Lisa M. Olson, Ph.D., is a biopharmaceutical research leader who became CEO of Milan-based clinical-stage biotech Enthera Pharmaceuticals in January 2024, after years on its board and as chair of its Scientific Advisory Board. Across two decades in immunology drug discovery - 15 years at AbbVie/Abbott where she helped advance 15 molecules into the clinic including Rinvoq, plus roles at Pfizer and as Chief Scientific Officer of Magenta Therapeutics - she has built a career turning biology into medicine. At Enthera she is steering the clinical development of Ent001, a first-in-class antibody targeting the IGFBP3/TMEM219 pathway for inflammatory bowel disease and type 1 diabetes.
Matt Crowley is the CEO of SCINTIL Photonics, a fabless silicon-photonics company in Grenoble building single-chip DWDM laser engines for AI data centers. A Princeton-trained physicist who grew up in a family of small-business owners, he spent 25 years turning lab-stage technologies into volume products, founding and exiting two MEMS startups (Sand 9 and Vesper Technologies, the latter acquired by Qualcomm) before taking the helm at Scintil in late 2024. He argues the next bottleneck in AI is the network, not the chip, and is betting that light - not copper - will carry it.
Nicholas Speyer is the co-founder and CEO of SYSO Technologies, a Boston-based market operations firm that runs renewable and battery storage assets in the wholesale power markets. Under his leadership, SYSO has grown to manage more than 4.5 gigawatts across 300+ sites in every major ISO/RTO market and into Canada, backed by a $15.5M Series B from Kimmeridge, New Energy Capital and MassMutual Ventures. A Stanford-trained energy resources engineer, Speyer spent two decades building energy-software and efficiency businesses before turning SYSO into what its investors call the clear leader in its space.
Nigel Ohrenstein is the CEO of Diagnostic Robotics, a Boston-based AI healthcare company building predictive tools for population health, triage, and care management. A UK-born former lawyer turned consultant, he has spent more than two decades operating at the front edge of value-based care: he scaled Express Scripts' Medicare business from under $10 million to over $500 million, co-founded the value-based care leader Lumeris, and served as president of both Kaia Health and TeleTracking Technologies before taking the helm at Diagnostic Robotics.
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.
Avant-garde Health is a Boston-based healthcare data analytics company whose CareMeasurement platform helps hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers and physicians measure the true cost, quality and processes of surgical care - then turn those insights into measurable savings and better patient outcomes. Founded in 2014 out of value-based care research at Harvard Business School, the company applies Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC) across EMR, financial, claims and patient-reported outcomes data to reveal what was previously invisible inside the operating room and the care pathway around it.
Beacon Biosignals is a Boston-based neurotechnology company that pairs FDA-cleared wearable EEG hardware with AI to turn brain electrical activity - especially during sleep - into scalable, at-home neurodiagnostics. Its platform powers drug development, clinical trials, and precision medicine across neurology, psychiatry, and sleep medicine.
Burmester & Vogel is a Boston-based maritime technology company that uses AI and machine learning to automate laytime calculation and demurrage claim management for the shipping industry. Founded in Hamburg in 1983 as a traditional laytime firm, it has reinvented itself as the maker of the Demurrage AI Copilot - software that digitizes shipping documents, calculates delay time, and audits demurrage claims in seconds. It serves industrial producers, commodity traders, bulk terminals and shipowners across several hundred companies worldwide.
Manifold is a Boston-area applied-AI company building a vertical agent platform for life sciences. Its software helps pharma companies, molecular diagnostics firms, biobanks and academic medical centers turn messy multimodal biomedical data into governed, analysis-ready insight - compressing workflows that used to take months into minutes, while keeping the data governance that regulated research demands. Founded in 2016 and led by CEO Vinay Seth Mohta, the company raised an $18M Series B in December 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $40M.
Medisafe is a digital health company that turns the everyday struggle of taking pills on time into a behavior-driven engagement platform. Born from a near-fatal insulin overdose in the founders' own family, it began as a free virtual pillbox app and grew into an enterprise platform - anchored by Medisafe Maestro and its Just-in-Time Interventions (JITI) engine - that pharmaceutical companies use to keep patients on therapy. With more than 13 million users worldwide and 4+ billion doses tracked, Medisafe sits at the intersection of consumer mobile health and the multibillion-dollar problem of medication non-adherence.
Tim Bernstein is the CEO of yet2, an open innovation and technology scouting firm founded in 1999 with backing from DuPont, Procter & Gamble, Honeywell and Siemens. He joined the company in 2001, rose from operator to chief executive, and now spends his days matching corporate R&D needs with technologies and partners pulled from a database of more than five million solution providers. A Yale economist with a Stanford MBA and a Harvard Kennedy School policy degree, he turned an academic thesis on university licensing into a career spent brokering deals others could not find.
Will Nitze is the founder and CEO of IQBAR, a brain-and-body nutrition brand he built from a Kickstarter campaign into a nine-figure CPG company selling plant-based protein bars, hydration mixes, and instant coffee in more than 10,000 retail doors. A Harvard psychology and neuroscience graduate who once sold software to oil-and-gas companies, he formulated his first products with no food-science background, scaled IQBAR past 100 million bars sold, and now hosts the founder podcast Eating Glass.
Mark Gaffney is the Chief Executive Officer and Board member of Calluna Pharma, an Oslo-based clinical-stage biopharma chasing inflammatory and fibrotic disease by tuning the body's innate immune system. A mechanical engineer turned lawyer turned dealmaker, he spent two decades building and selling biotechs - Oxular went to Regeneron, Vedere Bio to Novartis - before taking the helm of a company born from the merger of Oxitope Pharma and Arxx Therapeutics and freshly backed by a 75 million euro Series A.
Mohamed Shoura is the founder and CEO of PaxeraHealth, a Boston-based medical imaging AI company he launched in 2009 after spending 12 years inside Siemens and Toshiba Medical Systems. He holds a Ph.D. in Medical Imaging, has served as an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and pursued a business degree at Harvard. Under his leadership PaxeraHealth has reached more than 2,500 PACS installations across 50+ countries, won Best in KLAS for Global PACS three years running, and closed a Series A round in late 2022. He also founded CarePassport, an award-winning patient engagement platform.
Mohit Rawat is the Boston-based CEO of Myricx Bio, a UK-US biotech building a first-in-class antibody-drug conjugate platform based on NMT inhibition to treat cancer. He arrived in September 2025 fresh off Fusion Pharmaceuticals' $2.4 billion sale to AstraZeneca, where he was President and Chief Business Officer. With a Harvard MBA, an MIT chemical engineering master's, and stints at Novartis, AbbVie and McKinsey, he is steering Myricx toward its first human clinical trials in 2026.
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.
Jackie Walsh is a Senior Vice President of Media at Microsoft, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Operating within one of the world's largest technology companies - with $281 billion in annual revenue and 228,000 employees - she leads at the intersection of enterprise technology and media. Her role places her inside Microsoft's vast ecosystem spanning cloud infrastructure, AI services, productivity tools, and advertising platforms including Microsoft Advertising, MSN, and Xbox media properties.
Lydia Smyers is Vice President of Customer and Partner Solutions for U.S. Telco, Media, and Gaming at Microsoft, leading a team of more than 400 professionals serving the top 200 enterprises in those sectors. Based in Massachusetts, she has spent over a decade at Microsoft in roles spanning U.S. Education, Americas Northeast, and now the converging industries of telco, media, and gaming. Before Microsoft she held senior executive roles at Oracle, Red Hat, and Ernst & Young, building a career defined by large-scale partnerships, channel strategy, and technology-driven transformation. She was named to CRN's Top 100 Women of the Channel five consecutive years and spoke at MWC Barcelona 2026 on AI and its societal implications.
Jonathan Correia is a co-founder of Torch, a San Francisco-based leadership development and coaching platform that has raised over $85 million in funding and generates $71.8 million in annual revenue. With a mechanical engineering background from Northeastern University and prior experience as an R&D engineer at Johnson & Johnson MedTech, Correia brings a product and engineering lens to Torch's mission of scaling human-centered coaching through behavioral science, AI, and data-driven insights. Torch connects organizations with professional coaches and mentors to develop managers, executives, and high-potential employees at scale.
Shawn Heide is a Boston-based entrepreneur who blends culinary creativity with digital storytelling and enterprise AI. As co-founder of 9muse Creative Studio, he crafts cinematic brand films for companies across New England. His culinary arc spans founding Wagwan Jerk Bar in 2017 — a Caribbean-meets-New England pop-up launched at Boston farmers markets — to directing culinary operations at The Kitchen at White Barn, a Neapolitan pizza restaurant grown from a working farm. Pursuing his MBA at Babson F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business, Shawn is also connected to Upstage AI, the enterprise AI company known for document intelligence and large language models that raised a $120M Series C in early 2026.
Karim Toubba is the CEO of LastPass, the world's leading password manager with over 100,000 business customers and millions of consumers. A 25-year cybersecurity veteran, he previously led Kenna Security to a successful Cisco acquisition in 2021 and has held executive roles at Juniper Networks and Digital Island. He joined LastPass in April 2022, just months before a major security breach, and has since led a comprehensive transformation of the company's security posture, infrastructure, and culture - turning crisis into opportunity.
Joshua Barrow is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Skillcentrix, the only consultancy 100% focused on Workday customers' entire talent lifecycle. With a Harvard CS background and 25+ years building and selling tech companies - from Breakaway Solutions' 1999 IPO to selling Third Sky to VMware in 2014 - he now sits at the intersection of HR strategy and enterprise software, helping healthcare organizations make skills data safety-critical rather than just strategic.
Peter Morales is the CEO and co-founder of Code Metal, a Boston-based AI company that hit unicorn status in February 2026 after raising a $125M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures. With a background spanning BAE Systems (F-35 ML optimization), MIT Lincoln Laboratory (counter-drone AI), and Microsoft (HoloLens computer vision), Morales built Code Metal to solve a gap he discovered firsthand: AI can generate code fast, but mission-critical industries — defense, automotive, semiconductors — need proof that code is correct before it ships. Code Metal's verifiable AI platform translates high-level code into hardware-optimized, mathematically verified production code for edge devices, drones, FPGAs, and autonomous systems. Customers include the U.S. Air Force, L3Harris, Raytheon, Toshiba, and Bosch.
Gregory L. Verdine is a Harvard-trained chemical biologist who coined the phrase 'drugging the undruggable' and built an empire around it. The Erving Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, he co-invented stapled peptides, pioneered the field of chemical biology, and founded or co-founded more than a dozen biotech companies - several of which reached the Nasdaq and three of which produced FDA-approved drugs. In July 2023 he joined Andreessen Horowitz as a Venture Partner on the Bio + Health team, bringing his rare combination of deep scientific discovery, serial entrepreneurship, and capital deployment to one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture firms.
Thomas J. Cahill, MD, PhD is the founder and managing partner of Newpath Partners, a Boston-based life sciences venture firm he built from the ground up to translate breakthrough academic science into medicines. A structural biologist trained under two Nobel laureates, Cahill has co-founded more than a dozen biotech companies — including Prime Medicine, Chroma Medicine, and Autobahn Therapeutics — and became one of the pandemic's most consequential behind-the-scenes operators when he assembled Scientists to Stop COVID-19, a coalition that fed curated research directly to the White House and helped redirect Regeneron's manufacturing to Dublin.
Bijan Sabet is a first-generation American venture capitalist, co-founder of Spark Capital, and former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic. The son of Iranian and Korean immigrants who met in a New York medical school, he drove from Boston to Silicon Valley after a 1991 Macworld, built foundational consumer internet companies, then returned east to co-found Spark Capital in 2005 - backing Twitter when it had 11 employees, Tumblr before it sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion, and Discord before it became the home for every online community. After stepping back from Spark in 2021, President Biden appointed him Ambassador to Prague, where he served until January 2025. He is also a film photographer, board member of Human Rights Watch, and trustee at Boston College.
David Fialkow is the co-founder and Managing Director of General Catalyst, a $40+ billion venture capital firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Beyond building one of America's most influential VC firms, he has produced over 20 documentary films - including two Academy Award winners (Icarus and Navalny) - making him a rare figure who operates with equal conviction in finance and storytelling. Known for backing bold ideas from Airbnb to Anduril, Fialkow brings the same instinct for truth-telling to the board room that drives his work on screen.
Joel Cutler is the co-founder and Managing Director of General Catalyst, one of the most influential venture capital firms in the world. Since co-founding the firm in 2000 with David Fialkow - a partnership forged at summer camp at age 8 - Cutler has backed transformative companies including Airbnb, Warby Parker, Venmo, Lemonade, and KAYAK, which he literally conceived and assembled from scratch. A law school graduate who never practiced law, a self-described non-visionary who keeps a 'Wall of Shame' of deals he missed, and a travel obsessive who attended Phocuswright for 20+ consecutive years, Cutler operates with a contrarian philosophy: he only wants 'exciting, different, and risky' bets, believes great teams beat great ideas every time, and insists that if you don't fail, you're a bad investor.
Eric Paley is a serial entrepreneur turned seed-stage venture capitalist who co-founded Founder Collective in 2008, building it into one of the world's highest-performing seed funds with investments in Uber, The Trade Desk, Airtable, and 20+ unicorns. Before VC, he co-founded Brontes Technologies — a 3D dental imaging startup spun out of MIT — and sold it to 3M for $95 million in 2006. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (ranked as high as #9 globally and the world's top-ranked seed investor), he became known for his unusually candid critiques of venture capital excess. In June 2025, he left Founder Collective to serve as Massachusetts Secretary of Economic Development under Governor Maura Healey, overseeing a 700-person agency focused on housing affordability, business competitiveness, and the AI innovation economy.
Yossi Naar is the Chief Visionary Officer and co-founder of Cybereason, the endpoint detection and response (EDR) company he helped build from a 20-person Tel Aviv startup into a global cybersecurity powerhouse valued at $5 billion. A veteran of Israel's elite Unit 8200 intelligence unit, Naar invented the Malop (Malicious Operation) framework and designed Cybereason's in-memory graph engine - two core innovations that reshaped how defenders visualize and respond to multi-stage cyberattacks. With a career spanning defense-grade security platforms, AdTech big data systems, and cutting-edge cybersecurity, he brings a rare combination of low-level engineering depth and product-level vision to the frontlines of the cyber war.