Tagged: brooklyn
23 results
Mike's Hot Honey
Mike's Hot Honey is a Brooklyn-based food brand that makes honey infused with chili peppers - a sweet-and-spicy condiment for pizza, fried chicken, cheese and more. Founded by Mike Kurtz in 2010 after he discovered chili-infused honey at a Brazilian pizzeria, the company pioneered the hot honey category in the United States and now sells through more than 30,000 retail locations and 3,000-plus restaurants. Led by CEO Matt Beaton since 2015, it has grown from a one-man operation at Paulie Gee's pizzeria into a nationally distributed brand with an estimated $40 million in annual revenue.
Vigilante Plumbing, Heating and Air Conditioning
Vigilante Plumbing, Heating and Air Conditioning is a family-owned Brooklyn contractor that has served New York City since 1927. Now in its third and fourth generation under the Vigilante family, the company handles residential and commercial plumbing, heating, air conditioning, drain and sewer work, and fire-protection systems across the five boroughs, built on flat-rate pricing, licensed master plumbers, and background-checked technicians.
Jack Gierlich
Jack Gierlich is a Brooklyn-based growth marketing founder and fractional CMO who has spent 15+ years scaling healthcare, SaaS, and AI companies. He leads marketing and growth at Leal Health (formerly TrialJectory), an AI-powered platform that helps cancer patients find advanced treatment options, and he moderates several of the largest marketing and business communities on Reddit, reaching millions of readers a month. He describes his craft as building marketing systems that compound rather than one-off campaigns.
James Malley
James Malley is the co-founder and CEO of Paccurate, a New York-based software company whose API decides the cheapest, lowest-waste way to pack every shipment. He grew up around multi-carrier shipping software, trained in theater, and spent years building parcel apps before he and CTO Pat Powers turned a side project fixing carriers' dimensional-weight pricing into a venture-backed cartonization platform used by major retailers and 3PLs.
Johan Brissmyr
Johan Brissmyr is the CEO and co-founder of Castle, a security company that helps online businesses detect fraud, bots, and account takeover in real time. A computer scientist from Lund University, he started building web products in Malmo, Sweden before moving to Silicon Valley through Y Combinator and relocating the company to New York. Castle grew out of a password-storage side project that revealed a bigger opportunity in behavioral risk scoring, and today combines device fingerprinting, behavioral signals, and analytics into APIs used by companies of many sizes.
Madeleine Ormond
Madeleine Ormond is a New York based business strategist and co-founder of The Backflip Group, a boutique consulting firm built to move companies from strategy to reality. She spent more than a decade working inside tech startups and larger technology companies before co-founding the firm, where she leads on product strategy, financial modeling, go-to-market planning, and the kind of hands-on execution that turns a plan into a working operation. Her work centers on helping growing companies test ideas at low risk, sharpen their thinking, and build foundations that scale.
Matt Beaton
Matt Beaton is CEO of Mike's Hot Honey, the Brooklyn-based chili-infused honey brand he built with college friend Mike Kurtz. He joined in 2015 when the company was pulling in $100,000 a year, and grew a one-SKU business into a roughly $40 million operation stocked in more than 30,000 retail stores and 3,000 restaurants. He came out of brand-management jobs at Wrigley and PUR Water and an MBA from Kellogg, and now runs the classic case study for what happens when you refuse to launch a second product.
Matthew Levin
Matthew Levin is the co-founder and CEO of Lariat, an AI-native sales platform built to prospect into brick-and-mortar businesses. A UC Berkeley alum based in Brooklyn, he's a career B2B go-to-market operator whose past stops include Global Head of Marketing at Nosto and VP of Marketing at mParticle, plus early co-founding runs at Plenishable and the Switchboard project.
Michael Dorfman
Michael Dorfman is the CEO of the Pro Padel League, the top-flight professional padel circuit in North America, and the founder of the New York Atlantics franchise. A lifelong Knicks and Rangers fan who picked up padel at Brooklyn's Padel Haus during the pandemic, he left the tech insurance company he co-founded (Koffie Financial) to run the league full-time. In March 2026 he closed a $15 million Series A led by Charlotte Hornets co-owner Rick Schnall, valuing PPL at roughly ten times its seed round from a year earlier.
Prabhdeep Singh
Prabhdeep Singh is the CEO of Steno, a tech-enabled court reporting and litigation support company that recently closed a $49M Series C. He joined as COO in 2024 and was elevated to CEO in June 2026, succeeding co-founder Greg Hong. Before Steno he ran Marketplace at WeWork, Enterprise at Uber Eats, was Chief Growth Officer at Clover Health, and served as Operating Partner at Armory Square Ventures.
Tailored Industry
Tailored Industry is a Brooklyn-based on-demand knitwear manufacturer that pairs industrial 3D 'wholegarment' knitting machines with a proprietary software platform. It lets fashion brands of any size produce seamless sweaters and knit staples with zero minimums and near-zero waste, matching supply to actual demand instead of guessing seasons in advance.
Aagya Mathur
Aagya Mathur is the co-founder and CEO of Aavia, a Brooklyn-based hormone health company whose app helps people with ovaries understand how their cycle shapes their energy, mood, sleep and focus. A University of Virginia neuroscientist turned MIT Sloan MBA and ex-Deloitte consultant, she co-built Aavia out of an MIT bootcamp into a top-charting wellness app that has reached hundreds of thousands of users on organic growth alone, with backers ranging from MIT delta v to a $9.7M+ funding base.
Nick Fleisher
Nick Fleisher is the co-founder and CEO of Sandstone, the first platform built for AI-native in-house legal departments. An engineer who once tried to drop out of college to build apps, he later led McKinsey's legal tech and AI practice in New York before reuniting with his freshman-year roommate and a lawyer-turned-engineer to launch Sandstone in 2025. The company raised a $10M seed round led by Sequoia Capital and runs out of Brooklyn, where Fleisher is betting that institutional legal knowledge can become a company's competitive advantage instead of a bottleneck.
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.
Dominic Nguyen
Dominic Nguyen is the co-founder of Chromatic, the company behind Storybook - the open source workshop used by tens of thousands of frontend teams including Airbnb, Microsoft, IBM and Shopify to build UI components in isolation. A designer by training, he turned a developer tool with a devoted community into a self-sustaining business by selling visual testing and review services that fund the open source project itself. His focus now is what AI means for design systems, including Storybook's Model Context Protocol work.
BEAT THE BOMB
BEAT THE BOMB is an immersive social entertainment company that turns teamwork into a real-life video game. Squads of four to six players suit up in hazmat gear and battle through a series of high-tech, motion- and touch-driven game rooms - dodging lasers, cracking codes, and racing a Bomb Clock. Fail the final mission and you get blasted with paint, foam, or slime. Founded in Brooklyn in 2017 by former Tough Mudder executive Alex Patterson, the company has grown into a national chain backed by $22M in venture funding, hosting corporate outings, school groups, and birthday parties across multiple U.S. cities.
Prose
Prose is a New York-based beauty-tech company that makes custom haircare and skincare to order. An online consultation feeds a proprietary AI engine that blends from a library of natural ingredients into formulas tailored to each customer's hair, scalp, skin, lifestyle, and even local climate. Founded in 2017 by ex-L'Oreal and Phyto executives, Prose is a Certified B Corporation, a Public Benefit Corporation, and a carbon-neutral brand that has produced millions of bespoke products and reached profitability while expanding into skincare and licensing its technology stack, Singular.
Alexander Patterson
Alexander Patterson is the founder and CEO of BEAT THE BOMB, the immersive social video game where teams in hazmat suits race through networked game rooms and either disarm a bomb or get blasted with paint, slime, or foam. A former tax lawyer turned Tough Mudder marketing chief, he built BEAT THE BOMB into a multi-city experiential entertainment brand that has hosted corporate teams from Google, Citi, Bloomberg, and Amazon, raising $22 million to expand across the United States.
Josh Haimson
Josh Haimson is the co-founder and CEO of Inductive Bio, a New York based AI company building software to speed up small molecule drug discovery. Before starting Inductive in 2024 with Ben Birnbaum, Josh ran product for the machine learning and data curation teams at Flatiron Health, generating real-world evidence across a network of more than 2 million cancer patients. The company raised a $25M Series A in May 2025 led by Obvious Ventures, and its Compass platform helps chemists predict a molecule's ADMET properties before it is ever synthesized, attacking the 'whack-a-mole' bottleneck that slows drug development.
Mahmoud Abdelkader
Mahmoud Abdelkader is the Egyptian-American co-founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based data security platform that raised $105 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Visa. Born near the Suez Canal and raised in Brooklyn, he built high-frequency trading systems at Wachovia, was employee #4 at Milo.com before its $75M eBay acquisition, then co-founded Balanced Payments through Y Combinator (W11) before founding VGS in 2016. VGS pioneered the 'Zero Data' category of data security as a service, serving 700+ customers including Fortune 100 companies. He stepped down as CEO in late 2022 and now invests in fintech companies including Ramp, Vercel, Alloy, Mercury, and Stytch while experimenting with AI.
Nina Perez
Nina Perez is the founder of Project Fandom, an entertainment news and podcast platform she launched in 2009 that covers TV, movies, gaming, comics, anime, and books from a geek's perspective. Dubbed 'The Oprah of MySpace' for her uncanny ability to get readers hooked on almost anything, she is also a published author with three series under her belt, a Social Media Community Manager by day, and a lifelong Brooklynite who now calls Portland, Oregon home.
Judene Jean-Louis
Judene Jean-Louis is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz's Cultural Leadership Fund - the first VC fund comprised exclusively of Black cultural leaders committed to Black wealth generation. A Jamaican immigrant and Brooklyn native who trained professionally as a dancer, she brought dual MFA and MBA credentials to Silicon Valley's most ambitious experiment in cultural capital. At a16z, she bridges world-class entertainers, athletes, and cultural icons with early-stage technology investments, while funneling all management fees and carry back into nonprofits that funnel Black talent into tech.
Alison Roman
Alison Roman is a New York-based food writer, cookbook author, and newsletter publisher who turned unfussy home cooking into a cultural phenomenon. Best known for viral recipes like #TheCookies, #TheStew, and #ThePasta, she has authored four solo cookbooks - including the NYT bestsellers 'Nothing Fancy' and 'Something from Nothing' - and built a fiercely loyal subscriber base through her candid, witty voice. After stints at Bon Appétit, BuzzFeed, and the New York Times, she went fully independent, launching a newsletter, YouTube series, a Catskills corner store called First Bloom, and her own tomato sauce line in 2025.