Plant People is a plant-based functional wellness brand making science-backed, zero-sugar supplements built around functional mushrooms, adaptogens, and vitamins. Founded by Hudson Gaines-Ross and chef Gabe Kennedy, the company sells a line of 'Wonder' gummies and chews - WonderDay, WonderSleep, WonderFocus, WonderCalm and more - direct-to-consumer and through major retailers including Whole Foods, Sprouts, Target, REI and Amazon. A Certified B Corporation, Plant People grew profitably for roughly seven years before raising a Series A led by Manna Tree Partners in November 2025.
Hudson Davis-Ross (also published as Hudson Gaines-Ross) is the co-founder and CEO of Plant People, the Austin-based functional wellness brand whose gummies rank as the #1 best-selling supplement at Whole Foods Market, Sprouts and Erewhon. A Brooklyn-born, Brown-educated serial entrepreneur, he previously co-founded nitro cold brew company RISE Brewing Co. and branding consultancy Crosby Advisory, was COO of wellness brand ALOHA, and launched divisions at Gilt Groupe. He started Plant People in his apartment after he and co-founder Gabe Kennedy bonded over recovery from spinal surgeries, and in November 2025 raised a roughly $7.9M Series A led by private-equity firm Manna Tree.
Fred Turner is the founder and CEO of Curative, a health-insurance company built on the radical premise of no copays, no deductibles, and no cost-sharing for in-network care. A British biochemist who dropped out of Oxford, he won the UK's Young Engineer of the Year at 17 for building a PCR machine to study his brother's red hair, founded cattle-genetics and diagnostics startups, then pivoted Curative into one of the largest COVID-19 testing providers in the United States before reinventing it as a health plan. He says his goal is to put his own company out of business by keeping members healthy.
Lamine Zarrad is the founder and CEO of StellarFi, an Austin-based fintech that reports everyday bill payments to the three major credit bureaus so Americans with thin or no credit files can build a score without taking on debt. A refugee from Soviet-era Azerbaijan who sold pirated VHS tapes in a Moscow chemical lab as a teenager, he went on to serve in the Marine Corps, work as a National Bank Examiner at the OCC, and build three fintech startups in a decade. StellarFi raised a $15M Series A in March 2023 led by Acrew Capital, and its members average a 26-point credit-score jump in their first month.
Marc Khoury is the co-founder and CEO of aifleet, an Austin-based tech-native trucking company that uses proprietary AI to schedule routes, automate load booking, and keep its employee drivers busier and better paid. A civil engineer turned management consultant, he ran strategy at US Xpress before launching aifleet in 2020 to attack what he calls trucking's real problem: not a driver shortage, but a retention problem rooted in an inefficient, fragmented $400 billion market. The company has raised roughly $55 million and grown its fleet from dozens of drivers to hundreds.
Mike Stapleton is the Chief Business Officer of QbDVision, the Austin-based software company building a Digital CMC platform for pharma and biotech. He spent three decades moving between the lab bench, the boardroom, and the consulting deck - senior scientist at BP, COO at Accelrys, leader at Life Technologies, PerkinElmer, Merck, Microsoft, and Accenture - before joining QbDVision's board and then stepping in to run its commercial strategy. His argument is contrarian for a software executive: the bottleneck in drug development is not the platform, it is the people willing to standardize how an industry handles its data.
Noel Moldvai is the co-founder and CEO of Augment, a FINRA-registered marketplace that lets accredited investors buy and sell shares of late-stage private companies like SpaceX, OpenAI and Stripe with order-book style trading. A former Google engineer and founding engineer at Rubrik, where he felt the pain of locked-up employee equity firsthand, he built Augment from beta to a roughly $10M run rate in about 18 months, profitably, crossing $400M+ in trade volume and raising about $16M. Berkeley EECS grad, holder of 10+ patents, and a self-described metalhead who plays guitar and drums.
Rashad Hossain is the founder and CEO of RYZE Superfoods, the mushroom coffee brand he started in his mother's basement in March 2020 and grew into a multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer company. A Harvard economics graduate who quit a brand-marketing job at Kraft Heinz to build a coffee he would actually want to drink, he blended six functional mushrooms with organic arabica into a product that has racked up more than 175,000 customer reviews. He earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list in 2022. Before RYZE he founded Keepspace, a social journaling platform that won a $50K Harvard innovation award and later became the HOW I RYZE gratitude app.
Tom Molden is CIO of Global Executive Engagement at NinjaOne, a role that puts a 30-year IT practitioner in the room with the buyers he used to be. He learned automation in the car rental business, spent 14 years moving through the semiconductor industry across the US and Europe, then ran planning for a multi-billion-dollar IT transformation at General Motors before becoming Chief of Staff to GM's global CISO. Fluent in English and German, he trades in the language of boards: revenue, margin, and risk.
Will Young is the co-founder and CEO of Sana, an Austin-based tech-enabled health plan that aims to cut small-business health insurance costs by up to 30%. A Stanford and Harvard Business School graduate who passed through Google and Justworks before starting a company in an industry he had no background in, Young bet that being an outsider was the advantage. Sana launched in 2018, went fully remote from day one against investor advice, and by its $60M Series B in 2022 had raised roughly $107M total while operating across eight states.
Tory Reiss is the CEO and co-founder of Equi, a New York-based investment manager and technology platform that brings hedge-fund-style alternative strategies to investors. A three-time venture-backed fintech founder, he previously co-founded TrustToken (later Archblock), where he helped launch TrueUSD, one of the fastest-growing stablecoins in crypto history, and TrueFi, which originated more than $1.7 billion in loans. Before crypto he co-founded Harvest, an AI-driven debt-management platform. A self-described entrepreneur, activist, and educator, Reiss has taught financial literacy for over a decade and advocates for criminal justice reform.
Chris Hull is Co-Founder of Jasper, the enterprise AI platform for marketing teams that went from zero to $90M ARR in under three years. A serial entrepreneur from Austin, Texas, Hull co-built three companies with the same two partners - Dave Rogenmoser and JP Morgan - cycling through a digital marketing agency, a Y Combinator-backed social proof tool called Proof, and finally Jasper, which became one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies of the AI era, raising $130M and hitting unicorn status in roughly 18 months.
Ivan Novikov is the founder and CEO of Wallarm, an AI-powered API security platform that has raised over $70 million in funding including a $55M Series C in 2025. With 24+ years in cybersecurity, he is recognized as the inventor of memcached injection attacks and a pioneer of SSRF research, having earned bug bounty awards from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tesla, and Yandex. A Y Combinator S16 alumnus with a physics background from Moscow State University, Novikov transformed hands-on offensive security expertise into a company protecting APIs for enterprises worldwide.
Lennie Sliwinski is the co-founder and CEO of Trusted Health (Trusted, Inc.), a San Francisco-based healthcare technology company he launched in 2017. Inspired by watching his mother navigate the chaos of nursing staffing, he built the leading labor marketplace and workforce management platform for healthcare professionals, growing the platform to over half a million nurse profiles and partnerships with hospitals in all 50 states. With $234M raised across three funding rounds, Trusted went from digitizing the travel nursing placement process to launching Works - a full enterprise workforce OS for health systems. Before Trusted, Sliwinski cut his teeth as a Cornell-trained lawyer who never practiced law, a performance marketer at Adlucent, and Director of Marketing at Hired in San Francisco.
Maxwell Blumenfeld is the Co-Founder, COO, and Head of R&D at SentiLink, a San Francisco-based identity verification and fraud prevention company he co-founded in 2017 with Naftali Harris after both worked as risk leaders at Affirm. Discovering that synthetic identities with real 750+ credit scores were slipping through the financial system, they built SentiLink into a platform now serving 300+ financial institutions - including three of the top 10 US banks - having verified several hundred million applications. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2020, Blumenfeld holds a mathematics and economics degree from the University of Chicago and operates from Austin, Texas.
Stress-Free Auto Care is a tech-enabled chain of automotive repair shops modernizing a $200B+ legacy industry. Founded in 2016 and based in Mountain View, California, it operates 30+ ASE-certified shops across California and Texas, pairing proprietary software with neighborhood mechanics to offer transparent pricing, digital vehicle inspections, text updates, and live video feeds of repair bays.
Scott Stephenson is the co-founder and CEO of Deepgram, the voice AI company building foundational speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and voice agent models from scratch. A particle physicist who once helped build a dark-matter detector two miles underground, he now runs an AI company used by NASA, Spotify, and Twilio.
Chris Williamson is the host of Modern Wisdom, one of the world's most-listened-to long-form interview podcasts, and co-founder of the nootropic drink brand Neutonic. A former nightclub promoter and Love Island contestant turned interviewer, he has built a 400M+ download catalogue of conversations with thinkers, scientists, and authors.
Alyssa Bernstein is the co-founder, President, and CEO of wrrk, an Austin-based company that provides fully managed, fractional customer support solutions for fast-growing brands and startups. With a background in product management at RetailMeNot and Main Street Hub, she launched wrrk in 2016 to give entrepreneurs access to experienced, embedded support teams without the overhead of building in-house. Under her leadership, wrrk has grown to serve 125+ brands including Bombas, Taylor Stitch, and Supergoop, offering omnichannel support via US-based and offshore teams in the Philippines.
Freddie Heygate is CEO, North America at Just After Midnight, a London-founded managed cloud services and 24/7 digital support company now part of the Ultima group. After spending five years building JAM's Asia-Pacific operations from Singapore, he relocated to Austin, Texas in January 2024 to lead the company's US expansion. With a background spanning digital consultancy, marketing, and business development at agencies including Reading Room and The Drum, Freddie brings over a decade of cross-continental experience helping global brands like Ford, Abbott, and Vodafone keep their digital infrastructure running around the clock.
Austen Allred is the founder of Lambda School (rebranded Bloom Institute of Technology), the income-share-agreement coding bootcamp that raised $129M+ and peaked at a $200M valuation before a CFPB enforcement action in 2024. Undeterred, he launched Gauntlet AI in Austin - a fully employer-funded, invitation-only AI engineering program that is 100% free for participants, guarantees $200K+ job offers on completion, and has already trained engineers reporting 50% productivity gains.
Noah Kagan is the founder and CEO of AppSumo, a bootstrapped software deals marketplace generating $80-100M in annual revenue, built for under $60 over a single weekend in 2010. A former Facebook employee #30 and Mint.com employee #4 — fired from both — he turned serial rejection into a playbook: 7+ businesses each worth $1M+, a New York Times bestselling book (Million Dollar Weekend), a YouTube channel with 1M+ subscribers, and a podcast in the top 0.1% globally. He splits his time between Austin, Texas and Barcelona, Spain with his wife and child.
Alex Garcia is the Austin-based founder of Marketing Examined, a growth marketing newsletter he bootstrapped into a 7-figure media company with 200,000+ subscribers across 5 newsletters. A former CMO and agency founder, he built a social commerce agency that generated $100M in TikTok Shop attributable revenue in 18 months, co-founded the short-form video course Cut30, and hosts the Sweat Equity podcast. He's aiming to build a 9-figure media empire to rival Harvard Business Review.
Maren Kate Donovan is a serial entrepreneur and operator best known for founding Zirtual, a US-based virtual assistant marketplace that grew to 400+ employees and $11M ARR before its dramatic overnight collapse in 2015. She turned that spectacular failure into a career studying how people work, building Avra Talent (later Carrara), co-founding Inde.co for remote workers, serving as interim COO at Calm, and writing candidly about the realities of building companies. Currently exploring SMB acquisition and building Zozy, an AI-powered home inventory app, she writes at marenkate.com under the banner 'Build Real Things.'
Scott Leese is a 6x sales leader, 5x founder, 3x author, and one of the most authentic voices in B2B sales. He scaled six consecutive early-stage startups from near-zero to $25M+ ARR, survived nine surgeries and beat opioid addiction, and turned those experiences into a consulting empire, a Costa Rica surf-and-sales retreat, and three bestselling books. Based in Austin, Texas, he now runs Scott Leese Consulting, Surf and Sales, GTM United, Thursday Night Sales, and Milos Ventures - a new venture fund investing in AI, robotics, and cleantech.