conversational-commerce
(3)
Melissa Bridgeford
Melissa Bridgeford is CEO and cofounder of Wizard, an AI-native shopping agent she runs with Marc Lore that emerged from stealth in February 2026 after nearly five years of private development. Wizard aims to replace endless e-commerce scrolling with a chat interface that searches the web, ranks products with zero paid placements, and checks out on your behalf. Before Wizard, Bridgeford founded Stylust in Austin, a text-based conversational shopping company that was folded into Wizard as its technical and human foundation. Earlier she spent almost a decade in finance at Guggenheim Partners and at Cain Hoy Enterprises.
Stefanos Loukakos
Stefanos Loukakos is the Co-founder and CEO of Connectly.ai, a San Francisco-based AI conversational commerce platform that raised a $20M Series B led by Alibaba in September 2024, bringing total funding to $37.2M at ~$100M valuation. A native of Greece, he previously served as Head of Facebook Messenger Business and Director of Blockchain at Meta, and as Country Director of Google Greece. He built Connectly to let retailers sell through WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS, and web chat - turning customer messages into revenue.
Vincent Yang
Vincent Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Firework, the world's largest AI-powered video commerce platform. A serial entrepreneur with a Stanford MBA, he previously co-founded EverString (acquired by ZoomInfo) and built a career spanning investment banking at J.P. Morgan and venture investing at Summit Partners. At Firework, Yang raised $270M+ in funding - including a $150M SoftBank Vision Fund 2-led Series B - and built a platform used by 1,500+ global brands to embed shoppable live and short-form video directly on their owned digital properties. Named to Ad Age's Tech Power List 2024, he is now betting on agentic AI as the next frontier of commerce.