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.
Dugal Bain-Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Lifeforce, a clinically integrated health optimization platform he launched in February 2022 with Tony Robbins, Dr. Peter Diamandis and Joel Jackson. An Australian-born finance and healthcare operator who went from BlackRock and Cambridge to telehealth, he built Lifeforce after his own fragmented hunt for answers about his changing body at 38. The company tests 40+ biomarkers via at-home blood draws and pairs the data with clinicians, coaching and supplements, on a stated mission to extend healthy lifespan for five million people by 2030.
Dylan Massey is the co-founder and CEO of Interchecks, a New York-based instant-payment platform that moves deposits and withdrawals for sportsbooks, lenders, fintechs and banks. A former Goldman Sachs analyst and University of Chicago economics grad, he started the company in 2016 and has built it into infrastructure that has processed more than $50 billion, powering money movement for names like FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM and Credit Karma Money. In 2022 Interchecks raised a $16M Series B co-led by Senator Investment Group and Standard Investments.
James Kanoff is the co-founder and CEO of Terradot, a climate company using enhanced rock weathering to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by spreading crushed silicate rock across farmland. He launched Terradot in 2024 with $58.2M in funding, including a $54M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins and backing from Google, Microsoft, John Doerr and Sheryl Sandberg, and has already signed some of the largest carbon-removal deals in the field's history. Before Terradot, while a Stanford undergraduate sent home during the COVID-19 pandemic, he co-founded The Farmlink Project, a nonprofit that has rescued well over 130 million pounds of surplus food for communities facing hunger.
George Kalogeropoulos is the co-founder and CEO of HealthSherpa, the private-sector enrollment engine that sits on top of HealthCare.gov. When the federal exchange buckled at its 2013 launch, he and two collaborators built a faster alternative in a matter of days. HealthSherpa has since enrolled more than 10 million Americans in ACA coverage. Raised in Greece by a sculptor father and a tutor mother, he studied political science at Yale, did a stint at Bridgewater Associates, then pivoted a Y Combinator rent-prediction startup into a mission to make health insurance legible.
Jad Boutros is the co-founder and CEO of TerraTrue, a San Francisco privacy-and-security automation company he started in 2018 with former Snap general counsel Chris Handman. Before building software to make privacy reviews painless, Boutros spent nine years on Google's information security team leading security for its social products, then became Snap's first Chief Security Officer, where he and Handman ran thousands of privacy reviews a year out of a Google spreadsheet that ballooned past 100 tabs. TerraTrue is the product that spreadsheet should have been: a single source of truth that bakes privacy-by-design into the software development lifecycle.
Iain Usiri is the co-founder and CEO of Ramani, a Tanzanian fintech building financial infrastructure for Africa's consumer-packaged-goods supply chains. A Stanford computer science graduate and former Salesforce product manager, he gave up his US immigration status and flew home one-way in 2019 to start the company with his brother Calvin and friend Martin Kibet. Ramani gives micro distribution centers free point-of-sale and inventory software, then monetizes through lending - and in 2022 raised a $32M Series A led by Flexcap Ventures after passing through Y Combinator's W20 batch.
Ilan Bajarlia is the CEO and co-founder of nocnoc, a Montevideo-based cross-border e-commerce facilitator that connects more than 2,500 global brands and sellers from the U.S. and China with shoppers across Latin America's fragmented marketplaces. A former dLocal and AstroPay business developer, he built nocnoc from a $300,000 friends-and-family seed into a company that has raised roughly $22 million, led by PayPal Ventures, and operates the largest cross-border stores in the region across Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Argentina.
Evan Sussman is the co-founder and CEO of Granata Bio, a Boston-based biopharma company expanding access to fertility care by in-licensing IVF medications proven abroad and bringing them through U.S. clinical development and commercialization. A former fertility business unit head at EMD Serono, he built Granata to be revenue-positive early through a fee-for-service model, then raised a $14M Series A led by GV (Google Ventures), extended it, acquired ovarian-aging biotech Oviva Therapeutics, and struck a strategic investment and co-development deal with Gedeon Richter.
Farid Vij is the co-founder and CEO of Citizen Health, a San Francisco startup building an AI Advocate for patients living with rare and complex conditions. He turns fragmented medical records, genetics, and lived patient experience into proactive guidance families can act on. Before Citizen, he co-founded Ciitizen in 2017, sold it to Invitae, and ran its patient-data business. He is a Wharton graduate who believes patients, not systems, should own and benefit from their own health data.
Frank Cheung is the co-founder and CEO of Accorded, a San Francisco actuarial intelligence company building tools for value-based contracting in healthcare. A Fellow of the Society of Actuaries with more than 18 years as a health actuary, he spent years inside Blue Shield of California, Deloitte Consulting, and Collective Health before deciding the frustration he kept running into deserved a software fix. He started Accorded in 2019 with co-founder Thomas Bedington, and in 2024 launched Accorded Acumen, a platform that turns messy claims and eligibility data into actuarially rigorous, ready-to-use VBC data assets.
Gabriel Stengel is the co-founder and CEO of Rogo, a generative AI platform built for investment banks, private equity firms and hedge funds. A 2020 Princeton computer science graduate who did stints at J.P. Morgan and whose co-founder came from Lazard, Stengel turned a clunky senior-thesis econometrics chatbot into a company that, by April 2026, raised a $160 million Series D at a roughly $2 billion valuation. Rogo's AI agent Felix now serves more than 35,000 finance professionals across 250-plus institutions, automating the grunt work of benchmarking, earnings analysis and pitch decks that once kept junior bankers awake at night.
Gil Akos is the co-founder and CEO of Astra, a payments infrastructure company that lets developers move money bank-to-bank in real time. Trained as an architect with graduate work at Columbia, he taught himself programming, then earned a stack of Udacity nanodegrees in machine learning and AI to build the company he imagined. Under his leadership Astra crossed $1 billion in lifetime payments processed and pushed past a $2 billion annualized run rate, positioning the company as connective tissue for instant payouts across vertical SaaS, marketplaces, and earned wage access.
Harry DiFrancesco is the CEO and co-founder of Carda Health, a New York-based virtual care company rebuilding heart and lung rehabilitation for the home. A philosopher turned coder turned operator, he taught with Teach For America, helped found a school, did business operations at Stripe, and started Carda in 2020 after caring for a parent who could not access prescribed recovery care. He blends human clinicians with AI to remove friction from care delivery, and runs ultramarathons and climbs mountains in his spare time.
Idan Bar-Dov is the co-founder and CEO of Heka Global, a New York and Tel Aviv company that turns the public web into real-time, audit-ready digital identities for banks, insurers, and pension funds. A fintech lawyer turned operator, he started Heka during the pandemic to reconnect people with lost financial assets and grew it into a fraud-fighting web-intelligence engine used by institutions like Barclays and Pictet. In July 2025 Heka closed a $14M Series A led by Windare Ventures, with Bar-Dov arguing that the credit bureaus built for a paper era cannot see a world where both consumers and risk now live online.
Ilana Borkenstein is the co-founder and CEO of M7 Health, a New York healthtech company building nurse staffing and scheduling software designed by the people who live the night shift. A registered nurse who worked a bone marrow transplant unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering - the literal M7 floor the company is named for - she turned a Harvard Business School class project into a platform now used daily by tens of thousands of clinicians across more than 60 hospitals. M7 has raised about $17 million, including a $10 million Series A led by Threshold Ventures, on a single idea: fix nurse scheduling not as a math problem but as a human one.
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.
Jahaan Ansari is the co-founder and CEO of Gainful, a New York-based personalized nutrition company that builds custom protein and supplement formulas around each customer. A UC Berkeley chemical engineering and computer science graduate, he wrote the algorithm that matches a person's body and goals to a unique blend, turning a college dorm-kitchen experiment that filled its first 50 orders by hand into a Forbes 30 Under 30, Y Combinator-backed brand sold at Target. He raised more than $17M with high-school-best-friend-turned-co-founder Eric Wu, and in 2024 took an unexpected detour onto ABC's The Bachelorette.
Jake Brooks is the co-founder and co-CEO of Triumph, a San Francisco company that gives mobile game developers a drop-in SDK to add real-money, skill-based tournaments to their games. He dropped out of Stanford during the pandemic to build it, and in 2023 the company launched with $14.1M in seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst. Triumph handles the hard parts - payments, KYC, anti-fraud, matchmaking and state-by-state compliance - so developers can monetize beyond ads. Brooks pitches real-money competition as a third pillar of game revenue alongside advertising and in-app purchases.
James DeMuth is the co-founder and CEO of Seurat Technologies, a Wilmington, Massachusetts metal additive manufacturing company chasing a single audacious goal: printing metal parts fast and cheap enough to compete with mass production, then planting factories next to the customers who need them. He co-invented Seurat's Area Printing technology while working on laser fusion research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, holds a hand in roughly 145 patents, and has raised more than $181 million to reshore manufacturing and cut carbon out of how metal gets made.
James Gallagher is the CEO and co-founder of GreenLite, a New York based construction technology company that pairs AI with licensed architects, engineers, and former regulators to deliver code-compliant building permits in days rather than months. A former Marine infantry and intelligence officer who deployed to Afghanistan, Gallagher spent a decade scaling the physical footprints of venture-backed companies like Gopuff, Bandit, and Good Uncle before realizing that permitting was the real bottleneck holding builders back. He founded GreenLite in 2022 with fellow Gopuff alum Ben Allen, and has since raised $86M across three rounds, including a $49.5M Series B led by Insight Partners in September 2025.
James Hawkins is the co-founder and co-CEO of PostHog, the open-source product analytics platform built for engineers. He pivoted five times inside Y Combinator's W20 batch before landing on PostHog, then turned a Hacker News launch and a single tweet into a developer cult following and a $1.4 billion valuation. A former marketing operator and self-described 'very bad developer,' Hawkins runs PostHog on radical transparency, tiny autonomous teams, and a refusal to be boring.
Jeffrey Carleton is the co-founder and CEO of Runwise, a New York-based smart-building company that pairs proprietary wireless sensors with cloud software to cut the energy that boilers, cooling, electric and water systems waste. Drawing on seven years spent running 150 New York apartment buildings, he turned a hands-on operator's frustration with 1960s heating controls into a platform now deployed in more than 10,000 buildings, serving roughly 1,000 customers and saving over $100 million in energy costs. In June 2025 Runwise raised a $55 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures, bringing total funding to $79 million, around a thesis Carleton states bluntly: every building needs to be rebuilt with software, not bricks.
Jenny von Podewils is the co-CEO and co-founder of Leapsome, the people enablement platform she launched in Berlin in 2016 with Kajetan von Armansperg. After bootstrapping the company to roughly $10 million in annual recurring revenue, the pair raised a $60 million Series A in March 2022 led by Insight Partners - their first outside money in six years. Trained at St. Gallen, Oxford, and Singularity University, she relocated from Berlin to New York in early 2023 to scale Leapsome's U.S. business, and was named Female Founder of the Year at the 2023 German Startup Awards.
Jeremy Sicklick is the co-founder and CEO of HouseCanary, a San Francisco proptech company that uses machine learning to value and forecast residential real estate across more than 136 million U.S. homes. A former partner and managing director at Boston Consulting Group, he started HouseCanary in 2013 after the 2008 housing collapse exposed how paper-bound and opaque the largest asset class in America really was. His pitch: replace a two-to-three week human appraisal with an instant, data-driven valuation, and bring stock-market-grade transparency to homes.
Jessica Toh is the co-founder and CEO of Huckleberry Labs, the AI-powered children's sleep and parenting app she built with her husband Seng Toh after their own son woke every two to three hours for 20 months. A UC Berkeley triple major in electrical engineering, computer science, and math & statistics with a Cambridge MBA, she turned a personal sleep crisis into data science, then into a company that now reaches more than 5 million families across 150+ countries - including roughly 15% of U.S. babies. Her mission is to make expert-grade parenting guidance affordable for everyone, not just families who can pay a sleep consultant thousands a year.
Suvi Sharma is the co-founder and CEO of SOLARCYCLE, a clean-energy company turning end-of-life solar panels into recovered materials and brand-new solar glass. A three-time solar entrepreneur, he previously built and ran Solaria for 17 years and co-founded Nextracker before it was acquired by Flex. Today he is building one of the first US solar glass plants in Cedartown, Georgia, betting that the fastest-growing source of electricity also needs the smartest plan for what happens when the panels come down.
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.
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.
Joel Beal is the CEO and co-founder of Alloy.ai, a demand and inventory control tower that helps consumer goods brands like Bic, Bosch, Crayola and Ferrero turn messy retailer data into daily, SKU-store-level decisions. A would-be economics academic who walked away from a Stanford PhD because it felt too theoretical, Beal built a career in applied data science at Applied Predictive Technologies and helped scale fintech Addepar from pre-revenue to $300B in assets before founding Alloy in 2016. The idea came from his sister, who spent her weeks manually stitching together retailer spreadsheets for a luxury shoe brand.