Tagged: amazon
30 results
MarketLeap
MarketLeap is an AI-driven ecommerce accelerator that helps consumer brands launch and scale on global marketplaces such as Amazon, Walmart, eBay, OTTO, BOL and TikTok Shop. Founded in 2022 by former Amazon and Jumia executives Mamoun Benkirane and Mekki Mouaddeb, the platform combines automation, analytics and hands-on operations - including listing optimization, dynamic pricing, marketing, inventory forecasting and VAT/tax compliance - under a 'skin in the game' model that absorbs marketing costs and runs on 30-day rolling contracts. The company raised an $8M Series A in February 2025, bringing total funding to about $10.7M.
Goodreads
Goodreads is the world's largest social platform for readers, letting people track what they read, rate and review books, get personalized recommendations, and connect with a community of more than 150 million members. Founded in 2006 by Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler and acquired by Amazon in 2013, it pairs a vast book database with tools for shelving, discovery, reading challenges, and the annual reader-voted Goodreads Choice Awards.
Ohad Rozen
Ohad Rozen is the co-founder and CEO of Tymely, a New York and Israel based startup building an AI agent that resolves complex e-commerce customer service tickets end-to-end. A former NLP research scientist at Amazon and Yahoo with a PhD from Bar-Ilan University, Rozen previously ran the guided-onboarding startup Toonimo. Tymely has raised roughly $15.25M across seed and Series B rounds, backed by Hetz Ventures, DESCOvery (D.E. Shaw's venture studio), and 97212 Ventures.
ProductWind
ProductWind is a Seattle-based retail influencer marketing platform that helps enterprise brands ramp new product launches in days instead of months. Founded in 2020 by former Amazon product lead Jason Kowalski and ex-Uber engineer Tom Hirschfeld, the company mobilizes thousands of retail-native creators to drive social content, reviews, SEO and sales velocity on marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. Its core idea - 'marketing to the algorithm' - treats retailer AI systems as a second customer alongside human shoppers, coordinating waves of creator activity to push products from page five to page one.
Elizabeth Liu
Elizabeth Liu is the CEO of Crowd Cow, the Seattle-based online marketplace that connects independent farms and fisheries directly with people who want to know where their meat and seafood comes from. She has been with the company since its earliest days, rising from category and operations roles to VP of Marketing before taking the top job in February 2023 when co-founder Joe Heitzeberg stepped down. Before Crowd Cow she spent roughly 15 years in direct-to-consumer and marketplace commerce, including marketing director at Wayfair, payments product manager at Amazon, and business development at Zulily. She holds an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and mentors early-stage founders through Techstars.
Jason Kowalski
Jason Kowalski is the co-founder and CEO of ProductWind, an influencer technology platform built for brands that sell on online retailers like Amazon and Walmart. A former Amazon product lead who built the retailer's self-service marketing platform, Kowalski started ProductWind in 2020 on a contrarian idea: brands should market to retail algorithms, not just shoppers. The company coordinates thousands of micro-influencers to move e-commerce metrics that matter to those algorithms - sales velocity, reviews, organic placement, and Best Seller Rank - rather than chasing likes and reach. Bootstrapped and profitable from day one, ProductWind grew revenue tenfold before raising a total of roughly $5.17M in seed funding.
Emily Choi-Greene
Emily Choi-Greene is the co-founder and CEO of Clearly AI, a Y Combinator (S24) startup in Seattle that automates the slow, paperwork-heavy security and privacy reviews enterprises dread. She spent five years at Amazon leading Alexa AI Security and later owned data security and privacy at Moveworks, performing hundreds of reviews by hand before building the tool she wished she had. A Dartmouth computer scientist who graduated with High Honors, she runs the company alongside her husband and CTO Joe Choi-Greene, whom she met in 2019 over an Alexa security review. Clearly AI has raised roughly $8.4M and counts Fortune 500s and global brands among its early users.
Penny Chen
Penny Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Pax, the Y Combinator (S24) startup rebuilding duty drawback - the U.S. program that refunds import tariffs - as an AI-native brokerage. An MIT PhD and former research scientist at Amazon and Flexport, she stumbled on duty drawback while building supply-chain algorithms and saw a math problem hiding inside a bureaucratic one: each year roughly $10-15 billion in eligible refunds go unclaimed because legacy brokers take 10-20% and won't touch claims under $100k. Pax turns the rulebook into algorithms and LLM data extraction, promising a TurboTax-style experience that cuts filing from 9-12 months to a few weeks. The company raised $4.5M in seed funding led by Initialized Capital in April 2025.
Satayan Mahajan
Satayan Mahajan is the founding CEO of Datalign Advisory, a Cambridge, Massachusetts fintech that matches Americans with vetted fiduciary financial advisors using AI and human-centered design. An MIT alumnus and Media Lab pioneer, he spent two decades building motion-capture and gaming companies (Motus, iClub) before an eight-year run at Amazon as a GM and Head of Product. He returned to startup mode in 2024 when Cogo Labs founder Dave Blundin recruited him to lead Datalign, which has since referred more than $80 billion in assets across thousands of advisors.
Dave Selinger
Dave Selinger is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Sentinel, a Pleasanton, California company that pairs AI with live human guards to stop crimes before they happen rather than just record them. An early Amazon data scientist who reported to Jeff Bezos, he went on to co-found Redfin, build personalization giant RichRelevance, and now runs a security operation that says it intervenes in thousands of crimes a month. In June 2025 Deep Sentinel raised an oversubscribed $15 million Series B.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Alasdair McLean-Foreman is the founder and CEO of Teikametrics, a Boston-based AI platform that helps Amazon and Walmart sellers optimize advertising and pricing across more than $10 billion in marketplace transactions. A former Great Britain 800m runner and Harvard track captain, he started selling sporting goods from his dorm room in 2001, became one of Amazon's first third-party retailers in 2003, exited a fitness startup to News Corp, and has raised roughly $65 million for Teikametrics from investors including Intel Capital, Jump Capital, Centana Growth Partners and SoftBank's Lydia Jett.
Cheryl Liu
Cheryl Liu is the founder and CEO of Raspberry AI, a New York generative-AI platform that turns fashion designers' sketches into retail-ready, photo-realistic images, technical drawings, and CAD files in minutes instead of months. A former KKR retail private-equity analyst who later built product and machine-learning teams at Amazon and DoorDash, she spotted the opening for fashion-specific image generation the moment DALL-E and Stable Diffusion arrived in late 2022. Raspberry AI now serves brands including Under Armour, J.Crew, Tapestry, and Li & Fung, raised a $24M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and was named one of CB Insights' 2026 AI 100 as the only creative-AI application on the list.
Twitch
Twitch is the world's largest live-streaming platform, where creators broadcast video games, IRL content, music, and talk shows to a real-time audience that talks back in chat. Founded as a gaming-focused spin-off of Justin.tv in 2011 and acquired by Amazon in 2014, Twitch turned watching someone play a game into a social, participatory medium, building a creator economy powered by subscriptions, Bits, ads, and a culture of emotes and live community.
Cortney Lusignan
Cortney Lusignan is a seasoned communications and public relations executive currently serving as Senior Program Manager, AWS Communications, supporting the AWS Global Communications Vice President at Amazon Web Services. With a career spanning major PR agencies including Weber Shandwick and Edelman, and deep industry expertise in financial services, healthcare, and technology PR, Lusignan has built a reputation as a trusted operator at the intersection of enterprise cloud and strategic communications.
Jennifer Hartford
Jennifer Hartford is a senior marketing executive at Amazon Web Services, currently serving as VP of Events, Advertising, and Strategic Partnerships. With over a decade at AWS, she has led some of the biggest moments in enterprise tech — including serving as Event Lead for AWS re:Invent 2014 and 2015, and overseeing marquee partnerships such as the AWS-Formula 1 collaboration. Based in Bend, Oregon, she has grown from event marketing manager to one of AWS's top integrated marketing leaders, shaping how the world's largest cloud platform shows up at scale.
Jesse Dougherty
Jesse Dougherty is Vice President of Global Networking and Network Edge Services at Amazon Web Services (AWS), based in Vancouver, British Columbia. He leads AWS's global network backbone including CloudFront, Elemental, and Perimeter Protection services, while also serving as the Vancouver site lead overseeing an office of 1,000+ software engineers. With 20+ years in software engineering and leadership, he previously spent nine years at Microsoft as a Group Program Manager for Exchange Server and Office 365, and held technical leadership roles at Sophos, ActiveState Software, and Mindquake Software. A champion of the Vancouver tech ecosystem, he has been instrumental in Amazon's expansion in Western Canada and serves as a mentor in the BC Tech Association's Dragons 1-on-1 Mentorship program.
Jonathan Vlock
Jonathan Vlock is Vice President of Marketing, Demand Generation and Enablement at Amazon Web Services (AWS), bringing over two decades of B2B marketing leadership across cloud, cybersecurity, ESG, and enterprise technology. Before AWS, he held senior marketing roles at PwC, S&P Global, NetApp, and Wipro, and earlier co-founded Cooking Planit, a patented personal cooking assistant app. A Cornell MBA, Jeet Kune Do practitioner, and self-styled 'mad scientist' of integrated marketing, Vlock blends data-driven pipeline strategy with a restless entrepreneurial streak.
Liza Magee
Liza Magee is the Chief of Staff for the Consumer Chief Marketing Officer & Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, where she sits at the intersection of billion-dollar marketing strategy and cross-functional execution. With a career built at the nexus of tech and consumer behavior, she has led marketing across Microsoft's education division, Bing, MSN, and now the company's global consumer marketing apparatus. Before Microsoft, she honed product instincts at Amazon as a Senior Product Manager in Merchandising. Based in Seattle, Magee is a strategic operator whose career tracks the evolution of digital marketing from keyword portfolios to AI-powered consumer experiences.
Deren Baker
Deren Baker is the CEO of Flywheel Ventures, the innovation arm of Flywheel Commerce Network - now part of Omnicom Group after a landmark $835 million acquisition in 2023. A serial operator with deep roots in digital commerce analytics, Baker has led transformative companies including Jumpshot (which tracked 160 billion monthly clicks) and Edge by Ascential. He is a recognized thought leader in ecommerce strategy, retail media, and data-driven advertising, with bylines in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Entrepreneur Magazine.
Fang Cheng
Fang Cheng is a serial founder who builds AI that actually answers the question. She co-founded Touchco (acquired by Amazon, became the Kindle), founded Linc (acquired by Capacity in 2024), served as SVP & GM of Retail CX Automation at Capacity, and is now building a stealth venture focused on agentic commerce for restricted wallets.
Susan Cubillos
Susan Cubillos is the Senior Executive Business Partner to the CEO and CTO at Twitch, the live streaming giant headquartered in San Francisco. She operates at the hinge of the company, where calendar physics meets strategy, translating intent into motion for the people running one of the world's largest interactive video platforms.
CommerceIQ
CommerceIQ is a Mountain View-based AI platform that helps the world's largest consumer brands - Nestle, Colgate, Whirlpool, Kellogg's, Bayer - grow profitably on Amazon, Walmart, Target, Instacart and 450+ other retailers by automating retail media, digital shelf, supply chain and sales operations with AI agents.
Tim Craycroft
Tim Craycroft is a veteran technology executive who spent over two decades building the plumbing behind digital advertising. After 14 years at Amazon - where he helped architect their multi-billion dollar ads business and opened the Boulder ad tech office - he joined Google in 2020 as VP & GM of Google Advertising, overseeing YouTube, apps, and display ads. In September 2025, he took center stage at the Google ad tech antitrust remedies trial, testifying about internal analyses (Project Sunday and Project Monday) that explored divesting AdX and DFP. He's now joined Flywheel as Senior VP of Engineering. An early cloud storage pioneer who co-founded i-drive.com in the late 1990s, Craycroft brings Dartmouth computer science roots and a Boulder, Colorado sensibility - equal parts algorithm and altitude.
Danny Shader
Danny Shader is the founder and CEO of PayNearMe, a Santa Clara-based fintech platform that processes over $50 billion annually for more than 20,000 businesses. A serial entrepreneur whose previous ventures were acquired by Amazon, Motorola, and Netscape, Shader built PayNearMe from a niche cash-payment network into PayXM, the industry's first full-stack Payment Experience Management platform. Backed by $245 million in total funding including a $50M Series E in September 2025, he has spent 15+ years turning a deceptively simple problem - helping the cash-dependent and underbanked pay their bills - into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise payments category.
Don Johnson
Don Johnson is the CEO of Docker, Inc., the company behind the world's most widely used container platform. Appointed in February 2025, he brings decades of hyperscale cloud infrastructure experience from founding Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and serving as a founding technical leader at Amazon Web Services. A builder at heart who spent years constructing the plumbing of the modern cloud, Johnson now leads Docker's mission to make software development frictionless, secure, and AI-ready for the world's 20 million developers.
Kurt Beidler
Kurt Beidler is the Chief Executive Officer of Quizlet, the AI-powered learning platform used by hundreds of millions of students worldwide. Appointed in July 2024, he brings 17 years of Amazon experience scaling subscription businesses - most notably growing Amazon Kids+ into the world's largest youth-focused subscription service and launching Kindle into China. Under his leadership, Quizlet has grown revenue to $139M annually while aggressively integrating AI tools including a native ChatGPT app integration, lecture recording features, and an OpenAI partnership aimed at keeping students' entire study workflow on one platform.
SK Ganapathi
Dr. Srinivasan 'KG' Ganapathi is the founder and CEO of Vimaan Robotics, a Silicon Valley AI company deploying computer vision and machine learning to bring 100% inventory accuracy to warehouses. A serial entrepreneur with nearly 50 patents spanning magnetic recording, MEMS sensors, and supply chain digitization, Ganapathi previously founded Fidelica Microsystems (acquired by Lenovo) and Verreon Inc. (acquired by Qualcomm). With Vimaan, he is transforming how the world's largest 3PLs, retailers, and Fortune 10 companies track goods from dock to shelf - and became the first computer vision startup to receive investment from Amazon's $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund.
Hubert Thieblot
Hubert Thieblot is a French-born entrepreneur and General Partner at Founders, Inc. (f.inc), a San Francisco-based venture fund and community campus occupying 42,000 sq ft at Fort Mason. He built Curse, Inc. - a gaming media empire with 30M+ monthly visitors - from a World of Warcraft fan site he started as a teenager in Paris, grew it into an Inc. 500 company, and sold it to Twitch (Amazon) in 2016. After serving as VP of Emerging Markets and Mobile at Twitch, he joined Founders, Inc. to back early-stage founders tackling hard problems in AI/ML, hardware, web3, AR/VR, and other frontier tech sectors.
Jesse Robbins
Jesse Robbins is General Partner at Heavybit, the San Francisco-based venture firm focused exclusively on developer-first companies. He co-founded Chef (sold to Progress Software for $200M+), invented GameDay chaos engineering at Amazon where he held the title 'Master of Disaster', and co-created the O'Reilly Velocity Conference that seeded the global DevOps movement. A former volunteer firefighter and EMT, he brings a crisis-responder's instincts to early-stage investing, backing companies like Snyk, PagerDuty, Fastly, LaunchDarkly, and Tailscale. His portfolio spans 60+ companies with five IPOs.
Libby Roin
Libby Roin is the CEO of Goodreads, the world's largest social reading platform with over 150 million members. A Boston College English major turned MIT Sloan MBA, she spent nearly a decade building her way up through Goodreads product teams before taking the top job in January 2022. Along the way she founded Polk Street Press, a children's interactive app studio, and raised over $10 million for Teach for America. She grew up one of seven kids in Oklahoma - daughter of a police officer and a schoolteacher - and brings a pragmatic, community-first sensibility to one of the internet's most beloved book destinations.