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.
Luca Springer is the co-founder and CEO of Numen (formerly Cleancard), a San Francisco synthetic-biology company building rapid at-home diagnostic tests that read biomarkers from a urine sample in about 30 minutes. A 2016 German Rhodes Scholar who once planned a career in European politics, he traded the policy track for the lab bench, pairing degrees in computer science and global governance from Oxford with a dual BA from Columbia and Sciences Po. He started the company in 2021 with fellow Rhodes Scholar Thomas Carroll, went through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch, and has raised roughly $5.1M to make lab-grade screening as simple as a pregnancy test.
Yinon Ravid is the co-founder and CEO of Albert, the personal finance app that turned 'pay what you think is fair' into a profitable business serving millions of mostly young, under-$100k Americans. A former high-yield bond trader turned engineer, he spent the past decade building budgeting, banking, saving, investing and human-plus-software financial advice into one app - and in 2026 shipped Genius, an AI assistant that doesn't just advise but takes action on your money.
Adrianne Nickerson is the co-founder and CEO of Oula, a New York maternity company that fuses midwives, OB-GYNs and technology into one hybrid clinic built to give pregnant patients a calmer, more personal, evidence-based birth experience. A Columbia biology grad with a Harvard master's in global health, she decided she could help patients more by not becoming a doctor - and instead builds the systems doctors and midwives work inside. She co-founded Oula in 2019, opened it while pregnant alongside two pregnant co-executives, and has raised tens of millions to expand care that reduces unnecessary C-sections and centers patient voices.
Daniel First is the founder and CEO of Axion (Axion Ray), an AI-powered quality intelligence platform that helps manufacturers detect, investigate, and resolve product issues before they reach customers. After watching enterprise AI pilots stall at analysis rather than action during his years at McKinsey and QuantumBlack, he built Axion to put AI directly in the hands of field engineers across aerospace, automotive, medical devices, and consumer goods. The New York company has raised $25M total, including a $17.5M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners with RTX Ventures, and counts Boeing, Cummins, Baxter, DENSO, Newell, and Pratt & Whitney among its customers.
David Chait is the co-founder and CEO of Travefy, the itinerary, proposal and client-management platform that thousands of travel advisors use to make their trips look as good as they feel. He started it in 2012 to untangle a friend's bachelor party booked across 75 emails, pivoted the whole company to serve travel professionals in 2016, and built it into one of the quiet workhorses of the travel-advisor economy from an office in Lincoln, Nebraska. A former McKinsey consultant and Obama-era SBA policy advisor with two Columbia degrees, he is now an industry advocate, vice chair of The Travel Institute board, and ASTA's 2017 Entrepreneur of the Year.
Tomer Aharoni is the co-founder and CEO of Nagish, a New York startup using AI to caption phone calls in real time so Deaf and hard-of-hearing people can place and receive calls by typing and reading, with no human operator in the loop. The idea began with a phone ringing during a class at Columbia and a question he couldn't shake: how do you take a call if you can't hear or speak? Nagish (Hebrew for 'accessible') is now FCC-certified, offered free to users through federal subsidies, and has raised $16 million. Aharoni builds the product hand-in-hand with the Deaf community and is now pushing into AI sign-language translation.
Zack Gray is the co-founder and CEO of Ophelia, a New York-based telemedicine company he started in 2019 with Columbia Business School lecturer Mattan Griffel. A Columbia astrophysics-and-philosophy graduate turned Wharton MBA, Gray scaled a solar startup to $30M as employee number two before building Ophelia into a Y Combinator-backed, Tiger Global-funded company that has raised roughly $68M across Series A and B rounds.
Wayne Ting is the CEO of Lime, the world's largest shared electric vehicle company, where since 2020 he has led the green scooter-and-bike fleet from cash-burning startup to the first profitable micromobility business of its kind. A Taiwan-born Nebraska kid turned Columbia class president, Obama policy advisor, and Uber chief of staff, he has spent his career on the operational side of big consumer platforms.
Jim Kim is the Founder and General Partner of Builders VC, a San Francisco-based venture firm deploying capital into the unglamorous corners of the economy - agriculture, industrial technology, healthcare IT, and real estate - where pen and paper still govern billion-dollar decisions. A product of MIT and Columbia Business School, Kim has logged stints at GE Capital (where he built the company's venture arm), Khosla Ventures, and Formation 8 before launching Builders with a thesis that the most interesting returns live in sectors most investors won't touch. Three funds and $368M+ later, his portfolio spans synthetic biology (Bolt Threads), precision cattle data (Performance Livestock Analytics), construction tech (Fieldwire), and de-extinction biotech (Colossal). He practices kung fu, tends a Cabernet vineyard, and has been waiting his whole career for the U.S. soccer team to win a World Cup.
Jean-Denis Greze is the Co-Founder and CEO of Town, an AI-powered tax platform for small businesses that raised an $18M seed round led by First Round Capital in March 2025. Previously, he served as CTO of Plaid, where he scaled the engineering team from 20 to 350 people, and before that as Director of Engineering at Dropbox. A Columbia CS grad and Harvard Law JD, he brings an unusually cross-disciplinary approach to building technology companies at the intersection of finance, law, and software.
Roy Maute is co-founder and CEO of Pheast Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech in Redwood City, CA, developing macrophage-targeted cancer immunotherapies. Trained at UC Berkeley, Columbia (PhD, Genetics), and Stanford (postdoc under Irving Weissman), Maute has built a career at the intersection of innate immunology and drug development. Before Pheast, he co-founded Ab Initio Biotherapeutics (acquired by Ligand in 2019) and led translational research at Forty Seven Inc. ahead of its $4.9B acquisition by Gilead in 2020. At Pheast, he is advancing PHST001, a novel anti-CD24 antibody that teaches macrophages to eat cancer cells, currently in Phase 1 clinical trials with FDA Fast Track Designation for ovarian cancer.
Mike Novotny is the founder and CEO of Medrio, a San Francisco-based eClinical SaaS company he started in his apartment in 2005. Over 15 years he bootstrapped Medrio into a nine-figure company that has helped customers win regulatory approvals for more than 100 treatments. After a sabbatical researching organizational development, he returned as CEO in 2025, betting that AI will reshape clinical trial data management. Before Medrio, he was CEO of Telosa, President of Ninaza, a UN research associate, and managed the fraud database at Visa. He holds degrees from Stanford, PUC Chile, and Columbia.
Nico Laqua is the 26-year-old co-founder and CEO/CTO of Corgi, the AI-native full-stack insurance carrier that went from zero to unicorn ($1.3B valuation) in under two years. A Columbia neuroscience Rabi Scholar turned serial founder, he built Basket Entertainment into a gaming publisher with 200M+ monthly active users before pivoting to reinvent commercial insurance for startups. Corgi raised $268M total - including a $160M Series B in May 2026 - and became the first AI-native licensed insurance carrier purpose-built for technology companies.
J. Scott Zimmerman is the CEO and co-founder of Xola, a San Francisco-based SaaS platform that powers booking, back-office management, and marketing for tour and activity operators worldwide. A licensed physician who completed a neurology residency at Stanford, Zimmerman chose Stanford precisely for its proximity to Silicon Valley, coding in Python during spare hospital moments - sometimes until 2am - while simultaneously building the company that would become Xola. He founded Xola in fall 2011 after recognizing that real-time technology had transformed flight, hotel, and car rental reservations, but the $135 billion tours-and-activities market remained largely undigitized. Backed by investors including Rakuten Travel, Michael Burry (of 'The Big Short' fame), and Google Analytics co-creators Scott and Brett Crosby, Xola has grown to serve thousands of operators across North America, Western Europe, and beyond.
Paul Sethi is a Managing Partner and Co-Founder of 2048 Ventures, a New York-based pre-seed and seed venture capital firm he co-founded with Alex Iskold in 2019. With a career spanning hedge funds, operational leadership, and over two decades of early-stage angel investing across 50+ companies - including unicorns like Flexport, SeatGeek, and Notion - Sethi brings rare dual credibility as both operator and investor. He scaled and sold Redbooks (spun out of LexisNexis) for a 10x+ return and co-founded Robuzz, an ML/NLP platform exited in 2022. His firm, which has grown from a $27M Fund I to an oversubscribed $82M Fund III, backs founders building in vertical AI, deep tech, healthcare, and fintech - with a Founder NPS of 100 and a commitment to review every single pitch.
Erik Hoel is an American neuroscientist, novelist, and philosopher who turned the hardest problem in science - consciousness - into a literary career. Holding a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison under consciousness pioneer Giulio Tononi, Hoel developed 'causal emergence' theory and the 'overfitted brain hypothesis' before trading academic tenure for a Substack with 69,000+ subscribers. His newsletter The Intrinsic Perspective blends rigorous science with razor-sharp cultural commentary, while his books - the debut mystery novel The Revelations (2021) and the nonfiction The World Behind the World (2023) - bring consciousness science to general readers. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he grew up in his mother's independent bookstore in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and was mentored by novelist Andre Dubus III at age 13.