New Balance is a privately held, family-owned athletic footwear and apparel company founded in Boston in 1906. Originally a maker of arch supports and orthopedic shoes, it grew into one of the world's largest sportswear brands, known for its running shoes, the iconic 990 and 574 sneakers, its unusual commitment to domestic manufacturing in the US and UK, and a strategy of being 'the best, not the biggest.' The company reported roughly $9.2 billion in 2025 sales and competes globally with Nike, Adidas and others across running, lifestyle, basketball, tennis, baseball and soccer.
NOBULL is a Boston-based direct-to-consumer athletic brand that designs minimalist, durability-focused footwear and apparel for training and daily life. Founded in 2015 by two former Reebok executives, it built its reputation on no-nonsense CrossFit trainers before expanding into running, lifestyle apparel and nutrition. Now co-owned by entrepreneur Mike Repole and Tom Brady, the brand carries a reported $1 billion valuation.

Rodney Rambo is the Chief Marketing Officer of Converse Global, where he steers worldwide marketing for one of the most recognizable footwear brands on the planet. A graduate of Northern Arizona University with a background in speech communication, he built his career across action-sports and lifestyle labels including Volcom and Vans before joining Converse in 2012. Over more than a decade at Converse he has moved from Global Marketing Director to VP of North America Brand Marketing to CMO, championing a marketing philosophy built on listening to fans and treating consumers as co-creators. His teams have kept the century-old Chuck Taylor relevant to new generations, most visibly by reviving the knee-high XXHi sneaker in 2024 after tracking years of fan demand on social media.

Patricia Pino is a long-tenured brand marketing leader at Converse, the Nike-owned footwear icon behind the Chuck Taylor All Star. Based in Boston, she has spent more than 15 years inside the brand, rising through roles in brand planning, operations, and global brand marketing to become Head of Brand Planning, Global and Chief of Staff to the CMO. A University of New Hampshire marketing graduate, she is known as a consumer-led, process-driven strategist who connects the culture of sneakers with the discipline of running a global brand.

Bruno Lempernesse is the CEO of MDClone, an Israeli-founded healthcare data platform that lets organizations explore and share sensitive patient data using synthetic data that preserves privacy. A 25-year veteran of healthcare technology, data science, and life sciences, he joined MDClone as President of North America in September 2024 and stepped up to Chief Executive Officer in 2025. Before MDClone he was CEO of Carevive, a cancer-care and real-world-studies company acquired by Health Catalyst in 2024, and earlier spent two decades at Cegedim building its data and research business, plus leadership roles at SHYFT Analytics and Acorn AI (a Medidata company). He is an early pioneer of longitudinal patient data drawn from electronic medical records across Europe and the United States.
Brian Tervo is the Boston-based Chief Executive Officer of ThirdChannel, a retail execution and merchandising technology company that pairs on-the-ground field teams with real-time software so brands can see and improve how their products show up in physical stores. A longtime operator in the B2B software and retail space, he spent roughly 14 years at supply-chain integration firm TIE Kinetix in senior North American and global roles before leading ThirdChannel. He writes regularly about closing the gap between retail strategy and what actually happens on the store floor.
Christopher Gosline was the co-founder and first CEO of SYSO Technologies, a Boston company that turns passive solar, wind, and battery projects into active participants in wholesale power markets. Before SYSO, he ran a $100M+ software business at demand-response pioneer EnerNOC and helped build BlueWave Solar as a senior vice president. Trained in geographic information systems and energy policy, he spent more than two decades pushing toward a grid that runs without fossil fuels, and was known as much for the team he built as for the funding rounds he closed.
Alpha-9 Oncology is a clinical-stage radiopharmaceutical company engineering bespoke, tumor-targeting molecules that deliver alpha- and beta-emitting isotopes directly to cancer cells while sparing healthy tissue. Spun out of the University of British Columbia and BC Cancer in 2019 and now headquartered in Boston with research operations in Vancouver, the company iteratively optimizes each part of a radiopharmaceutical - binder, linker, chelator and radioisotope - to build a pipeline of paired imaging and therapy candidates. Backed by $258M in total funding, including a $175M Series C in 2024, Alpha-9 aims to expand precision radiotherapy across validated oncology targets.
Ampion, PBC is a Boston-based public benefit corporation and software platform for community solar and distributed generation. Its enterprise technology handles subscriber acquisition, billing, revenue management, customer care, and sustainability reporting for solar asset owners, connecting households and businesses to local solar farms so they can lower electricity bills without rooftop installations or upfront costs. Ampion manages hundreds of megawatts across multiple U.S. states and has saved subscribers more than $42 million in electricity costs.
iboss is a Boston-based cloud security company that delivers a cloud-native Zero Trust Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform. Founded in 2003 by twin brothers Paul and Peter Martini, iboss consolidates network security functions - secure web gateway, ZTNA, CASB, data loss prevention and firewall - into a single SaaS service that connects users to applications from anywhere while replacing legacy VPNs, proxy appliances and VDI. The platform is used by thousands of enterprises, government agencies and school districts, and processes over 100 billion transactions daily.
David Rubinstein is the CEO of OptiRTC (Opti), a Boston-area company that builds cloud software to monitor and adaptively control stormwater infrastructure in real time. A technology operator with roughly four decades of experience scaling high-tech startups, he joined Opti as President and COO in 2018 and became CEO in 2019, steering the company from an engineering-services consultancy into a digital water product business. His background spans SaaS and data companies including DataXu, Resolve Technology, Invoke Solutions, and Convergent Group, which he helped take public before its sale to Schlumberger.
Ledgebrook is a tech-enabled excess and surplus (E&S) lines managing general agent (MGA) that aims to give wholesale insurance brokers the fastest, easiest quoting experience. Founded in 2021 by former actuary Gage Caligaris, the company pairs a next-generation tech stack - which enriches and prefills broker submissions and speeds rating - with experienced human underwriters to write specialty commercial coverages such as general liability, excess liability, professional liability, allied healthcare, and architects & engineers. Having written its first policy in May 2023, Ledgebrook passed a $100M premium run rate and closed an oversubscribed $65M Series C in June 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $119M.
NeuShen Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotech developing novel small-molecule and gene-therapy treatments for central nervous system disorders such as schizophrenia, depression and epilepsy. Founded in 2021 by Joan Huaqiong Shen, MD, PhD, and headquartered in Shanghai with an R&D center in the Boston area, the company runs a pipeline led by NS-136, a selective M4 receptor positive allosteric modulator for schizophrenia, and NS-041, a highly selective KCNQ2/3 activator for epilepsy and depression.
Onapsis is a Boston-based cybersecurity company that secures business-critical applications - the SAP, Oracle and SaaS ERP systems that run the world's largest enterprises. Founded in 2009 by a team of ethical hackers, Onapsis combines a platform for assessing, defending and controlling ERP application-layer security with the threat research of Onapsis Research Labs, which regularly discovers SAP zero-day vulnerabilities and works directly with SAP and CISA. It is the only SAP security and compliance platform certified as a Premium Certified SAP Endorsed App.
Sustainability Roundtable, Inc. (SR Inc) is a Boston-based, certified B Corporation that provides membership-based strategic advisory and support services in enterprise decarbonization. For more than fifteen years it has helped executives at nearly 100 Fortune 500 and high-growth companies set sustainability goals, drive progress, and report results through shared-cost research, one-on-one consulting, and a peer community. Its two flagship offerings are the Sustainable Business & Enterprise Roundtable (SBER) advisory service and the Net Zero Consortium for Buyers (NZCB), a confidential corporate renewable-energy buyers' community and transaction platform.
Sware is a Boston-based software company that modernizes GxP validation for life sciences. Its cloud-native Res_Q platform and developer-focused GxPNext product use AI and a decade of regulated validation knowledge to automate the computer system validation (CSV) work that the FDA and other regulators require - helping pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device and CDMO teams cut validation time and cost while staying audit-ready. Formerly Boston Technology Research (BTR), the company rebranded to Sware in 2022 and has raised roughly $26-27M to date.
Uncommon Schools is a nonprofit charter management organization that starts and runs outstanding urban public charter schools designed to close the achievement gap and prepare students from low-income communities to graduate from college. Founded around North Star Academy in Newark in 1997 and relaunched as a multi-state network in 2005, Uncommon operates roughly 53 K-12 schools serving about 20,000 students across New York City, Newark, Camden, Rochester, Troy, and Boston. Beyond running schools, it is a national force in teacher development - home to Doug Lemov's 'Teach Like a Champion' methodology - and pairs rigorous, data-driven instruction with long-term alumni college coaching.

Elad Ferber is the CEO and co-founder of Synthpop, a healthcare AI company that uses multi-agent automation to handle the administrative work behind patient care - referrals, prior authorizations, eligibility checks, documentation, and claims. A former Israeli Air Force Talpiot cadet and systems engineer with a Stanford MBA, Ferber previously co-founded the remote patient monitoring startup Spry Health, which was acquired by ZOLL Itamar in 2021. Founded in 2023 with CTO Jan Jannink, Synthpop has raised $23 million to date and pitches its AI as a labor solution that compresses 40-minute back-office tasks into under a minute.
Garth Coleman is the CEO of Canvas GFX (Canvas Envision), a Boston-based manufacturing software company building tools that turn engineering data into interactive, 3D visual work instructions for frontline factory workers. A mechanical engineer by training with an MBA from Babson, he spent roughly 19 years at Dassault Systemes leading global strategy for 3D visualization, PLM, AR/VR, and generative AI before taking the top job at Canvas. He champions a 'connected knowledge' approach to manufacturing, arguing that the industry modernized its products and processes but left the people on the floor relying on static PDFs and printed checklists.
Gjergj Demiraj is the President and CEO of Gutenberg Technology, a Boston-based edtech company whose end-to-end content management platform helps publishers and enterprises author, reuse, and distribute learning content at scale. A polyglot with an international consulting background in finance, telecom, and media, he joined the company in 2012, opened its US office in Boston in 2016, and took the top job in 2019 after helping shape the business across every department. He co-founded the French crowdfunding platform Anaxago and earlier advised global publishing groups on digital transformation at EidosMedia in Milan and Paris.

Mehul Bhatt is co-founder and CEO of FloCareer, an interview-as-a-service HR tech platform that dispatches expert freelance interviewers (plus AI proctoring) to run structured technical screens for enterprises. A former Cisco solutions architect with a Master's from Illinois Institute of Technology, he spent 16 years as an individual contributor before starting the company with Mohit Jain. FloCareer raised a $5.7M Series A in October 2021 and has conducted more than one million interviews for 600+ clients across the US and India.
James (Jim) Boyle is the founder and CEO of Sustainability Roundtable, Inc. (SR Inc), a Boston-based public benefit corporation and certified B Corp that advises global companies such as Akamai, Biogen, Cisco, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Wayfair on corporate sustainability governance, renewable energy procurement, and organizational resilience. A former attorney and aide to U.S. Senator John Kerry who moved through commercial real estate before founding SR Inc in 2009, Boyle built a shared-cost research and advisory model that has helped nearly 100 Fortune 500 and growth companies pursue more sustainable high performance. In 2026 he published Dignity First Leadership, a framework arguing that companies should place human dignity at the center of value creation in an age of climate breakdown and technological upheaval.
Jim Keller is the AWS Global CEO at Quantiphi, an AI-first digital engineering firm and AWS Premier Tier consulting partner. He runs the company's AWS business unit, where he has helped land marquee designations including Quantiphi being named the First Preferred Amazon Quick SI Partner by the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center. A Boston-area technology leader with more than 25 years building and scaling public and private companies, Keller has moved through sales, marketing, and general-management roles across cloud, analytics, and software before focusing on enterprise generative and agentic AI.
Jochen Meissner is a German-trained mechanical engineer turned technology executive with more than 25 years of experience running machinery and technology companies across Europe and the United States. After leading the printing-press maker Goss International as President and CEO, he founded and ran Setem Technologies, a Boston-area startup built on patented signal-separation algorithms for far-field voice control. When the British semiconductor company XMOS acquired Setem in 2017, Meissner became General Manager of the XMOS Boston office and joined the XMOS Board of Directors, where he continues to help steer the company's push into voice and AI-enabled audio processing.
Kieran Harney is the CEO of sensiBel, an Oslo-based semiconductor company that builds the world's first studio-quality optical MEMS microphone. A three-decade veteran of the MEMS industry, he founded the MEMS microphone business at Analog Devices in 2005, which was acquired by InvenSense in 2013 and later became part of TDK. He joined sensiBel in 2022, rose from COO to Chief Commercial Officer, and took over as CEO in September 2025 with a mandate to scale the company's optical microphone technology from evaluation kits to mass-market production.
Manisha Shah-Bugaj is the CEO of Activ Surgical, a Boston-based medical technology company building hardware-agnostic surgical software and its ActivSight Intelligent Light imaging module. A medtech executive with more than two decades of experience, she previously built Olympus's U.S. gynecology business from the ground up, rising to General Manager and Global Vice President, before joining Activ Surgical as COO in January 2022 and becoming CEO that December.
Mari Cook (Mari Silipo Cook) is the CEO of TurningArt, a Boston-based national art consulting firm that helps offices, hospitals, and commercial spaces build custom art programs sourced from a network of more than 4,000 independent artists. A working visual artist herself, she joined TurningArt in 2012, rose through the company to President and then to CEO, and now leads its expansion into healthcare and multi-location commercial design. She holds an Evidence-Based Design Accreditation (EDAC) and a degree in Studio Art, Art History, and Anthropology from the University of Vermont.
DataRobot is an enterprise AI platform company founded in 2012 that helps organizations build, deploy, govern, and monitor predictive and generative AI. A pioneer of automated machine learning (AutoML), the company has since expanded into MLOps, generative AI, and agentic AI, letting technical and business teams move models from experimentation into production with governance and observability built in. More than 1,000 organizations - including enterprises, hospitals, and government agencies - rely on its platform, now centered on an Agent Workforce Platform co-engineered with NVIDIA.
Mariano Nunez is the CEO and co-founder of Onapsis, the Boston-based company that pioneered security for the business-critical ERP applications - SAP, Oracle and others - that run the world's largest enterprises. A security researcher turned operator, he was among the first to publicly demonstrate cyberattacks against SAP systems and built the first open-source ERP penetration testing framework. Under his leadership, Onapsis Research Labs has discovered and helped patch more than 1,000 zero-day vulnerabilities, and the company partners directly with SAP as an endorsed application security solution. Nunez has been named EY Entrepreneur of the Year, an MIT Top 35 Innovator Under 35, and a Boston Business Journal 40 Under 40.
Matt Watson is the co-founder and CEO of Origin, a Boston-based fintech that in September 2025 launched what it calls the first SEC-regulated AI financial advisor. A former Citigroup high-yield credit trader who previously co-founded Indio Technologies (acquired by Applied Systems in 2019), Watson has raised more than $75 million for Origin from Founders Fund, Felicis, General Catalyst and 01A to make certified-financial-planner-quality advice available to people who normally can't afford it.