contactless-payments
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Mark Kozlowski
Mark Kozlowski is the founder and CEO of Upped Events, a Philadelphia event-experience platform he built to drag festivals, fairs and community events out of the spreadsheet era. A Penn State and Wharton-trained operator, he started by trying to pour a beer in under ten seconds (BeerMe), then turned that obsession with friction into a full registration, contactless-payment and analytics stack. In May 2025 Upped was acquired by Events.com.
Touradj Barman
Touradj Barman is the co-founder and CEO of Up 'n go, the San Diego company that lets restaurant guests scan a QR code, pull up their check, and pay without downloading an app. An MIT graduate with a Yale MBA and more than 20 issued patents - some acquired by Microsoft and now underpinning push and group messaging - Barman started Up 'n go to solve a small annoyance, splitting the check at a single San Diego restaurant. The platform has since processed more than $1.1 billion across over 16 million checks for 11 million-plus guests nationwide.
Eric Allen
Eric Allen is the CEO and President of LISNR, the Cincinnati-based company turning ordinary sound into a secure data channel. A self-described product guy with 30-plus years in software, he previously ran a $250M audio-fingerprinting business unit at Gracenote and helped win two Emmy Awards for interactive television. Since taking the helm in 2018, he has steered LISNR's pivot into contactless payments and proximity verification, attracting investment from Visa and pushing data-over-audio as a software alternative to NFC, Bluetooth, and QR codes.
Kathleen Schnering
Kathleen Schnering is the Chief Executive Officer of Clover Network, one of the largest cloud-based point-of-sale platforms in the United States. Under the Fiserv umbrella, Clover serves more than 800,000 merchants across retail, restaurant, and services verticals, processing hundreds of billions in payments annually. Schnering leads a platform generating over $2.7 billion in annual revenue with a workforce of approximately 1,500 employees, steering Clover's expansion into international markets and value-added services as it targets $4.5 billion in revenue by 2026.