John D. Balian, MD is a physician-turned-executive who co-founded ClinChoice, one of the world's larger full-service contract research organizations, and serves as its CEO, International. He spent years inside the FDA, then ran drug safety and regulatory operations at Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson before building a global CRO spanning the US, Europe and Southeast Asia. He is also a published novelist whose debut, Gray Wolves and White Doves, draws on his Armenian heritage and the Armenian Genocide.
Anirban Gangopadhyay is the co-founder and CTO of Angle Health, an AI-native health insurance platform serving small and mid-sized businesses across 44 U.S. states. A Columbia University computer scientist and former Palantir machine learning engineer, he previously served as a Stokes Scholar at the U.S. Department of Defense and co-founded Zircon Technologies - an AI-enabled clinical trial recruitment startup that was acquired - before building Angle Health through Y Combinator's W20 batch. Angle Health raised $134 million in a December 2025 Series B and has grown revenue 26x since its Series A, with a mission to redesign healthcare delivery through AI-first technology.
Gil Feig is the Co-Founder and CTO of Merge, the unified API platform that lets B2B software companies add hundreds of integrations to their products in days instead of months. He started coding at 12, got a cease-and-desist from Facebook at 16, and launched Merge in the middle of COVID after interviewing 100 companies before writing a single line of code. The company has raised $74.5M, serves 4,000+ customers, and named Feig and co-founder Shensi Ding to the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Moawia Eldeeb is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tempo, a San Francisco-based AI-powered home fitness company that raised $316M and uses 3D sensors and computer vision to deliver real-time form correction and personalized training. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, he immigrated to the US at age 9, dropped out of school in 6th grade to work 12-hour shifts at a pizza restaurant, survived homelessness in a Harlem shelter, and put himself through Columbia University by working as a personal trainer - before building one of the most-funded fitness tech startups in history.
Shensi Ding is the co-founder and CEO of Merge, the unified API platform that lets B2B software companies offer hundreds of product integrations by integrating just once. A Columbia computer science graduate who detoured through investment banking at Credit Suisse and Silver Lake before becoming Chief of Staff at Expanse, she co-founded Merge in 2020 with college friend Gil Feig after they spent six months talking to 100+ companies about integration pain — without pitching a single solution. Merge has since raised $75M from Accel, NEA, and Addition, serves 7,000+ customers including Calendly, Gong, Ramp, and Brex, and has become critical infrastructure for the AI era as LLMs need real-time access to third-party data.
Xscape Photonics is a Santa Clara-based deep-tech startup building next-generation silicon photonic solutions to solve the escape bandwidth crisis inside AI data centers. Founded in 2022 by a team of Columbia University researchers and industry veterans, the company's proprietary ChromX platform and FalconX laser module deliver multi-wavelength optical connectivity that can increase data throughput by 10x while cutting power by 10x compared to conventional solutions. Backed by $95 million in total funding from NVIDIA, Cisco, and others, Xscape is building the photonic fabric that will underpin the next generation of agentic AI infrastructure.
Arjun Mangla is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fulcrum, an AI-powered workflow automation platform that is quietly transforming how commercial insurance brokers operate. A Columbia-trained computer scientist turned McKinsey consultant, Mangla left a high-flying advisory career to tackle one of corporate America's most overlooked inefficiencies: the manual, error-prone drudgery of insurance policy checking and proposal generation. Under his leadership, Fulcrum has captured nearly a third of the top 50 U.S. insurance brokers as customers, raised $25M in total funding led by CRV, and grown revenue 5x in six months - all by making insurance brokers dramatically faster and more accurate without replacing the humans who know their clients.
Sushanth Raman is the co-founder and CEO of Pallet, a San Francisco-based AI company building an autonomous workforce for the logistics industry. Drawing on family roots in food distribution and stints at Microsoft, Google, and Retool, he founded Pallet in 2022 with fellow Retool engineer Andrew Spencer. The company has raised $50M total — including a $27M Series B led by General Catalyst in May 2025 — and its CoPallet platform automates the manual back-office operations (order entry, quoting, portal updates, shipment tracking) that still consume billions of dollars annually in a $12 trillion global logistics market.
Nicolai 'Nic' Ouporov is Co-Founder and CEO of Fleet AI, a startup building reinforcement learning training environments - or 'RL gyms' - that let AI agents practice operating real software tools like Salesforce and Excel before deployment. Fleet raised ~$45M total and grew from $1M to $60M+ annualized revenue in under a year. Nic is also a 3x YoungArts Award winner in photography and visual arts, a former pre-professional ballet dancer trained at Boston Ballet and San Francisco Ballet, and a QuestBridge Scholar from Columbia University. He previously served as Founding Engineer at Respell (acquired by Salesforce in 2024) and published AI research at Stanford's Robotics and Embodied AI Lab.
Tim Jung is the Founder and CEO of XL8.ai, a San Jose-based AI company building the world's most accurate machine translation engine for media and entertainment. A Columbia University PhD and former Google tech lead, Jung left a career launching NLP search features to solve a problem he saw up close: the media industry's broken localization pipeline. XL8 has since translated 800,000+ hours of content across 45+ languages, raised $11.5M including a $7.5M Series A led by KB Investment, and built a platform where AI doesn't replace human translators but makes them dramatically faster.
Shruti Gandhi is the General Partner and Founding Engineer of Array Ventures, a pre-seed fund backing technical founders building enterprise data, AI infrastructure, security, and developer tools. A former IBM engineer turned startup founder turned VC, she made the leap from Mumbai to Manhattan to the Bay Area armed with a Columbia CS degree and a Chicago Booth MBA. With 100+ investments, 15+ exits (to Apple, Amazon, PayPal, ServiceNow, and others), and 25,000+ Substack subscribers, she is one of a vanishingly small cohort of women of color who raised and run their own VC fund - and she teaches AI at Columbia on the side.
Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University, Director of the European Institute, and one of the most widely-read public intellectuals in economics and geopolitics. His newsletter Chartbook on Substack has over 181,000 subscribers and his books - including The Wages of Destruction, Crashed, and Shutdown - have reshaped how historians, economists, and policymakers understand financial crises, the Nazi economy, and global disorder. He popularized the term 'polycrisis' and co-hosts the Foreign Policy podcast Ones and Tooze. Known for his extraordinary output, analytical range, and willingness to publicly revise his views, Tooze is that rare figure who straddles academic history and live economic commentary with equal authority.
Nikhil Krishnan is the founder and 'Thinkboi' behind Out-of-Pocket, a healthcare newsletter and education platform that makes the bewildering business of American healthcare funny, accessible, and actually worth reading. A Brooklyn-based writer, creator, and early-stage investor, Krishnan grew up in a family of physicians and parlayed a career in healthcare research at CB Insights and clinical trial partnerships at TrialSpark into one of the most original media brands in health tech - one that includes a newsletter with 30,000+ subscribers, educational crash courses, a medical bankruptcy card game, a children's book about clinical trials, hackathons, and a scout fund backing early-stage healthcare startups.
Tanay Jaipuria is a Partner at Wing Venture Capital, a former Meta product leader turned investor and prolific tech analyst. With an MBA from Harvard Business School (Baker Scholar) and a CS degree from Columbia, he bridges operator instinct with investor judgment. He writes Tanay's Newsletter - a weekly Substack with 12,000+ subscribers covering AI economics, enterprise SaaS, and technology business models. With 72,800+ X followers, he's become a trusted voice on the cost of intelligence, AI agent economics, and what makes software businesses defensible in the age of generative AI.