chicago-tech
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Godard Abel
Godard Abel is the co-founder and CEO of G2, the software review platform that brought Yelp-style peer reviews to enterprise software buying. A third-generation entrepreneur born in Germany and raised in Pittsburgh, he built and sold two SaaS companies before G2: BigMachines (acquired by Oracle for a reported $400M+) and SteelBrick (acquired by Salesforce). At G2 he has raised more than $260M, weathered a near-bankruptcy earlier in his career, and is now steering the company through the AI wave with its buying agent Monty and the 2026 acquisition of Gartner's Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice.
Mathew Elenjickal
Mathew (Matt) Elenjickal is the founder and CEO of FourKites, the Chicago-based supply chain visibility company he started in 2014 after realizing he could track a pair of Amazon shoes to the doorstep but not a $100,000 shipment of industrial equipment. A mechanical engineer from Kerala turned logistics-software operator, he spent seven years at i2 Technologies and Oracle before building FourKites into a platform that now tracks more than 3.2 million supply chain events a day for 1,600+ global brands. He has raised roughly $247 million across four rounds and is now pushing the company past dashboards into AI-native orchestration with products like the Intelligent Control Tower and Loft.
Lucas Roh
Lucas Roh is a serial entrepreneur and computer scientist who founded and runs MetalSoft, a Chicago-based startup whose software automates bare metal data centers - turning racks of multi-vendor switches, servers, and storage into cloud-like, on-demand infrastructure. A former Argonne National Laboratory researcher in automatic differentiation, he built the global web host Hostway (1998-2013), launched the big data cloud Bigstep, and spun MetalSoft out of Hostway's internal tooling in 2019. In December 2022 MetalSoft raised a $16 million Series A led by DNS Capital.
Pete Foley
Pete Foley is a serial enterprise-software entrepreneur and the co-founder of ModelOp, the Chicago-based company that built one of the first platforms for governing AI models the way banks govern money. Over a 35-year career he has run and exited a string of infrastructure companies - Infoblox, PortAuthority (to Websense), RingCube (to Citrix), Graphite Systems (to EMC) - before betting that the hardest problem in artificial intelligence would not be building models but trusting them. He served as ModelOp's CEO from its founding and now supports the company from its board of directors.