10 million+ lives across the US. A Harvard MBA and USC-trained engineer with 25+ years in digital health, she built Trayt after personally navigating the fractured US mental health system with her son. The company raised $7.17M in April 2026 and was selected by Kentucky's KyCOMPASS program to power maternal mental health access statewide.
Bob Schafer, PhD, is the CEO of Lumos Labs, the company behind Lumosity, the world's largest brain training platform with over 100 million users. A Stanford-trained neuroscientist with postdoctoral work at MIT, Schafer founded Prophecy Sciences (YC W13) before joining Lumos Labs via acquihire in 2015. He rose from Head of Research to Chief Science Officer to President of Lumosity DTx before being named CEO in May 2023. Under his leadership, Lumos Labs achieved FDA 510(k) clearance in December 2025 for LumosityRx (marketed as Prismira), the first prescription digital therapeutic for attention improvement in adults with ADHD — validated by a 500-participant randomized controlled trial.
Andrew Wilkinson is a Canadian entrepreneur, investor, and author who built Tiny - a publicly traded holding company (TSX: TINY) often called 'the Berkshire Hathaway of the internet' - from a one-man design agency he started with $200 at age 20. Having dropped out of university after less than a year, he transformed a $6.50/hour barista gig into a billion-dollar empire of 32+ internet businesses including Dribbble, AeroPress, Letterboxd, and Serato. His 2024 memoir 'Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire' became a USA Today bestseller and candidly explores why wealth didn't bring happiness, his ADHD diagnosis, and his commitment to giving away most of his fortune through the Giving Pledge.
Mark Suster is a Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures, the largest early-stage VC firm in Southern California, and the author of the influential blog Both Sides of the Table. A serial entrepreneur who built and sold two companies before switching to investing, Suster brings a rare founder's perspective to venture capital. Known for coining 'fauxmentum,' championing the LA tech ecosystem, and advocating openly about ADHD, he manages hundreds of millions in capital while hosting the Upfront Summit — one of America's premier LP and VC conferences.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a French neuroscientist, author, and entrepreneur who burned out at Google, taught herself to code, and built Ness Labs into a 100,000+ reader science-based learning community - all while completing a PhD at King's College London. Her 2025 book 'Tiny Experiments' (Penguin Random House) distills her philosophy: life is a series of experiments and you are the lead scientist. She is now a UKRI-funded postdoctoral researcher studying curiosity and ADHD at KCL, while publishing to 124,000+ Substack subscribers at Hypercurious.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, PhD is a French-Algerian neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author based in London. After leaving a marketing career at Google, she founded Ness Labs - a bootstrapped newsletter and community focused on science-backed mindful productivity - while simultaneously earning her MSc and PhD in Applied Neuroscience at King's College London. Her 2025 book 'Tiny Experiments' (Penguin Random House) proposes replacing linear goal-setting with a circular, experimental approach to growth. As a UKRI-funded postdoctoral research fellow at King's College London, she studies the evolutionary neuroscience of curiosity and has proposed the 'Hypercuriosity Theory of ADHD'. Ness Labs has grown to 120,000+ newsletter subscribers and a paid community of 2,000+ members.