Numat is a Chicago-based advanced-materials company and the first to commercialize metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) at industrial scale. Its molecularly engineered, programmable 'sponges' capture, store, and separate hazardous chemicals for semiconductor, defense, and energy customers, reducing the impact of chemical products and processes on human health and the environment.
Quantum Corridor is a Midwest network-infrastructure company building North America's first inter-state, quantum-safe commercial fiber backbone. Its live coherent optical network links Chicago to Northwest Indiana with 40 Tbps capacity and 0.274 ms round-trip latency, connecting quantum research labs, hyperscalers, data centers and defense partners. Formed in 2021 as a public-private partnership, it is extending the route toward Purdue, Indianapolis and the Crane naval research base.
Sam Tegel is the CEO of ElectronX, the Chicago-based exchange that in 2026 launched the first U.S.-regulated, direct-access power derivatives market. After more than two decades building market-making and liquidity businesses at firms like Jump Trading, Millennium, Sun Trading and Caherciveen Partners, Tegel now sells 1-megawatt-hour electricity futures and binary options to anyone exposed to the wild swings of the modern grid - from battery operators to bitcoin miners. ElectronX has raised more than $55 million and holds both Designated Contract Market and Designated Clearing Organization status from the CFTC.
Stephanie Trunzo is the CEO of MERGE, a hybrid marketing-and-technology firm working at the crossroads of health, consumerism, and storytelling. A 20-plus-year technology leader, she launched Oracle Health and steered the Cerner acquisition, scaled the IBM Garage across 16 co-creation studios worldwide, and earlier doubled revenue year over year as COO/CDO of PointSource before its acquisition by Globant. She holds more than 20 patents, is a certified yoga instructor, and is a vocal advocate for authentic leadership and women in technology.
ActiveCampaign is a Chicago-based marketing automation platform that helps over 180,000 businesses in 170+ countries connect with their customers through email marketing, CRM, SMS, and AI-powered automation. Founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom - who bootstrapped it solo for 13 years before raising $360M - the company reached a $3B valuation in 2021 and now generates $250M+ in annual recurring revenue. Its platform is particularly strong for small and mid-sized businesses that need sophisticated automation without enterprise-level complexity or cost.
Sean Evans is the co-creator and host of Hot Ones, the YouTube phenomenon where celebrities eat increasingly spicy chicken wings while answering impeccably researched questions. Since launching the show in 2015 with First We Feast, Evans has turned a deceptively simple format into over 4 billion views, a Daytime Emmy nomination, TIME100 Creators recognition, and a co-ownership stake in First We Feast after the brand was acquired for $82.5 million in December 2024.
Corrine (Corrie) Sahli is Area Vice President, Content Supply Chain - Enterprise Accounts at Adobe, based in Chicago. With 20+ years in SaaS sales and 15+ years in MarTech, she leads enterprise relationships around Adobe's content supply chain platform - helping major brands in CPG, retail, financial services, healthcare, and automotive scale personalized content production. A former VP at Sitecore and Kontent.ai, she is a recognized industry voice on content operations, composable DXP, and AI-driven marketing workflows.
Nels Stromborg is a VP Transformational Leader for Media and Entertainment at Adobe, based in Chicago, with 20+ years of digital media sales experience. Known for scaling sales organizations and consistently outperforming targets - hitting 300% of goal in FY2020 and winning Adobe's North American and Media & Entertainment Seller of the Year award - he has built a career arc from floor trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange to driving Adobe's most strategic entertainment partnerships. He has held senior sales leadership roles at Undertone, Retale, and AOL before joining Adobe.
Glen Tullman is a serial health-tech entrepreneur and CEO of Transcarent, the consumer-directed health and care platform he founded in 2021. Over three decades he turned Allscripts into the dominant electronic health records provider, founded Livongo Health and sold it to Teladoc for $18.5 billion - the largest consumer digital health deal in history - and co-founded 7wireVentures, one of the top-returning venture funds in Illinois. Now leading Transcarent's $621M acquisition of Accolade and pushing AI-powered 'WayFinding' tools into employee benefits, Tullman is also a Giving Pledge signatory who has committed most of his estimated $1 billion fortune to healthcare and education.
Julie Brinkman is CEO of Beyond, the leading revenue management platform for short-term rental operators. She joined as COO on March 2, 2020 - just 10 days before global COVID travel bans - and navigated the company through the pandemic to emerge stronger, earning her promotion to CEO in February 2021. A University of Michigan Ross School of Business alumna, Brinkman spent a decade at Deloitte before sharpening her growth instincts at Groupon and Hireology. She now leads a global team of ~310 across 30 countries, focused on replacing gut-feel pricing with data-driven revenue optimization for property managers worldwide.
Krzysztof Marzec is Co-Founder of Trove, the branded recommerce platform powering more than 75% of the U.S. branded resale market. Originally founded as Yerdle in 2012 and rebranded to Trove in 2016, the company has raised over $153 million in funding and serves clients including Patagonia, Levi's, Lululemon, Canada Goose, and Carhartt. With a background spanning commodity futures trading at Geneva Trading USA and early-career roles at Northern Trust and Morningstar, Marzec brings a rare blend of financial markets discipline and entrepreneurial technology vision to the fast-growing recommerce sector.
Matt Krueger is the Chief Executive Officer of Caresyntax, an AI-powered surgical intelligence platform used in 4,200+ operating rooms worldwide and supporting over 3 million surgical procedures annually. A decade-long veteran of the company, Krueger rose through roles including SVP & GM for the Americas & ANZ, Chief Commercial Officer, Chief Customer Officer, and President before being elevated to CEO in July 2025. With 18+ years in medical devices and healthcare technology - including stints at Hill-Rom and TRUMPF - he has been a primary architect of Caresyntax's expansion and its consistent 50%+ organic revenue growth trajectory.
Matt Levin is the CEO of Modern Health, a leading global workplace mental health platform. A serial CEO with two decades of leadership across HR technology, health care, and benefits, Levin has helmed Benefitfocus (sold to Voya Financial), People 2.0 (a 50-country HR platform), and held C-suite roles at ADP and Aon. He was part of the core team that engineered the landmark $4.9 billion Aon-Hewitt merger and was recognized as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2013. A Chicago-based operator and longtime lecturer at both Northwestern and the University of Chicago, he now leads Modern Health's mission to bring proactive, globally equitable mental health care to the world's workforce.
Sue Khim is the CEO and co-founder of Brilliant.org, an interactive STEM learning platform serving over 10 million users in 150+ countries. Born in South Korea and raised in Chicago, she studied mathematics at the University of Chicago before leaving to found Alltuition, a student financial aid startup, in 2009. That team pivoted in 2012 to build Brilliant, which has since raised over $90 million in venture funding and become one of the most widely used platforms for self-paced math and science education. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education and recognized by Apple as an AAPI leader in tech, Khim is focused on replacing rote memorization with genuine conceptual understanding at global scale.
Zack Hudson is the co-founder of Golden Fandom LLC and one of the organizers behind Golden-Con: Thank You For Being a Fan, the world's first fan convention dedicated entirely to The Golden Girls. A Chicago-based social services professional and self-described hardcore fan, Hudson transformed a pandemic-era bar trivia idea into a sold-out multi-day convention at Navy Pier in 2022 that drew over 3,100 attendees from around the globe. The event grew from a single social media announcement that, in his words, 'just kind of escalated from there.'
Maria Heyen is an early-stage investor at Lightbank in Chicago, previously the first hire at Redbud VC in Columbia, Missouri, where she helped deploy $5M+ across 35+ companies. A Pacific Northwest native who worked 80-100 hour weeks to fund her own education, she went on to co-found the Husker Venture Fund at UNL and build a reputation as one of the emerging voices in Midwest venture. She invests at the intersection of vertical SaaS, fintech, and infrastructure in overlooked industries, and writes the Soapbox newsletter on career, culture, and capital.
Jason Fried is the co-founder and CEO of 37signals, the bootstrapped software company behind Basecamp, HEY, and ONCE. A contrarian voice in tech, he has spent 25+ years arguing that smaller is smarter, calm beats hustle, and profitable beats funded. He co-wrote Rework - a Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller - and his TED Talk on why work doesn't happen at work has millions of views. Along with co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson, he has built one of the most influential (and deliberately small) software companies in history.
Nate Kontny is a Chicago-based serial founder, engineer, and writer who went from chemical engineering at UIUC to co-founding two Y Combinator companies (Inkling W06, Cityposh S11), running Highrise as CEO for Jason Fried, writing prolifically across Medium, HuffPost, and Fast Company, and building a suite of solo products - most recently AlliHat, a Safari extension embedding Claude AI directly in the browser. Currently Staff Engineer at Fivetran (post-Census acquisition), he is known for his radical transparency about failure, his 250-words-a-day writing discipline, and a philosophy that shipping imperfect work beats endless polishing.
Casey Winters is a co-founder and CEO of SuperMe, an AI-native professional network backed by Greylock and Reid Hoffman. He is one of the most respected growth and product operators in Silicon Valley, having scaled Grubhub from 40,000 customers in 3 cities to 3 million users in 1,000+ cities, then led Pinterest's growth from 40 million to 400 million users, and later served as CPO of Eventbrite through a pandemic that wiped out the live events industry. A longtime Reforge program partner and prolific writer at caseyaccidental.com, Winters is known for first-principles thinking, blunt contrarianism, and a deep aversion to cargo-cult growth frameworks.
nikhil trivedi is the Director of Web Engineering at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has spent nearly two decades building open-source museum technology while simultaneously championing anti-oppression frameworks in cultural institutions. His tagline - 'Museums. Technology. Social Justice.' - is not a brand, it is a practice: he co-created Visitors of Color, contributed to the MASS Action Toolkit, received a UN Women Gender Equality Award, and built a public data API that connects AIC's collection to historical records of the transatlantic slave trade. A Desi Chicagoan, sitar player, and former high school band member, he codes in PHP by day and runs his own Mastodon instance by night.
Shahed Khan is the co-founder of Loom, the async video messaging platform that grew from a Chrome extension to 25 million users across 350,000+ companies before being acquired by Atlassian for $975 million in 2023. A Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Khan started his entrepreneurial journey at 16 in suburban Chicago, founding Viatask before connecting with Joe Thomas and Vinay Hiremath to build Loom through two pivots and years of near-failure. He now lives in New York City, angel-investing in 40+ companies and staying active in the startup ecosystem.
Brendan Hufford is a content marketing and SEO strategist who spent a decade as a high school teacher and assistant principal before pivoting to digital marketing. He founded Growth Sprints, an agency helping SaaS companies scale from $10M to $100M ARR, and created 'SEO for the Rest of Us,' a free newsletter with 6,000+ subscribers. Known for practical, no-BS approaches to content strategy and SEO, Brendan has worked with companies like ActiveCampaign and Allstate, built and sold multiple online businesses, and is a sought-after speaker and educator in the B2B marketing space.