Tagged: community
30 results
Bandit Running
Bandit Running is a Brooklyn-born, community-first performance running brand founded in 2020 by Tim and Nick West with designer Ardith Singh. Starting with a single pair of cushioned running socks packed by hand, Bandit grew through New York run clubs into a full head-to-toe running apparel line - shorts, tights, singlets, sports bras, socks and lifestyle wear - sold direct-to-consumer. The brand is known for co-designing product with its running community, high social engagement, and The Unsponsored Project, which backs professional runners without shoe deals. Bandit raised a $14.25M Series A in 2023.
Brixton
Brixton is a California-based lifestyle apparel and headwear brand founded in a Oceanside garage in 2004. Named after The Clash song 'The Guns of Brixton,' it started with a single vintage-inspired newsboy cap and grew into a full line of hats, clothing and accessories inspired by heritage workwear - from mariners and aviators to cowboys and laborers. Distributed in more than 30 countries and backed by Altamont Capital Partners, Brixton blends classic silhouettes with modern function and a growing commitment to sustainable materials.
Gazelle Sports
Gazelle Sports is a Michigan-based specialty running and active-lifestyle retailer founded in Kalamazoo in 1985. With seven stores across West and Southeast Michigan plus an online shop, it sells running shoes, soccer gear, apparel and accessories, and pairs product with expert fittings, training programs and community events. In 2024 it became 100% woman-owned and operated, led by CEO Jennifer Brummitt and CMO Cara Cross, and its mission is simply to inspire others to move.
SNIPES
SNIPES is a global sneaker and streetwear retailer founded in Germany in 1998 and owned by the Deichmann Group. It sells footwear, apparel and accessories from brands like Nike, Jordan, adidas and New Balance across roughly 750 stores in the US and Europe plus its e-commerce sites, and positions itself as a culture-first brand tied to hip-hop, sport, music and youth communities.
COLABS
COLABS is a flexible workspace and community platform that provides fully serviced offices, coworking space, and back-office support for startups, scaling companies, and enterprise teams. Founded in Pakistan in 2019 by twin brothers Omar and Ali Shah, it operates more than 500,000 square feet across 10+ locations serving over 5,000 members, and in April 2026 opened a 4,000-square-meter flagship campus in the Al-Narjis district of northern Riyadh to anchor its expansion into Saudi Arabia.
Avenidas
Avenidas is a Palo Alto-based nonprofit that has helped older adults on the mid-Peninsula stay active, connected and independent since 1969. From its flagship enrichment center at 450 Bryant Street, plus the Rose Kleiner adult day health center in Mountain View, it runs fitness, arts and lifelong-learning classes, door-to-door transportation, caregiver support, the Avenidas Village aging-in-place membership, a Chinese Community Center and an LGBTQ Rainbow Collective - serving thousands of seniors and their families each year.
Or Bokobza
Or Bokobza is co-founder and CEO of Venn, a New York-headquartered proptech company that builds a resident-experience operating system for multifamily property owners. He founded Venn in 2017 with fellow Israeli special-forces veterans Chen Avni and David Sherez after a hands-on urban revitalization experiment in Tel Aviv's Shapira neighborhood. Venn now operates across dozens of cities in the US and Europe and, as of late 2025, has raised roughly $140M in venture funding.
Aeronaut Brewing Company
Aeronaut Brewing Company is a Somerville, Massachusetts craft brewery founded in 2014 by three grad-school roommates who brought MIT and Cornell science backgrounds to beer. Known for propagating its own house-cultured yeast and experimental recipes, Aeronaut pairs adventurous ales and lagers with a Somerville taproom that doubles as a food hall, live-music venue and community hub. In 2024 it merged with Dorchester Brewing Company under a new parent, Tasty Liquid Alliance.
Flow Club
Flow Club is a virtual coworking community that runs live, hosted focus sessions where people work side-by-side on video to get into flow and beat procrastination. Built around 'body doubling' - the idea that the quiet presence of others working keeps you on task - each 50-minute sprint opens with quick goal-setting, runs on focused silence with music, and closes with a recap. Founded in 2020 by Ricky Yean and David Tran, the Y Combinator (S21) startup has become a popular tool for remote, independent, and neurodivergent workers, often described by its founders as 'Peloton for coworking.'
Ola Guild Games
Ola Guild Games (OLA GG) is the largest Web3 gaming community in the Spanish-speaking world, operating as a regional subDAO of Yield Guild Games. Founded by lifelong Hispanic gamers, it onboards players across Latin America and Spain into blockchain games through NFT scholarships, Web3 education, and a shared-rewards model that lets people play and earn without upfront cost. In 2022 it raised $8 million in seed funding from investors including Galaxy Interactive, BITKRAFT, and Arca.
Krishna Dosapati
Krishna Dosapati is the founder and CEO of Clockout, a New York-based networking app for Gen Z+ professionals that has crossed hundreds of thousands of downloads, hit a Top 20 App Store ranking, and reached seven-figure ARR within its first ten months. Backed by Evite, Gaingels, and Baytech Ventures, Clockout pitches itself as the antidote to LinkedIn noise: AI-powered matchmaking, real-world events, and community over content.
Forge
Forge is a San Francisco gaming platform that gives game developers no-code tools to playtest, market, and sell their titles - turning static Steam landing pages into interactive hubs powered by quests, loyalty rewards, and verified-gamer audiences. Spun out of GGWP in late 2023 with $11M in seed funding, Forge has crossed one million users and partnered with 75+ studios.
Women In Product
Women In Product is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and global community of more than 30,000 women and non-binary product professionals. Founded in 2016 out of a casual networking event in Silicon Valley, it equips members to thrive as builders, leaders, and changemakers through an annual conference, local chapters, leadership programs, peer mentorship, and online resources - with a particular focus on closing the gender gap at the mid-career, senior, and executive levels where it is widest.
Justine Davis
Justine Davis is the VP of Developer Marketing, Community, and Developer Relations at ServiceNow, where she oversees a developer community of more than one million members and shapes the narrative of ServiceNow as a global developer platform. With roots in digital marketing and a career arc that ran through Hotwire, Atlassian (over nine years), and Postman, she has built a reputation for translating complex technical products into language that resonates with developers and enterprise buyers alike. Based in Scottsdale, Arizona, she is known for her candid takes on developer marketing, her emphasis on showing rather than telling, and her belief that DevRel and Developer Marketing are two sides of the same coin.
Jim Hori
Jim Hori is President and CEO of the YMCA of Silicon Valley, one of the largest YMCA associations in the United States. He took the helm in June 2022 after 22 years at Silicon Valley Bank, where he served as Managing Director and led the SVB Foundation for 19 years. A Fresno native and Fresno State graduate, Hori spent more than a decade on the YMCA board before being asked to run the place.
John T. Ehrbar
John T. Ehrbar is a career YMCA leader who, starting January 26, 2026, takes the helm as President and CEO of the YMCA of Silicon Valley after six years running YMCA Buffalo Niagara. He has spent over two decades inside the Y movement, climbing from a high school Leaders Club kid in northeast Ohio to running an 80-million-dollar nonprofit serving 2,300 staff across the Bay Area.
Arena
Arena is a San Francisco-based audience engagement platform that turns publishers' and brands' own websites into social-network-like communities. Through live blogs, group chats, comments, AI-powered content feeds and audience analytics, Arena helps over 20,000 organizations - including Fox Sports - keep readers on-site, collect first-party data and monetize attention they used to give away to social platforms.
Inkitt
Inkitt is a San Francisco-based AI-powered publishing and entertainment company that uses reader data and machine learning to identify breakout stories before they become hits. Writers upload fiction to Inkitt's community platform; the platform's algorithm tracks reader engagement to surface manuscripts with bestseller potential. Top stories move to Galatea, a premium immersive reading app offering ebooks, audiobooks, and chat-style fiction, and then to CandyJar, a short-drama streaming app. The result: a story-to-screen pipeline with 33 million users, a new million-dollar novel produced every four weeks, and 40x the hit-rate of traditional publishers.
Kindred
Kindred is a members-only home-swapping network that turns primary residences into a credit-based travel platform. Founded in 2021 by Opendoor alums Justine Palefsky and Tasneem Amina, the San Francisco company has grown to nearly 300,000 members across 150+ cities and raised $125M in combined Series B/C in February 2026 to scale a 'third way' alternative to hotels and short-term rentals.
Make:
Make: is the media and events company that gave the maker movement its name. Founded in 2005 by Dale Dougherty inside O'Reilly Media, it publishes Make: magazine, runs Maker Faire events around the world, and sells kits and books through the Maker Shed. After a 2019 shutdown, Dougherty restructured the business as Make: Community LLC and kept it going.
Graham Gaylor
Graham Gaylor is the co-founder and CEO of VRChat Inc., the social virtual reality platform he built from a single Reddit-recruited room in 2014 into a $500M company with millions of custom avatars and hundreds of thousands of user-created worlds. A Vanderbilt-trained mathematician and software engineer who backed the original Oculus Kickstarter, Gaylor has spent over a decade building the infrastructure for human connection in virtual space - a platform where avatars meet, worlds multiply, and the line between game and community blurs entirely.
Marty Sarim
Marty Massih Sarim is the President of Sanas, a real-time speech AI platform that modulates accents and eliminates background noise for contact center agents globally. An Afghan refugee who came to the US in the early 1980s and started his career at 18 as a call center agent, Sarim brings over 25 years of BPO and contact center industry expertise to Sanas. He is also Co-Founder and General Partner at Carya Venture Partners, a $20M micro-fund focused on deep tech and enterprise AI, and founder of the Moe123 Scholarship Fund, which has awarded $125,000+ to high school seniors in the Minneapolis area.
Sherman Ye
Sherman Ye is the Founder and CEO of NebulaGraph (vesoft Inc.), the company behind one of the world's most scalable open-source distributed graph databases. After engineering stints at Facebook and Ant Financial — where he worked directly on graph database infrastructure — Ye founded vesoft in 2018 to bring enterprise-grade graph database technology to a market hungry for connected-data insights. NebulaGraph can handle trillions of edges with millisecond latency, and counts Tencent, Meituan, and JD Digits among its users. Ye led the company through a $8M pre-A round in 2020 and a Series A in 2022 led by Jeneration Capital, while pioneering the GraphRAG concept that merges knowledge graphs with large language models.
Tasneem Amina
Tasneem Amina is the Co-Founder and President of Kindred, a members-only home-swapping platform that lets people exchange homes without exchanging money. Born in South India and immigrated to the US at 14, she studied Biology at the University of Chicago before pivoting into finance and tech. After stints at Goldman Sachs, Yik Yak, and Stitch Fix, she became a product leader at Opendoor - where she grew a business line from $0 to ~$300M in annual volume. She co-founded Kindred in 2021 with fellow Opendoor alum Justine Palefsky after a week locked in a cabin whiteboarding ideas. Kindred has since grown to 300,000+ members and 300,000+ homes across 150+ cities, raising $148M total with a $125M round in February 2026 led by Index Ventures.
Manara
Manara is a Silicon Valley-backed edtech company training and placing software engineers, AI and cloud talent across the Middle East and North Africa. Through cohort-based learning, mentorship from senior engineers at companies like Google and Meta, and partnerships with AWS, Manara has trained over 300,000 learners and helped hundreds land jobs at global tech firms.
ZeeMee
ZeeMee is a higher education technology platform that bridges the gap between college-bound students and institutions through authentic community and behavioral intelligence. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, ZeeMee gives students a social space to showcase their personalities beyond transcripts while giving colleges AI-powered insights that predict enrollment intent with up to 98% accuracy. With 2.6M+ active student users, 300+ institutional partners, and a 4.7-star app rating, ZeeMee has quietly become one of the most influential platforms in college enrollment - helping students find roommates, discover campus culture, and connect with admissions teams before ever setting foot on campus.
Teppei Tsutsui
Teppei Tsutsui is General Partner and co-founder of GFR Fund, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on gaming, generative AI, creator economy, and consumer tech. Tokyo-raised and University of Chicago-educated, he co-founded GFR Fund in 2016 after a decade spanning Mitsubishi Corporation, Morgan Stanley M&A, and GREE - where he moved to San Francisco in 2014 to launch their seed investment program. GFR Fund III closed at $53.5M in 2023, and the firm's portfolio of over 100 companies includes three unicorns - VRChat, Animoca Brands, and Sky Mavis - with GFR's earliest and most famous bet being VRChat, invested when the platform had just 1,000 active users.
Katy Keim
Katy Keim is the Chief Executive Officer of LeanData, the leading revenue orchestration platform trusted by over 1,000 B2B companies. A marketing and go-to-market veteran with 20+ years across enterprise SaaS, she previously served as CMO of Lithium Technologies and CEO of LQ Digital before joining LeanData's board in 2021 and stepping into the CEO role in July 2025. Katy holds degrees from the University of Virginia (History) and Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management (MBA, Marketing & Entrepreneurship), and has been recognized as an Inspirational Woman in Tech by We Are Tech Women.
Vanessa Didyk
Vanessa Roth Didyk is the CEO of ZeeMee, a social platform serving 2.6 million college-bound students across 3,000+ institutions. A serial edtech entrepreneur with 16+ years in the field, she founded Scholar's Station at UC Berkeley, sold it, built a tutoring marketplace at Rev.com, ran MathElf, then took over a struggling ZeeMee in 2018 and turned it into a top-10 App Store social networking app used by roughly 1 in 3 US college freshmen annually.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a French neuroscientist, author, and entrepreneur who burned out at Google, taught herself to code, and built Ness Labs into a 100,000+ reader science-based learning community - all while completing a PhD at King's College London. Her 2025 book 'Tiny Experiments' (Penguin Random House) distills her philosophy: life is a series of experiments and you are the lead scientist. She is now a UKRI-funded postdoctoral researcher studying curiosity and ADHD at KCL, while publishing to 124,000+ Substack subscribers at Hypercurious.