Watershed Bio (legally Watershed Informatics) is a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building a unified, cloud-based platform for biological data analysis. Its product, Omics Bench, lets biologists and bioinformaticians securely store, harmonize, and analyze multi-omic data - genomics, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics, microbial sequencing and protein folding - using customizable and AI-assisted workflows backed by elastic supercomputing. The pitch: go from sample to therapeutic insight in a single day instead of weeks, closing the gap between high-code and no-code bioinformatics for drug-discovery teams.
Matthew Smith is VP of Creative Cloud Strategy & Growth at Adobe, where he leads strategy, design, and emerging products across Adobe Stock, Behance, Adobe Podcast, and AI/ML content initiatives. A product leader and founder, he previously served as SVP of Product at Vimeo and co-founded Workframe, a commercial real estate workflow platform acquired by Newmark in 2019. Based in New York, Smith sits at the intersection of creativity, technology, and the creator economy.
Dipti Agrawal is the Co-founder and CEO of Tudip Technologies, a Pune-headquartered global IT services company she built from a team of four in 2010 to a 600-person enterprise serving clients like Google, Adobe, and Databricks across 8+ countries. A Chemical Engineering graduate from NIT Durgapur with an MBA from IBS Hyderabad, she pivoted from Oracle ERP consulting at Infosys and Hitachi Consulting to co-found Tudip on April 5, 2010 with Tushar Apshankar. Under her leadership, Tudip has achieved CMMI Level 5 certification, earned Databricks Silver Partner status, and expanded into AI/ML, cloud transformation, cybersecurity, and digital innovation—while championing gender diversity with 15 women in top management.
Carolyn Joshua is the President and CEO of Trilyon, Inc., a Silicon Valley-based IT staffing and workforce solutions firm she has led since 2009. Under her leadership, Trilyon has grown into a globally recognized, women-owned and minority-certified enterprise serving Fortune 500 companies including Google, Cisco, Samsung, Hitachi, and Oracle across North America, LATAM, EMEA, and APAC. A champion of diversity, inclusion, and women's empowerment, she serves as Co-Chair of USPAACC WISE and has been recognized with the J.P. Morgan Unity in Action Award (2025), the SheLeads Impact Award (2024), and named a Top 50 Women Leader of San Francisco (2023).
Evan Kaplan is the CEO of InfluxData, the company behind InfluxDB - the world's most popular open-source time series database with over 1.3 million developers. With nearly 20 years in CEO roles across multiple companies, he took InfluxData from a scrappy open-source project of 3,000 users to a platform handling billions of data points per second for 1,900+ enterprise customers. His path to the C-suite ran not through computer science but through environmental science degrees and years spent as a mountain guide in his late 20s - an unconventional origin story that shows up in how he thinks about resilience and long-term endurance.
Rich Waller is President and CEO of WellStack, a Madison, Wisconsin-based healthcare data platform that helps provider and payer organizations build a unified data ecosystem for AI, analytics, and population health management. A 20-year veteran of healthcare technology, Waller co-founded VisiQuate - a healthcare revenue cycle analytics company - before joining WellStack to lead its expansion into enterprise healthcare data infrastructure. He is known for his client-centered philosophy and belief that growth strategy is a team sport.
Usman Pervaiz is the CEO and co-founder of Tekxai, a San Francisco-based digital innovation studio that builds AI-powered MVPs and custom software for startups and enterprises. With over a decade in tech, he leads a ~56-person team delivering full-stack web and mobile products with a signature 6-week build methodology, serving founders backed by Y Combinator and Techstars.
Vinay Manglani is the co-founder and CEO of VigourSoft Global Solutions, a Pune-headquartered IT services and software engineering firm with offices across India, the US, and Poland. With over two decades of engineering and leadership experience at companies like Siebel Systems and Symantec, he built VigourSoft in 2016 into a 50+ person shop delivering cloud orchestration, AI/ML, healthcare analytics, software localization, and DevOps solutions for global enterprises. Based across San Francisco and Pune, he bridges Silicon Valley product thinking with India's engineering depth.
Jared O'Leary is the Co-Founder and CEO of SirenOpt, a deep-tech startup commercializing PlasmaSens - a manufacturing intelligence platform that uses cold atmospheric plasma and AI to perform real-time, non-destructive materials characterization. A Stanford Chemical Engineering graduate with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, O'Leary spun SirenOpt out of his doctoral research with advisor Professor Ali Mesbah in 2022. The platform can generate 213,000 data points per measurement in milliseconds without destroying the sample, targeting battery manufacturing, aerospace, semiconductors, and other advanced manufacturing sectors. SirenOpt has raised $16.1M total, including a $6.5M strategic round led by Hitachi Ventures and JLR's InMotion Ventures in 2025, plus a $2.4M California Energy Commission BRIDGE grant for battery electrode applications.
Murat Bicer is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of Silicon Valley's oldest and most storied early-stage venture firms. Born in Turkey and educated at Middle East Technical University and Babson College, he has spent two decades hunting for the next breakout enterprise software company. His signal achievement: backing Datadog at the seed stage in 2011 - before cloud monitoring was a recognized category - and riding it to a $30B+ public company that burned under $25M to get there. A five-time Forbes Midas List honoree (ranked #24 in 2024), Bicer is known for investing in developer-first companies, his contrarian willingness to back pre-product teams, and a portfolio that spans Datadog, Signal Sciences (acquired by Fastly for $775M), Iterable, Voyage AI (acquired by MongoDB), LanceDB, and Gorgias.
Ryan Peterman went from new grad to Staff Engineer at Instagram in three years, then left one of tech's most coveted jobs to build what he wished existed. His newsletter 'The Developing Dev' has 106,000+ subscribers, his podcast 'The Peterman Pod' features career stories from top engineers, and his hardware company Compose is building an ultra-low-profile ergonomic keyboard. Based in San Francisco, he is the rare engineer who codes, writes, interviews Turing Award winners, and designs keyboards with equal intensity.