Tagged: chicago
30 results
Basis Technologies
Basis Technologies is a Chicago-based advertising software company that builds Basis, an automation and intelligence platform for digital media. Founded in 2001 as Centro and rebranded in 2021, Basis unifies programmatic, publisher-direct, search, social, and connected TV buying alongside campaign planning, workflow automation, reporting, and financial reconciliation - so agencies and enterprise marketers can run cross-channel media from a single system.
Stephanie Trunzo
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.
Ben Hernandez
Ben Hernandez is the founder and CEO of Numat, a Chicago deep-tech company that treats chemistry like software. Numat designs metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), nanoscale materials that capture, hold, and even destroy specific molecules with atomic precision. Trained as an engineer with a law degree and an MBA, and a former private equity investor, Hernandez turned a Northwestern lab idea into the world's first industrial-scale MOF manufacturing campus, powering safer hazardous-gas storage for the semiconductor industry through its ION-X product and pushing toward industrial decarbonization.
Craig Kohler
Craig Kohler is the founder and CEO of ONVI, a Chicago-area oral health technology company building what he calls the operating system for oral health. A dentist for four decades on Chicago's North Shore, he spent 20-plus years recording procedures through surgical microscopes and noticed a pattern: patients who could actually see inside their own mouths started taking better care of their teeth. He turned that observation into a product line - the video-enabled Prophix brush, the LED-lit MOTSY Light manual brush, and the HIPAA-compliant ONView platform - backed by 39 patents and a $25 million Series A raised in August 2025.
Danish Qureshi
Danish Qureshi is the founder and CEO of Zarminali Pediatrics, a nationwide pediatric multispecialty group he started in 2024 to fix the fragmented way American children get care. Before Zarminali, he co-founded LifeStance Health, scaling it into the country's largest outpatient mental health provider with thousands of clinicians across dozens of states before it went public. A former Bain consultant and private equity operator who cut his teeth in wound care, Qureshi has raised roughly $150M for Zarminali and grown it to nearly 30 clinics across eight states in under two years.
Mit Jha
Dr. Mit Jha is the CEO of Quantum Corridor, the first inter-state quantum-safe commercial communications network in North America, running fiber from Chicago's 350 Cermak data center to Hammond, Indiana. A Purdue-trained PhD in transportation systems and former MIT research associate, he spent two decades structuring mega public-private-partnership infrastructure deals as a Managing Principal at Keystone Global before turning that dealmaking discipline toward building a quantum internet backbone across the American Midwest.
Ronak Sheth
Ronak Sheth is the CEO of Pricefx, the cloud-native pricing software company, where he has pushed a disciplined 'smart growth' playbook and an aggressive bet on AI pricing agents. He arrived in 2021 as President and Chief Revenue Officer and took the top job in 2022. Before Pricefx he co-founded and led Label Insight, a B2B data SaaS company acquired by NielsenIQ. A Northwestern-trained industrial engineer with a Washington University MBA, he is a fixture of the St. Louis startup scene, sitting on boards and mentoring founders through Arch Grants.
Jeremy Keeshin
Jeremy Keeshin is the CEO and co-founder of CodeHS, the online platform that teaches computer science to millions of middle and high school students. A Stanford computer science graduate who cut his teeth as a section leader for the university's legendary intro programming courses, he launched CodeHS in 2012 with classmate Zach Galant to bring coding to schools that had never offered it. He wrote 'Read Write Code,' a friendly primer arguing that coding is the new literacy, and he still finds time to juggle, chase crosswords, and crack jokes rooted in his college days running the satirical paper The Stanford Flipside.
Justin Benjamin
Justin Benjamin is the co-founder and COO of Normal, a Chicago-based crypto savings and index investing platform built on Stellar. He is also a beach wrestling world champion - the first U.S. man to win a Senior Beach World Series gold medal - and serves as Head of Strategy for USA Wrestling. He was a Big Ten wrestler at Northwestern University and earlier built products at CoinFlip and Bitcoin of America before co-founding Normal through the Antler Boulder accelerator in 2022.
evermore
evermore (formerly Soda Health) is a healthcare technology company that administers Smart Benefits, connecting people to the products and services they need - healthy food, OTC medications, transportation and more - when they need them. Its Smart Benefits Operating System adjudicates purchases at the item level in real time across more than 70,000 retail locations, helping Medicare Advantage, Medicaid and commercial payers manage supplemental benefits, close care gaps and improve outcomes. The company rebranded from Soda Health to evermore in October 2025 after closing an oversubscribed $50M Series B led by General Catalyst.
Brian Barnes
Brian Barnes is the founder and CEO of M1, a Chicago-based personal finance platform that blends investing, borrowing, and spending into one automated 'finance super app.' He started investing in the fifth grade with a real brokerage account opened by his parents, studied economics at Stanford, and launched M1 in 2016 after concluding that the tools for managing money had barely improved in two decades. M1 has raised more than $320 million, reached unicorn valuation, and grown to roughly a million members and billions in assets under management.
Sibel Health
Sibel Health is a Chicago-based digital health company spun out of Northwestern University that builds clinical-grade, fully wireless wearable sensors paired with AI analytics and a cloud platform. Its flagship ANNE One system continuously tracks vital signs - heart rate, respiratory rate, temperature, SpO2, pulse and more - for patients from neonates to adults, in hospitals, at home, and in low-resource settings around the world. The mission is to deliver 'Better Health Data for All.'
Eric Meizlish
Eric Meizlish is the CEO of Cardiosense, a Chicago digital health company building AI-enabled, non-invasive cardiac monitoring. A Yale-trained investor turned healthcare operator, he co-founded the clinical analytics firm Lumere (sold to GHX), ran the life-sciences procurement platform Prendio-BioProcure, and started his career investing in tech and media at Citadel. He took the Cardiosense top job in September 2025 to scale the company's CardioTag sensor, which predicts pressures and volumes inside the heart without an implant.
Vadim Vladimirskiy
Vadim Vladimirskiy is the co-founder and CEO of Nerdio, a Chicago software company that automates and cuts the cost of running Microsoft cloud desktops for thousands of organizations across more than 50 countries. He emigrated from Ukraine at 13, started his first IT consultancy in high school, and spent fifteen years running an MSP before turning his internal tooling into a product. In March 2025 Nerdio raised a $500 million Series C from General Atlantic at a valuation above $1 billion, and the company crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue by mid-2025.
FourKites, Inc.
FourKites is a Chicago-based enterprise software company that tracks roughly 3.2 million shipments a day across road, rail, ocean, air and last mile. Founded in 2014 by Matt Elenjickal, it pioneered applying SaaS to GPS and ELD telematics to give the world's largest shippers real-time visibility into where their freight actually is. Today the company is reinventing itself around AI: an Intelligent Control Tower and a 'Digital Workforce' of named AI agents that don't just show what is happening in a supply chain but decide and act on it.
Numat
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
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
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.
ActiveCampaign
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
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 Sahli
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.