brand-protection
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Daniel McKinnon
Daniel McKinnon is the CEO of Proof Authentication, a Boston-based anti-counterfeiting technology company whose non-duplicatable printed marks and smartphone verification app are used by Fortune 500 brands. Before taking the top job in 2021 alongside the company's Series A round, he spent nearly a decade as Senior Counsel for Intellectual Property and Global Brand Protection at New Balance, where he led the sportswear maker's aggressive legal campaign against copycat brands in China. He is best known for helping secure a landmark $1.5 million damages award against the counterfeiter New Boom, at the time the largest such award granted to a foreign company by a Chinese court.
Kevin Tian
Kevin Tian is the co-founder and CEO of Doppel, an AI-native social engineering defense platform that scans the internet for impersonation campaigns and shuts them down automatically. A Georgetown grad who built dispatch systems and flying-car software at Uber and Lyft, he started Doppel in 2022 after spotting social engineering becoming the top source of breaches and cyber-insurance claims. Doppel raised a $70M Series C in November 2025 at a $600M+ valuation, backed by Bessemer, a16z, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, and a bench of WNBA stars.
Alex Dhillon
Alex Dhillon is the founder and CEO of Outtake, a New York-based cybersecurity company building autonomous AI agents that detect, investigate, and remove digital threats like impersonation, phishing, and brand abuse in hours rather than weeks. A UC Berkeley triple major who spent nearly five years at Palantir on its experimental product team reporting to the CEO and CTO, Dhillon left in 2023 to bet that security needed a reset built around agents instead of alerts. Outtake has raised over $56 million across its rounds, counts OpenAI, AppLovin, Pershing Square, and federal agencies among its customers, and is backed by Iconiq, CRV, and angels including Satya Nadella, Nikesh Arora, Bill Ackman, and Shyam Sankar.
Ling Xiao
Ling Xiao is the CEO of Ruvixx, Inc., a San Francisco-based SaaS platform helping enterprise brands protect intellectual property, automate license compliance, and convert market opportunities into revenue. A serial entrepreneur with deep roots in Silicon Valley, he co-founded Playdom - the social gaming company acquired by Disney in 2010 for up to $763 million - and later co-founded GGWP, an AI-powered platform tackling toxicity in online gaming. Trained in electrical engineering at UC Berkeley and computer science at Stanford, Xiao brings a rare combination of engineering rigor, product instinct, and entrepreneurial range that has taken him from Google's data teams to Disney's exec suite to the frontier of brand intelligence.