Dave Licata is a Stanford-trained mechanical engineer turned biotech operator who co-founded TORL BioTherapeutics with legendary UCLA oncologist Dennis Slamon. As President and CFO (and founding CEO), he built TORL into a clinical-stage oncology company developing antibody-drug conjugates against targets like Claudin 6 and Claudin 18.2, raising more than $450 million while keeping a reputation for capital efficiency. He is also Executive Chairman of 1200 Pharma and previously founded Holoclara and served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Caltech.
David Renteln is the co-founder and CEO of Lucy, a Los Angeles consumer brand making tobacco-free nicotine gum and pouches built around a stated mission of reducing tobacco-related harm to zero. A Harvard human evolutionary biology graduate and former Harvard Rugby president, he deferred a Caltech bioengineering PhD to help build Soylent, where he served as co-founder and chief marketing officer. In 2016 he started Lucy with Soylent alumni John Coogan and Samy Hamdouche, raised a $10M Series A in 2020 from RRE Ventures, Vice Ventures, Greycroft and Y Combinator, and has since pushed nicotine into the productivity-and-wellness conversation.
Jack Geremia is the CEO and co-founder of Matterworks, a Somerville, Massachusetts biotech building Large Spectral Models - foundation models that read raw mass spectrometry signals the way a large language model reads text. A Princeton-trained chemist and former Caltech quantum-control postdoc turned serial biotech founder, he has spent 25-plus years moving technologies from lab bench to market, authoring more than 100 patents and publications. After co-founding Matterworks in 2019 as advising CTO, he stepped into the CEO seat to commercialize Pyxis, the company's generative-AI engine for untargeted molecular annotation, and led the company through a 2025 Series A from Lewis & Clark Partners and OMX Ventures.
Steven Sunshine is the CEO of Ticketure, the cloud ticketing platform that runs admissions, memberships and donations for museums, zoos, aquariums, gardens and immersive venues from Meow Wolf to the Philadelphia Zoo. He co-founded TixTrack in 2008 and ran it through acquisition by The Nederlander Organization in 2022; in July 2025 the Ticketure business was spun out as a standalone company backed by Dahlia Equity, with Sunshine at the helm. Before ticketing he spent the late 1990s and early 2000s commercializing the 'electronic nose' as president and CEO of Cyrano Sciences, a Caltech spinout whose handheld Cyranose device used a 32-polymer sensor array to identify smells, later acquired by Smiths Detection.
Advith Chelikani is the co-founder and CTO of Pylon, an AI-powered B2B customer support platform based in San Francisco. A Caltech computer science graduate and former Samsara engineer, Advith co-founded Pylon in November 2022 alongside Marty Kausas and Robert Eng. In under three years, the company raised $51.2M in total funding - including a $17M Series A from a16z in 2024 and a $31M Series B in 2025 - scaled to 750+ customers, and grew revenue 5x year-over-year for two consecutive years. Pylon replaces legacy platforms like Zendesk by meeting enterprise support teams where their customers already are: Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord.
Gian Merlino is the co-founder and CTO of Imply, the company commercializing Apache Druid - the open-source real-time analytics database he co-created while at Metamarkets. A Caltech computer science graduate with roots at Yahoo, Merlino has over 1,000 commits to Apache Druid and served as the project's inaugural PMC chair. Imply reached unicorn status in May 2022 with a $100M Series D, bringing total funding to $215M. Based in San Francisco, Merlino is a recognized expert in operational analytics, real-time data infrastructure, and the convergence of batch and streaming architectures.
Manuel Godoy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Félix, a WhatsApp-native remittance platform that uses USDC stablecoins and AI to let Latino immigrants send money home in minutes for a fraction of traditional costs. Born in Venezuela and educated at Caltech and Wharton, Godoy turned his own immigrant experience into a company that has processed over $1 billion in remittances, serves 400,000+ active users across nine countries, and raised $90.5M including a $75M Series B in April 2025 led by QED Investors.
Robert Eng is Co-Founder and CPO of Pylon, the AI-native B2B customer support platform built for how enterprise teams actually communicate. A Caltech computer science and history double major who cut his teeth at Facebook, DoorDash, and Affinity, he co-founded Pylon in November 2022 with Advith Chelikani and Marty Kausas. The company - backed by $51M from a16z, Bain Capital Ventures, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator - has grown to 750+ customers including Together AI, Cognition, and AssemblyAI with 5x+ year-over-year revenue growth for two consecutive years.
Alex Hartz is a General Partner at Shine Capital, a New York seed-stage venture firm with about $435M across three funds. He came up at SciFi VC over eight years, trained as an applied physicist at Caltech, and writes checks into ambitious founders working at the intersection of hard sciences, financial infrastructure, and applied AI.
Siddhartha Agarwal is CEO of JazzX AI, the first end-to-end AI platform built for the mortgage industry. With over 30 years steering product strategy and go-to-market transformation at Oracle, Google Cloud, Databricks, and Freshworks — where he helped drive more than $700M in annual recurring revenue — he now leads a SAIGroup-backed company that is rewiring mortgage lending with governed, auditable AI automation. He holds degrees from Grinnell College, Caltech, and Stanford, sits on the Wisconsin School of Business advisory board, and publishes widely on why digital employees will eventually outnumber human ones by a factor of 10 to 20.
Todd Gottula is CEO and Co-Founder of Clarify Health, a San Francisco-based healthcare analytics platform that maps over 300 million patient journeys and delivers 18 billion-plus AI-predicted precision insights. A Caltech-trained chemical engineer who spent over a decade as EVP and CTO at Advent Software (acquired by SS&C Technologies for $2.7B), Gottula co-founded Clarify in 2015 to bring the data intelligence of banking and consumer industries into healthcare. The company has raised over $401M in total funding, including a $150M Series D in 2022, and earned the #1 KLAS ranking in Data Analytics Platforms for Payers.
Dee Datta, Ph.D., is co-founder and CEO of Switch Therapeutics, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company pioneering conditionally activated siRNA (CASi) molecules to treat neurodegenerative diseases and other conditions with significant unmet need. With a PhD from Caltech, an MBA from Stanford, and a career spanning venture capital at The Column Group and Longitude Capital, corporate development at Forty Seven Inc., and the C-suite at XOMA, Datta brings rare scientific depth and dealmaking fluency to one of the most ambitious RNA medicine platforms in the field. Switch raised a $52 million Series A in March 2023 and in late 2024 named its first development candidate - CASi-APOE, a brain-targeted, liver-sparing RNAi therapy aimed at the 60% of Alzheimer's patients who carry the APOE4 gene variant.
Maneesh Jain is the CEO and Co-founder of Mirvie, a South San Francisco-based biotech company pioneering RNA-based blood tests to predict pregnancy complications like preeclampsia and preterm birth months before symptoms occur. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years in life sciences and more than $1.5B in combined exits across five prior startups - including Ion Torrent (acquired by Life Technologies) and Cirina (acquired by GRAIL) - Jain trained at the Stanford Genome Technology Center and holds a BS from Caltech and a Master's in Applied Physics from Stanford. Mirvie has raised over $90 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, GV, General Catalyst, and the Gates Foundation, and received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for its preeclampsia risk test in 2022.
Nadim Maluf is the co-founder and CEO of Qnovo, a Silicon Valley battery intelligence software company whose technology has shipped inside over 150 million smartphones and is now entering the electric vehicle market. Holding a PhD from Stanford, an MS from Caltech, and over 50 patents, Maluf spent three decades mastering sensors, photonics, and MEMS before channeling everything into a singular bet: that software, not chemistry, would solve the world's battery problem. His platform, SpectralX, and its automotive extension SentinelX, use real-time electrochemical diagnostics and machine learning to make batteries charge faster, last longer, and fail less often — a proposition that earned strategic investment from Hyundai and Kia.
Ilya Fushman is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where he invests in early and growth-stage companies reshaping enterprise software, infrastructure, financial services, and AI. Before VC, he was a senior product leader at Dropbox (employee #75) and a General Partner at Index Ventures. A trained physicist with a Stanford PhD and a Nature paper on quantum computing, Fushman brings rare scientific depth to the investment table - having backed transformative companies including Slack, Robinhood, Rippling, Harvey, and Loom.
Jeff Bramel is a Partner on the a16z Perennial team at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads real assets investing for ultra-high-net-worth clients and families. With 25 years of investment and portfolio management experience spanning derivatives trading, endowment-style alternatives at Jasper Ridge Partners, co-founding the Sequoia Heritage Fund, and heading real assets at both Jordan Park Group and UBS Asset Management, Bramel brings a rare blend of engineering rigor and financial depth to one of venture capital's most storied firms. A Caltech-and-Stanford-trained engineer turned multi-billion-dollar allocator, he now helps the world's most successful tech founders and families build durable, multi-generational wealth.
Bill Coughran is a Partner and Founder's Coach at Sequoia Capital who spent two decades at Bell Labs - where C, Unix, and C++ were born - before scaling Google's engineering organization from a few hundred to over 10,000 people across four continents. A mathematician by training (Caltech BS/MS, Stanford PhD in Computer Science), he oversaw Chrome, YouTube, Maps, and Search at Google before joining Sequoia in 2011. He is one of Silicon Valley's most seasoned operator-turned-investors, known for his belief in small teams, deep technical rigor, and the kind of coaching that only someone who has actually built the thing can offer.
Shaun Maguire is a partner at Sequoia Capital who bridges the worlds of theoretical physics and venture capital. With a PhD in quantum gravity from Caltech under John Preskill, he co-founded the cybersecurity company Expanse (acquired by Palo Alto Networks for over $1 billion) while completing his doctorate. At Sequoia, he leads investments in deep tech, aerospace, defense, and AI, backing companies like SpaceX, xAI, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. Before Sequoia, he was a partner at Google Ventures, where he led investments in Stripe, IonQ, and Opendoor. His unique background combines rigorous theoretical physics research on multiboundary wormholes with a track record of building and backing billion-dollar companies at the frontier of technology.