
He learned how insurers deny claims from the inside. Then he built the machine that fights back for the doctors.

Srinivas Sarkar is the co-founder and CEO of Coupl, a Y Combinator-backed neobank built for couples in India. After a stint as a management consultant at EY and a Founder in Residence run at Entrepreneur First, he set out to fix a gap he kept noticing: banking products for couples had not kept pace with how couples actually live. Coupl offers a zero-balance digital joint account that opens in under a minute and serves married, unmarried, and LGBTQ+ partners alike. The company has grown to 80,000+ couples and 300+ crore in transactions without paid advertising. Sarkar is a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia honoree, an Entrepreneur 35 Under 35 listee, a BITS Pilani alumnus, and a three-time TEDx speaker.

Suyash Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of Exly (YC W19), an all-in-one business platform that helps creators, coaches and knowledge entrepreneurs launch, manage and grow their online businesses. An IIT Kharagpur and IIM Calcutta graduate and former Boston Consulting Group consultant, he first built MyScoot, a marketplace for home-hosted social experiences, then pivoted the company through the pandemic to create Exly. The company has raised roughly $9.8 million to date, including a $6.2 million round led by Chiratae Ventures in 2024.

Sylvanus Mahe is the co-founder and CEO of Flott HQ (YC X25), an AI-native operating system for vehicle fleet management. A former McKinsey and Datadog operator and AI engineer, he teamed up with high school friend Kanvaly Fadiga after running a car rental side business in Cote d'Ivoire exposed them to the fragmented, spreadsheet-and-WhatsApp reality of running fleets. Flott unifies planning, live GPS and fuel tracking, invoicing, and payments into one control center run by AI agents. The company reached $200k ARR growing 45% month over month, almost entirely through word of mouth.
Yih Lin Teh is the co-founder and CEO of Axross (YC W22), a Singapore-based startup building AI-driven autonomous HVAC control systems that cut energy use and operating costs for factories and semiconductor plants across Southeast Asia. An econometrician turned climate tech entrepreneur with roots at LSE and MIT and stints across three continents, Teh returned to ASEAN to make the region's manufacturing sector greener and more competitive.
Stella Han is the co-founder and CEO of Fractional, a San Francisco startup that lets friends and strangers pool money to co-own investment real estate for as little as a few thousand dollars. A Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate and former senior software engineer at Affirm, she left fintech to attack a problem she grew up around: real estate is a great way to build wealth, and almost impossibly clunky to buy with other people. Fractional went through Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch, raised a $5.5M seed led by CRV with backing from Will Smith and Kevin Durant, and a $15M Series A led by Fifth Wall in late 2024.
Dimitrios Skaltsas is the co-founder and CEO of Intelligencia AI, a New York enterprise software company that uses machine learning and curated biomedical data to estimate the probability that a drug candidate will win regulatory approval. Trained as a lawyer in Athens and London, he spent more than a decade at McKinsey, where he built and led New Ventures' big-data and AI work for pharmaceutical R&D before co-founding Intelligencia with Vangelis Vergetis in 2017. Under his leadership the company raised a Series A, was named one of Forbes's Top AI Companies to Watch, secured a U.S. patent for its probability-of-success assessments, and landed on the Inc. 5000. He is also an Executive in Residence at INSEAD.

Ido Ben-Natan is the co-founder and CEO of Blockaid, a blockchain security company that protects crypto wallets, apps and users from scams and onchain exploits in real time. A veteran of Israel's Unit 8200 and the Office of the Prime Minister, where he led a cyber security R&D team and won the Israel Defense Prize, he launched Blockaid in 2022 to bring nation-state defensive expertise to Web3. The company is trusted by Coinbase, MetaMask, Kraken, Uniswap and Stellar, and has raised roughly $89 million from investors including Ribbit Capital, Sequoia, GV and Greylock.
Jeffery Ryan is the co-founder, president, and CEO of Interscope, Inc., a Massachusetts medical device company behind the EndoRotor System, a mechanical, non-thermal tool for interventional gastroenterology and pulmonology. A former U.S. Air Force captain who moved into medical device sales at Medtronic and Smith & Nephew, Ryan launched Interscope in 2013 with physician co-founder Dr. Ramon A. Franco, Jr., steering the EndoRotor from concept to FDA clearances and a 2020 distribution partnership with Micro-Tech Endoscopy.
Jeffrey Morelli is the co-founder and CEO of Silna Health, a New York company building an AI-powered Care Readiness Platform that automates prior authorizations, benefit checks, eligibility verification, and insurance monitoring for specialty healthcare providers. The son of a career nurse, he was the first sales hire at income-verification startup Truework and earlier worked at autism-care company Nightingale before starting Silna in August 2023 with Pavel Asparouhov and Sagar Jajoo. Silna has raised $27 million from Accel and Bain Capital Ventures and has helped more than 50,000 patients get cleared for care. In 2025 Morelli was named among the Healthcare Technology Report's Top Healthcare Technology CEOs.
Jon Jacobson is the co-founder, Group CEO and CTO of Omnisient, a privacy-preserving data collaboration platform that lets banks, insurers, retailers and healthcare organizations share and analyze consumer data without exposing raw personal information. A software engineer with more than 25 years building data platforms, he founded Omnisient in South Africa in 2019 to attack a specific problem: nearly two billion people are shut out of affordable financial services because they lack the behavioral data lenders use to assess risk. His platform uses cryptography to tokenize and match datasets locally, turning loyalty-card and retail data into alternative credit signals.
Marc Visent is the co-founder and CEO of Knowify, a New York-based cloud software company that helps trade contractors and small construction businesses run job costing, project management, billing, and accounting in one place. A trained computer engineer and lawyer turned software entrepreneur, he started Knowify in 2012 with Daniel de Roulet Jr. and has grown it into a platform used by thousands of contractors, an Intuit QuickBooks partner, and a 2025 Inc. 5000 honoree.

Yunfei 'Richard' Cao is the co-founder and CEO of Angio8 (通甪科技), a Shenzhen-based startup building a next-generation surgical robot for minimally invasive vascular interventional surgery. A Stony Brook biomedical engineer who cut his teeth inside the Boston medical-device machine at Vention Medical, SunMed and China Med Device, Cao now runs a cross-Pacific company - engineering brains in Boston, manufacturing and clinical work in Shenzhen - aimed at letting doctors steer catheters and guidewires by robot instead of by hand.
Zachary Garippa is the co-founder and CEO of Order.co, the New York B2B spend-management and guided-purchasing platform he started in 2016 as Negotiatus. A Boston College finance grad who once worked a Morgan Stanley desk and a luxury-building door, Garippa built Order into a company connecting 40,000-plus vendors, serving 300-plus customers, and processing nearly half a billion dollars in annualized spend. He rises at 3:30 a.m., says he is 'trying to build the greatest company New York has ever seen,' and is chasing a Series C to get there.
Sam O'Keefe is the co-founder and CEO of Flex, the San Francisco fintech often called 'Stripe for HSA/FSA payments.' Flex lets health and wellness brands accept the roughly $150 billion of tax-advantaged health-account money that Americans leave sitting unused every year, turning a confusing benefits process into a one-tap checkout. A two-time Y Combinator founder who previously built fraud and risk software at Unit21 and led startup programs at Google, O'Keefe raised a $15M Series A in September 2025 to make 'pay with HSA/FSA' as ordinary at checkout as PayPal.
Jamie Serota (Jamie Niu Serota) is the co-founder and CEO of Podium Automation, a Brooklyn-based company rebuilding the way industrial control panels are designed and manufactured. After leading commercial strategy and business operations at Tesla, Blue Origin, and Bowery Farming, she and co-founder Jacob Buser started Podium in 2024 to become the supplier they always wished they had. Podium ships UL 508A control panels in under four weeks - roughly a third of the industry's standard lead time - by replacing hand-drawn schematics with software. In June 2026 the company raised an $18M Series A led by Construct Capital, bringing total funding past $23M.
Jeff Yen is a Stanford-trained experimental physicist turned entrepreneur, and the co-founder and CEO of Etherdyne Technologies, a Santa Clara startup building 'wire-free' power. His company's Ether Power platform uses low-frequency magnetic resonance to deliver up to 100 watts through the air to multiple devices at once inside a three-dimensional 'Power Zone,' no cords or fixed charging pads required. After eight years of quiet R&D with co-inventor Dr. Robert Moffatt, Yen brought the technology to CES 2026, raised more than $1.2 million from over 400 investors on StartEngine, and now pitches wireless power as the next utility, an 'Electrification 2.0' as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi.
Ashin Shah is the co-founder and CEO of Made Card, a New York fintech building the first credit card designed for the full homeownership lifecycle. After a decade in investing - Bain Capital Credit, an activist hedge fund, and a principal seat at Valinor Management - Shah teamed up with fellow Harvard math alum Christophe Van to attack a gap hiding in plain sight: the largest expenses in American life, mortgages and home costs, earn no rewards. The Made Essential Visa Signature Preferred Card pays homeowners for on-time mortgage payments and everyday home spending, with points redeemable toward lower closing costs. In November 2025 the company launched with $8M+ in seed funding co-led by Jump Capital and Village Global, plus a nationwide distribution deal with Fairway Home Mortgage.
Ephraim Luft is the co-founder and CEO of Togetherhood, a New York-based platform that helps schools, residential buildings and community spaces source, schedule and manage high-quality enrichment programs taught by vetted independent teaching artists and coaches. He built the company with his wife Danielle after pandemic remote learning collapsed for their own family in 2020, prompting them to rent space, hire teachers and build a classroom from scratch. Before Togetherhood, Ephraim was Chief Product Officer at luxury fashion platform Farfetch, where he sat on the executive board through its roughly $7B IPO, and earlier co-founded and led Circle of Moms, a parenting social network acquired by POPSUGAR in 2012. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Eric Tsai is the co-founder and CEO of Asteroom, a proptech company that turns an ordinary smartphone into a professional 3D virtual tour studio. A former Facebook data scientist, he left big tech in 2019 to chase a stubborn problem in real estate: high-quality property visualization was too expensive and too complicated for the average agent. Under his lead, Asteroom grew to serve tens of thousands of agents and built a nationwide network of certified data collectors, becoming the first 3D tour platform to power property data collection for Freddie Mac's ACE+ PDR and Fannie Mae's value-acceptance programs.

Haren Chelle is the co-founder and CEO of Pulse (PulseGen Technologies), an AI-native feedback intelligence platform that turns scattered customer signals - support tickets, sales calls, app-store reviews, social chatter - into prioritized product decisions for B2B SaaS teams. An IIT Patna alumnus who spent his earlier career scaling conversational-AI businesses across Asia Pacific at Yellow.ai, he started Pulse in 2024 with two old friends and raised a $1.4M seed round led by Endiya Partners. Pulse was selected for the Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First 2025 cohort, and Chelle has been recognized on Fortune's 40 Under 40 list.
Isabel Sheinman is the co-founder and CEO of Maka Kids, a Detroit-based children's media company building an ad-free, algorithm-free streaming app for kids ages zero to six that is optimized for child well-being rather than watch-time. Before Maka, she co-founded NABU, a global literacy nonprofit that has put early-grade reading materials in front of more than 15 million children across 26 countries. With a decade spent at the intersection of education, technology, and social impact - and a resume that runs through Georgetown, NYU Stern, and Mastercard - Sheinman is wagering that the most valuable thing a screen can offer a small child is restraint.

Matthias Depenbusch is a German-trained, Vienna-based serial founder who builds software for unglamorous but expensive problems. He co-founded AVISIO, a SaaS platform that used AI-based purchasing suggestions to cut the cost of goods sold for independent 4- and 5-star hotels and restaurants, integrating their POS and PMS systems to automate inventory and ordering. Before that he helped launch Appinio, the Hamburg real-time mobile market-research company that landed 8th in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and on the FT 1000 list of Europe's fastest-growing companies. AVISIO won the Hospitality UPGRADE Award 2020 before filing for insolvency in 2023 amid a frozen funding climate.
Pranjal Daga is the co-founder and CEO of Accend (YC S23), a San Francisco fintech building human-in-the-loop AI agents for commercial credit underwriting and compliance at banks and fintechs. Before Accend he led AI product on the Risk team at Brex, where his work helped prevent roughly $20M in fraud losses, and earlier helped build Cisco Innovation Labs from a single person to a 35-person team. He dropped out of a PhD in AI/ML at Purdue to chase the build, has done research at Adobe and IBM, and is racing to replace slow, manual back-office compliance work with audit-ready AI.
Ricardo Flores is the co-founder and CEO of MiChamba, a startup that turns WhatsApp into an AI-powered management platform for deskless teams in construction, logistics, hospitality, and industrial services across Latin America. A kid who worked scorching El Paso roofs before heading to Georgetown and Wall Street, he left finance and an early seat at fintech Wealth.com to build software for the blue-collar workforce he came from. Less than a year after launch, MiChamba raised a $2.25M pre-seed led by Wollef and signed names like Pemex, Hilton, and Repsol, betting that for the 3 billion people who run their work lives on WhatsApp, management should live there too.
Samuel Adeyemo is the co-founder and CEO of Duranta, a Seattle software company building AI tools that help landscapers and lawn care businesses measure properties, design projects, and win contracts. Born in Nairobi and trained in finance at JP Morgan before pivoting to climate tech, he previously co-founded Aurora Solar, the solar design platform that grew to a reported $2 billion valuation and powers a large share of the U.S. residential solar market. In 2025 he raised a $7 million seed round for Duranta, backed by Base10 Partners, Pear, and angels including GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. His through-line is taking the unglamorous back-office work of physical-world trades and turning it into software.
Anthony Mironov is the co-founder and CEO of Wingspan, a New York fintech building payroll and benefits infrastructure for the 1099 economy. After a career in private equity and a stint as a freelancer who got tired of reverse-engineering his own paycheck, he started Wingspan in 2019 with Greg Franczyk. The company has processed more than $3 billion in contractor payments and raised $54 million, betting that as one in three American workers go independent, the back office for that work needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

Dhruv Amin is the co-founder and co-CEO of Anything (formerly Create), a San Francisco AI app-building platform that turns plain English into working software, complete with databases, payments, and App Store submission. A Stanford computer scientist and former early YouTube product manager, he and co-founder Marcus Lowe shut down a profitable $2M-a-year freelance-developer marketplace in 2023 because they believed AI would make it obsolete, then rebuilt from scratch. The bet paid off: Anything hit a $2M annual revenue run rate within two weeks of its 2025 relaunch and raised an $11M Series A at a $100M valuation.
Doug Tallmadge is the co-founder and CEO of Gradial, a Seattle enterprise-AI company building agentic tools that automate the unglamorous middle of marketing - the approvals, tagging, compliance checks, and publishing that sit between a finished idea and a live campaign. Before Gradial, he spent nearly five years at SpaceX as a software engineering manager, where he helped scale the Starlink network from zero to more than 500,000 customers. A Dartmouth physics graduate who also passed through Lockheed Martin and Bridgewater Associates, he started Gradial in 2023 with three Dartmouth classmates and has since raised roughly $53M across seed, Series A, and a $35M Series B led by VMG Partners.

Hudson Davis-Ross (also published as Hudson Gaines-Ross) is the co-founder and CEO of Plant People, the Austin-based functional wellness brand whose gummies rank as the #1 best-selling supplement at Whole Foods Market, Sprouts and Erewhon. A Brooklyn-born, Brown-educated serial entrepreneur, he previously co-founded nitro cold brew company RISE Brewing Co. and branding consultancy Crosby Advisory, was COO of wellness brand ALOHA, and launched divisions at Gilt Groupe. He started Plant People in his apartment after he and co-founder Gabe Kennedy bonded over recovery from spinal surgeries, and in November 2025 raised a roughly $7.9M Series A led by private-equity firm Manna Tree.