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Avak Kahvejian and the things you can take with you
His family carried their education out of Lebanon. From Montreal to Boston, Avak Kahvejian has spent his career turning knowledge into companies - and helping others find their way in.
Venky Soundararajan and the Case of the Missing Medical Signal
A biological engineer trained to read proteins now builds machines that read the unruly archive of medicine. His wager is simple to state and difficult to execute: the next useful discovery may already be hiding in the record.
Lou Jordano Keeps Changing the Product. His Operating System Stays the Same.
A teacher became a five-time B2B CMO by treating complex technology like a lesson worth understanding. At SimSpace, Lou Jordano is applying that habit to a harder subject: proving cyber teams are ready before a real attack begins.
Assil Halimi Wants to Make Nuclear Power Fit the Factory
The Apollo Atomics founder spent a decade learning the nuclear establishment from the inside. His wager is that the industry can move faster by changing one stubborn component, then manufacturing the result like a product.
Farbod Hagigi Has Spent 20 Years Fixing the Hand-Off
The ClinicalBox founder built a career around a stubborn observation: complex systems fail at their seams. His answer has been equal parts policy research, software design, and patient attention.
The Company That Makes Metal Without Melting It
A Cambridge startup spun out of MIT skips the furnace entirely - smashing metal powders together instead of melting them - and says the result is a molybdenum alloy three times stronger than what the market sells today.
The Surgeons Who Taught Software to Argue With Insurance Companies
Prior authorization is the paperwork chokepoint that delays surgeries and burns out staff. ClinicalBox built an AI that does the arguing - reading the chart, matching the policy, and building the case in about a minute.
The Climate Fund Built to Back What Venture Capital Leaves Behind
Azolla Ventures uses philanthropic risk tolerance and venture discipline to finance climate technologies that ordinary funds may pass over. Its wager is that the hardest science can become a large business - if someone funds the awkward first miles.
Liquid AI
Liquid AI is an MIT CSAIL spinout building Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs), a family of general-purpose AI models engineered to run fast and privately on-device - phones, laptops, wearables, and cars - instead of relying on the cloud. Rooted in the founders' 'liquid neural network' research inspired by the nervous system of a roundworm, the company pairs a first-principles model architecture with LEAP, a developer platform that deploys models into mobile apps in a few lines of code, and Apollo, a fully local AI chat app. It raised a $250M Series A led by AMD in December 2024 at a roughly $2.35B valuation.
Ara Knaian
Ara Knaian is an MIT-trained electrical engineer and inventor on more than 36 U.S. patents who now runs Acceleron Fusion, a Cambridge company chasing energy from muon-catalyzed fusion - a route that runs closer to 1,000 degrees C instead of the 100-million-degree plasmas everyone else fights. Before fusion he co-founded the product-design firm NK Labs, architected Google's modular Project Ara phone, tuned the drive waveforms behind Amazon's Kindle, and built the Milli-Motein, a self-folding robot chain at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. Acceleron raised a $24M Series A led by Lowercarbon Capital and Collaborative Fund and logged over 100 hours of continuous fusion at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland.
Fred Goff
Fred Goff is the co-founder and CEO of Jobcase, the Cambridge-based social platform built for and around workers rather than recruiters. A first-generation college graduate from Toledo, Ohio, he ran roughly a billion dollars in emerging-markets trading on Wall Street before turning a machine-learning hedge fund team loose on the labor market in 2009. Jobcase now counts more than 130 million registered members and ranks among the largest online destinations for career services. Goff has become one of the more vocal executives arguing that the AI era should put people first, a stance that landed him on the 2026 TIME100 list.
Michael Chang
Michael Chang is the founder and CEO of Synergies Intelligent Systems, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company building JarviX, a no-code augmented analytics platform that lets factory workers and executives 'talk to their data' in plain language. An MIT-trained PhD in electrical engineering and computer science, he pivoted from optics, machine vision and computational biology research into the messy world of manufacturing data, spending years inside Foxconn where his analytics work reportedly saved a Shenzhen factory around $20 million. In 2022 he raised a $12 million Series A led by NGP Capital to bring conversational, AI-driven decision-making to legacy industries.
Michael Chiu
Michael Chiu is the CEO of Kytopen, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech spun out of an MIT lab that builds the Flowfect platform - a non-viral, continuous-flow way to shuttle DNA, mRNA and CRISPR payloads into living cells at manufacturing scale. A mechanical engineer with a PhD and MBA from MIT, Chiu has spent his career turning laboratory hardware into shipped products, founding and selling companies in energy harvesting, healthcare, and bioprocessing before taking Kytopen's helm in August 2023 to push cell therapy manufacturing out of the bottleneck.
Aram Hong
Aram Hong is the CEO and co-founder of Apollon, a Seoul-born, Cambridge-based medtech company building MOGLU, a needle-free continuous glucose monitor powered by Raman spectroscopy. A former EY advisor and Genoplan executive who moved his family from Seoul to Boston to scale the company alongside MIT researchers, Hong has turned a laser-and-optics idea into a CES 2025 Innovation Award honoree that, in peer-reviewed clinical testing, matched the accuracy of leading needle-based sensors from Abbott and Dexcom.
Ashley Beckwith
Ashley Beckwith is the founder and CEO of Foray Bioscience, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech growing wood, plant materials, molecules, and seeds from single plant cells - no forests required. Out of her PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT, where she grew wood-like tissue in the lab from a zinnia leaf, she built a company that pairs in-vitro plant cell culture with an AI platform called Pando, billed as an operating system for plant science. The goal: shorten plant development from decades to months and bring biomanufacturing's precision to forestry and conservation.
Ly Tran
Ly Tran is the CEO of Belle.ai (BelleTorus Corporation), a Cambridge, Massachusetts computer vision company whose AI reads smartphone photos to help clinicians evaluate more than 1,600 skin conditions across 60-plus countries. He took the helm in 2021 after co-founding AtHoc, the crisis-communications company he built into the top supplier to the U.S. Defense and Homeland Security markets before BlackBerry acquired it in 2015. A Princeton history graduate with a Harvard MBA, Tran pairs a go-to-market operator's instincts with board and investor roles at companies like Jane Technologies and Cirkul.
Robert Schiller
Robert Schiller is the CEO of Impairment Science, Inc., the Cambridge, Massachusetts company behind DRUID, a smartphone app that measures cognitive and motor impairment in under three minutes through four game-like tasks. A repeat startup operator who has taken two high-tech companies public, Schiller runs a business built on a simple idea: instead of testing what is in your blood, test how your brain and body are actually performing right now. Under his leadership, DRUID has grown from a viral consumer download into Druid Enterprise, a workplace-safety platform used to gauge readiness for duty across fleets, public-safety departments, and employers.
Shivang Dave
Shivang R. Dave is the co-founder and CEO of PlenOptika, a Cambridge, Massachusetts medical-device company behind QuickSee, a handheld autorefractor that measures eyeglass prescriptions in about 10 seconds using wavefront aberrometry. A bioengineer with a PhD in bioengineering and nanotechnology, Dave co-invented the device during the Madrid-MIT M+Vision fellowship and has grown PlenOptika from a four-fellow research team into an international company whose technology has helped correct vision for over 7 million people across 60+ countries, especially in low-resource settings.
Abraham Parangi
Abraham Parangi is the co-founder and co-CEO of Akkio, a Cambridge, Massachusetts AI company that builds no-code predictive and generative analytics for media agencies and businesses. A Cornell-trained computer scientist who has worked on everything from missile guidance systems to iPhone ad technology, Parangi co-founded Akkio in 2019 with the goal of putting machine learning in the hands of people who do not write code. The company has raised $18M, including a $15M Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures in 2023, and now powers AI media-planning systems used across the global advertising ecosystem.
Akkio
Akkio is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based AI company that builds an AI-native platform for media agencies and data providers. It lets non-technical teams chat with their data, build no-code predictive models, segment audiences, simulate media plans, and generate campaign reports in minutes rather than weeks. Founded in 2019, Akkio started as a no-code machine learning tool for small businesses and has since refocused on automating the full campaign workflow for the advertising and media industry, with customers including Horizon Media, Havas, and LG Ad Solutions.
Darrin Miles
Darrin Miles is the President and CEO of Nested Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts precision oncology company that launched in 2022 with $125 million in financing to hunt for cancer-driving mutations hiding in plain sight. A commercialization leader with more than two decades in healthcare, Miles spent 14 years at Genentech shepherding landmark cancer brands and later served as Chief Commercial Officer at Agios Pharmaceuticals, where he helped bring the first mutant-IDH therapies to acute myeloid leukemia patients. At Nested, he is translating computational biophysics, genomics, and chemical biology into drugs aimed at targets the rest of the field calls undruggable.
David Block-Schachter
David Block-Schachter is the Chief Business Officer at Transit, the multimodal trip-planning and fare-payment app used in cities across North America and Europe. A car-free MIT transportation PhD who started his career designing websites for American Express and IBM, he co-founded the microtransit startup Bridj, ran customer technology as CTO of the MBTA, and now helps transit agencies turn rider data into faster buses and simpler fares. His through-line: use technology and data to make public transit work better for everyone.
Diego Villegas
Diego Villegas is the co-founder and CEO of Slang, an MIT-born edtech startup that uses machine learning and NLP to teach industry-specific professional English to the global workforce. A serial entrepreneur, he first built MASA, a Colombian oil-and-gas technical-services firm that grew to roughly $200M in revenue and 5,000+ employees before its acquisition by Stork. The pain of watching capable employees stall - and get laid off - for lack of business English became the seed of Slang, which now offers 150+ career-focused courses to companies including Nestle, Banco Santander, and Hyatt across more than a dozen countries.
Jeff Elton
Jeff Elton, Ph.D., is the founding CEO and now Vice Chairman of ConcertAI, a Cambridge-based company building generative and predictive AI on the world's largest multi-modal oncology dataset. He grew the company from a 2017 startup into a roughly $1.9 billion business with about 1,300 employees, acquiring TeraRecon's imaging technology and ASCO's CancerLinQ network along the way. A former Accenture managing director, Novartis research COO, and McKinsey partner, he co-authored the widely cited book Healthcare Disrupted and chairs the MassBio board.
Joe English
Joe English is the co-founder and CEO of Cartwheel, a school-based mental health company he launched in December 2022 to put licensed clinicians and a HIPAA-compliant platform inside K-12 districts. Cartwheel has grown into the largest K-12 mental health telehealth provider in the United States, reaching roughly 350 school districts across 15 states after nearly 300% year-over-year growth and raising a Series B that brought total funding to about $44 million. A Yale graduate and former student body president with an MBA from Harvard Business School, English previously founded the LGBTQ-inclusion nonprofit Hope in a Box and worked as a McKinsey consultant on K-12 education. He grew up on a farm in rural upstate New York, an experience that shaped his belief that schools are the natural front door for reaching kids and families.
Wes Sonnenreich
Wes Sonnenreich is the Co-CEO and co-founder of Practera, the experiential-learning platform that turns real industry projects into scalable, credit-bearing coursework for tens of thousands of students a year. An MIT-trained engineer who once wrote the book on network security - literally, more than one - he has spent 25-plus years building at the seam between technology and learning: from a 1990s web-metrics startup and a security consultancy to running Deloitte Australia's innovation program. Today he splits his attention between Sydney and Cambridge, Massachusetts, evangelizing a future where people learn alongside machines instead of competing with them.
Yibiao Zhao
Yibiao Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of ISEE, an MIT spin-off in Cambridge, Massachusetts that builds self-driving yard trucks powered by a 'humanistic' AI grounded in cognitive science. A UCLA PhD in computer vision and former MIT postdoc in Joshua Tenenbaum's Computational Cognitive Science Group, Zhao bet that machines need common sense, not just pattern recognition, to navigate the messy real world. ISEE became the first company to run fully autonomous operations in logistics yards, completing more than 10,000 self-driving trailer moves for customers like Maersk and Lazer Spot, and raised $40 million in a 2022 Series B led by Founders Fund.
Mian Zhang
Mian Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of HyperLight, the Cambridge-based deep-tech company commercializing thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonics. A Cornell-trained physicist who did his foundational work in Marko Loncar's lab at Harvard, Zhang took a notoriously hard-to-manufacture optical material and shrank it onto silicon-style chips - cutting signal loss roughly 100-fold in work published in Nature. HyperLight now runs the industry's first high-volume, qualified 6-inch TFLN production line and is pushing 400G-per-lane photonic circuits into hyperscale AI data centers through partnerships with UMC, Wavetek, and Jabil.
Cameron Halliday
Cameron Halliday is the co-founder and CEO of Mantel, a Cambridge, Massachusetts climate-tech company spun out of MIT's chemical engineering labs. Mantel uses molten borate salts to capture CO2 from heavy industry at high temperatures, recovering most of the energy as usable steam and slashing the cost and energy penalty of carbon capture. Halliday discovered the core material during his PhD at MIT, then co-founded the company in 2022 and raised a $30 million Series A co-led by Shell Ventures and Eni Next.