Conor Murray is the cofounder and CEO of OpenInvest, the values-based investing platform acquired by J.P. Morgan in 2021. An MIT-trained mathematician and computer scientist, he built portfolio-optimization technology at Bridgewater Associates managing more than $150 billion before starting OpenInvest in 2015 to let everyday investors align their money with their ethics. He now guides ESG innovation inside J.P. Morgan Wealth Management.
David Roger is the cofounder and CEO of Hetal Retail, a New York-based startup that uses computer vision and a crowd of everyday shoppers to tell brands what is really happening on store shelves. Before Hetal, he co-founded and ran Felix Gray, the company that pushed blue light glasses into the mainstream and onto the shelves of Target, CVS and Best Buy before selling in 2023. A self-described generalist who lives at the intersection of analytical and creative, Roger turned the frustrations he felt as a brand operator - expensive, slow, unusable retail data - into the company he runs today.
Dylan Keil is the co-founder and CEO of Bearing AI, a Palo Alto startup that uses artificial intelligence to cut carbon emissions and improve operations across the global maritime shipping fleet. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer who grew up on college campuses, he built and sold the mobile sensor startup Chronos to Life360 before launching Bearing in 2019. Backed by Andrew Ng's AI Fund and Japanese shipping giant Mitsui & Co., Bearing predicts vessel fuel consumption, speed and carbon ratings without onboard sensors, helping shipowners navigate regulations like CII, EU ETS and FuelEU Maritime while saving fuel and money.
Max Spero is the cofounder and CEO of Pangram Labs, a New York based startup building the most accurate AI-text detector on the market. A Stanford-trained machine learning engineer who worked at Google, Two Sigma, Yelp, and the self-driving company Nuro, Spero co-founded Pangram in 2023 with college dormmate Bradley Emi to draw a clean line between human and machine writing. His obsession is the false positive rate: he refused to ship at one wrong call in a hundred and pushed his team to one in ten thousand. Pangram now powers AI verification for journalism platforms, schools, and trust and safety teams, and raised about $4M in seed funding in 2025.
Moe Nada is the CEO and cofounder of SupportFinity, a San Francisco AI-native recruitment automation platform that sources across more than 2.1 billion profiles and runs the full hiring lifecycle through proprietary AI agents. A UC Berkeley MBA with roughly two decades across HP, HPE, IBM and OpenText, he moved from software engineering into product, implementation and customer success before betting that the resume-screening grind belongs to machines and judgment belongs to people.
Nikhil Rao is the cofounder and CEO of Reflex (formerly Pynecone), an open-source framework that lets developers build full-stack web apps in pure Python without touching JavaScript or React. A UC Berkeley EECS graduate who worked at VMware, Drive.ai, and Apple, he founded Reflex in 2022 with college roommate Alek Petuskey after watching brilliant ML engineers struggle to ship simple user interfaces. Reflex went through Y Combinator's W23 batch, raised a $5M seed led by Lux Capital, and has grown into an enterprise platform used for internal tools across roughly 30% of the Fortune 500.
Amanda Rees is the co-founder and CEO of Bold, a Los Angeles based digital fitness platform that delivers personalized, science-based exercise programs to help older adults build strength, ease pain, and prevent falls. A Princeton-trained chemical and biological engineer who is also a longtime dance and tai chi instructor, Rees built Bold after spending most of her twenties caring for her grandmother and discovering how few preventive tools existed for aging well. Bold partners with Medicare Advantage plans and has raised about $27 million in total funding, including a $17 million Series A.
Andy Thompson is the cofounder and CEO of Safehub, a San Francisco company that puts low-cost sensors on buildings to deliver real-time, building-specific earthquake damage data. A structural and earthquake engineer trained at UC Berkeley, he spent 16 years at the global engineering firm Arup, where he built its Catastrophe Risk & Insurance practice and worked post-disaster in countries from Chile to Haiti to Japan. He cofounded Safehub in 2015 with catastrophe-risk veteran Doug Frazier, raised a $9M Series A in 2021, and has deployed sensors across thousands of buildings in dozens of countries, now powering sensor-triggered parametric earthquake insurance with partners like Liberty Mutual Reinsurance.
Bing Li is the CEO and co-founder of Intalight, an ophthalmic imaging company behind the DREAM OCT swept-source platform. Founded in 2014 by a group of scientists and Silicon Valley industry veterans, Intalight built one of the first swept-source OCT devices in 2019 and has since powered more than 170 peer-reviewed retinal-imaging studies. Trained as an engineer and applied mathematician, Li moved from the auto and semiconductor industries into eye care, betting that faster, deeper, wider retinal scans would change how clinicians see inside the eye. In May 2025 the company won CE Mark clearance to sell DREAM OCT across the European Union, with FDA review pending in the United States.
Brian Jeong is the CEO and cofounder of Hawthorne, a New York personalized men's personal care brand he launched in 2016 with his childhood best friend Phil Wong. Hawthorne built its business on a data-driven quiz that matches men to fragrances, skincare, hair care and grooming products tuned to their body chemistry and preferences. With no prior beauty experience, Jeong reverse-engineered the fragrance world through roughly 100 industry interviews in three weeks, growing Hawthorne from an online storefront into a Series B company stocked in thousands of retail doors, including the vast majority of Target stores.
Kevin Stein is the CEO and cofounder of Delos Insurance Solutions, a San Francisco insurtech MGA that writes homeowners insurance for wildfire-exposed California properties that mainstream carriers refuse. A Bay Area native and aerospace engineer who once sold satellites at SSL/Maxar, Stein co-founded Delos in 2017 with Shanna McIntyre to apply satellite imagery, geospatial AI, and wildfire science to a problem the rest of the market treats as uninsurable. Delos accepts roughly two-thirds of the homes the standard market declines, and Stein reports it has never insured a home that later burned. He moonlights as a bassist and songwriter.
Swamy Vijayan is the CEO and cofounder of Zafrens, a San Diego biotech reinventing drug discovery by shrinking a 96-well plate down to 200,000 microwells that image and sequence single cells at once. A physicist by training who admits he was driven less by a love of biology than by dissatisfaction with theoretical physics, he is a serial founder whose previous company Omniome sold to Pacific Biosciences for up to $800 million. His stated goal is not a quick exit but a foundation for smart people to do important things for the next 100 years.
Alfredo Brillembourg is the cofounder and CEO of Meadow, a New York fintech rebuilding how American students pay for college. After a missed tuition deadline locked him out of registration as an undergraduate, he traded a finance track that ran through Goldman Sachs, Bowery Capital, and NEA for the unglamorous plumbing of campus billing. Meadow now serves over 170 colleges and universities, has delivered nearly a million net-price estimates, and raised a $14M Series A led by Matrix Partners in 2025.
Abel Mengistu is the cofounder and CEO of FlutterFlow, the low-code visual app builder that has enabled over 2 million users to create production-ready Flutter applications without deep coding expertise. A former Google senior software engineer who worked on Google Maps and ATAP hardware, he co-founded FlutterFlow in 2020 with Alex Greaves after a failed restaurant-recommendation startup taught them the real bottleneck was app development complexity. Accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch after applying past the deadline, they famously survived 'No-sleep November' to build FlutterFlow 1.0 in a single month. The company raised a $25.5M Series A from GV (Google Ventures) in January 2024, has grown to 173 employees, and in 2025 launched Dreamflow - an AI-powered builder that generates production-ready app screens in roughly 10 seconds.
Adi Goel is co-founder and COO of Sardine, an AI-powered fraud and compliance platform that has screened over $1.36 trillion in payments for 300+ enterprise customers across 70+ countries. Before Sardine, he scaled Revolut's entire US business from zero to millions of customers and led product strategy at Deutsche Börse managing a $200M fintech fund. A Wharton MBA and IIT Delhi engineer, Goel brings rare cross-disciplinary range across quantitative finance, product, and operations to building fintech infrastructure.
Andy Ruff is the co-founder and Chief Product & Tech officer at Numa, an AI communication platform purpose-built for automotive dealerships. A lifelong product builder who started writing software at 13, Ruff led the 100-person team that created the first Microsoft Outlook for Mac client, then scaled Location Labs to over 3 million monthly subscribers before its $220M acquisition. At Numa, he is building the AI stack that converts missed dealership calls into revenue - helping the $1.2 trillion retail automotive sector catch up to the digital age.
Gian Merlino is the co-founder and CTO of Imply, the company commercializing Apache Druid - the open-source real-time analytics database he co-created while at Metamarkets. A Caltech computer science graduate with roots at Yahoo, Merlino has over 1,000 commits to Apache Druid and served as the project's inaugural PMC chair. Imply reached unicorn status in May 2022 with a $100M Series D, bringing total funding to $215M. Based in San Francisco, Merlino is a recognized expert in operational analytics, real-time data infrastructure, and the convergence of batch and streaming architectures.
Greg Sullivan is the CEO and cofounder of AFAR, the award-winning travel media brand he launched in 2009 with Joe Diaz after a transformative six-week trip to India. A former corporate securities attorney, investment banker, and serial entrepreneur — he previously co-founded the world's largest-selling coin-operated basketball game manufacturer and served as President and CEO of DriveTime Automotive Group — Sullivan reinvented himself in his 40s through philosophy studies at Cambridge and a late-discovered passion for international travel. Under his leadership, AFAR has grown from a print magazine into a multiplatform media brand with a digital presence, a podcast, a nonprofit foundation (Learning AFAR), and a B Corp certification, and in 2025 expanded to Europe with the acquisition of SUITCASE Magazine.
Hamish McKenzie is the New Zealand-born co-founder and Chief Writing Officer of Substack, the subscription newsletter platform that has fundamentally reshaped how writers monetize their work. A former journalist and Tesla lead writer who wrote a book about Elon Musk's EV revolution, McKenzie pivoted from covering disruption to causing it - co-founding Substack in 2017 with Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi. Today the platform hosts over 50,000 earning creators and has raised $213 million total funding including a $100M Series C. McKenzie hosts The Active Voice podcast, delivered a TED2025 talk on the future of media, and is writing a book called 'How to Save the Media' due in 2026.
John Gedmark is the CEO and Co-founder of Astranis Space Technologies, a San Francisco-based aerospace company building next-generation geostationary satellites. He previously helped shape the commercial space industry as co-founder and executive director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, where he influenced President Obama's 2010 decision to use commercial space transportation for NASA missions - a shift worth over $10 billion to the industry. At Astranis, he has led the company from a Y Combinator startup to a $2.8 billion valuation with a $1+ billion backlog, operating a fleet of MicroGEO satellites that bring dedicated broadband to underserved regions across Alaska, the Philippines, Mexico, and beyond.
Peter Thompson is the Cofounder and CEO of LucidLink, a San Francisco-based cloud-native file streaming platform that turns object storage into a native file system accessible from anywhere in real time. A Minnesota farm kid who spent 15 years navigating storage markets across Asia and the Americas at DataCore Software before returning to Stanford's GSB at age 48, Thompson teamed up with engineer George Dochev in 2016 to build what users still describe as 'magic.' LucidLink has since raised $120.6M in total funding including a $75M Series C led by Brighton Park Capital in 2023, grown ARR nearly 5x in two years, counts Warner Bros., Paramount, Adobe, and Shopify among its customers, and earned an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Award from the Television Academy.
Sumir Meghani is the CEO and Co-Founder of Instawork, a San Francisco-based on-demand staffing platform connecting over 4 million skilled hourly workers with businesses across hospitality, light industrial, and warehousing sectors. A Stanford and Harvard Business School alumnus and Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, Meghani built Instawork from a Y Combinator S15 startup into a $171.8M-funded company operating in 30+ markets across the U.S. and Canada, earning the EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2023 Bay Area Award and back-to-back Inc. 5000 rankings.
James McGillicuddy is the CEO and Co-founder of BRM (Buyer Relationship Management), a San Francisco-based AI-powered vendor management and procurement automation platform. After key early roles at RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce for $390M), Sourcegraph (valued at $2.6B), and Carta (where he led CartaX), McGillicuddy co-founded BRM in May 2022 to rebalance the power dynamic between buyers and their vendors. BRM raised $21.6M in total funding - a $6M seed from Base10 Partners and a $15M Series A led by Caffeinated Capital in December 2024 - and serves customers including Deel and Cadence with AI SuperAgents that automate vendor discovery, contract extraction, compliance monitoring, and negotiation.
Ali Sabeti is the CEO and cofounder of Zerocater, the San Francisco food-tech company turning corporate cafeterias and catering programs into data-driven hospitality. A UC Irvine accounting summa cum laude who came up at Salesforce while it scaled from 5,000 to 30,000 people, he now runs a 180-person company that survived losing 98% of its business in the pandemic, tripled revenue in 2022, and raised a $15M Series C in 2023 to wire the hybrid office's lunch hour with AI-personalized menus and 450+ supplier partners.
Daniel Kravtsov is the CEO and Co-Founder of Improvado, a San Francisco-based AI-powered marketing intelligence platform that aggregates data from 500+ sources into a unified pipeline. A serial entrepreneur with 15+ years in digital marketing and ad tech, Kravtsov previously founded RTB-Media (acquired by Between Exchange in 2016) and Rizzoma.com before pivoting in 2017 to build Improvado into a $34M-funded revenue data platform serving enterprise marketers worldwide.
Forest Flager is the CEO and co-founder of Parspec, an AI-native software platform modernizing the construction supply chain. A Stanford PhD in computational design optimization, Flager spent years in academia and at SoftBank-backed Katerra before launching Parspec in 2021 with co-founder Pratyush Havelia. The company has raised $31.5M (including a $20M Series A in July 2025 led by Threshold Ventures), grown revenue 4x in 12 months, and counts four of the five largest U.S. electrical distributors - representing $70 billion in global annual sales - among its customers. Parspec automates product selection, quoting, and submittal generation, cutting submittal creation time by 55-80%.
John Dean is the Cofounder and CEO of WindBorne Systems, a Redwood City, California-based company operating the world's largest constellation of autonomous long-duration weather balloons. A Stanford electrical engineering graduate and former intern at SpaceX, NASA, and Lyft, Dean co-founded WindBorne in 2019 out of Stanford's Student Space Initiative after breaking four world records as undergraduates. The company raised a $15 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures in 2024, and its WeatherMesh AI model surpassed Google DeepMind's GraphCast as the most accurate global weather forecasting model, running on a fraction of the compute power. WindBorne's balloons have flown into Hurricane Milton and have set a new benchmark for how atmospheric data is collected at scale.