Rick Luebbe is the CEO and co-founder of Group14 Technologies, the Woodinville, Washington company behind SCC55, a silicon-carbon battery material that boosts energy density up to 50% and enables extreme fast charging. A former Army aviation officer who flew scout helicopters in Desert Storm and later commanded an Apache attack company, he traded the cockpit for a Stanford MBA and three startups. After building B2B integrator Hubspan and selling battery-materials pioneer EnerG2 to BASF in 2016, he spun out Group14 in 2015 with co-founder Rick Costantino. The company has raised more than $1 billion, including a $463M Series D, and is building the world's largest factory for advanced silicon battery materials. His mission, stated plainly: electrify everything.
Shauna Drumright runs Savage X Fenty, the inclusive lingerie brand Rihanna built. A subscription-commerce operator who cut her teeth at Procter & Gamble before spending years scaling TechStyle's JustFab and FabKids, she stepped into the CEO seat to turn a celebrity launch into a durable, data-driven retail machine. Her brief: keep the body-positive swagger that made the brand famous while making the math work across membership, stores, and a sprawling product range.
Severence MacLaughlin is the founder and CEO of DeLorean Artificial Intelligence, a Palm Beach-based company building predictive AI products for healthcare and sales. A Cornell-trained scientist with a PhD from the University of Adelaide, he ran AI and data science practices at Cognizant and Capgemini Invent before bootstrapping DeLorean AI with his own savings. The company says its Medical AI was the first to be biologically validated by two independent laboratories, trained on tens of millions of patient records and backed by seven patents. He advises the United Nations and World Health Organization on AI.
Steve Hoover is the CEO of Impossible Objects, the Northbrook, Illinois company commercializing CBAM (composite-based additive manufacturing), a from-the-ground-up 3D printing process that bonds carbon fiber and other composites into parts that are stronger, lighter and more heat-tolerant than conventional prints. A mechanical engineer with a Carnegie Mellon doctorate, he spent roughly two decades at Xerox, rising to corporate CTO and running PARC as CEO, before a stint leading RIT's Global Cybersecurity Institute and co-founding the art-recognition startup Artify.ai. He took the Impossible Objects helm in March 2023 to push composite 3D printing from prototypes into high-volume manufacturing.
Tom Smart is a biotech executive with a 25-year run of taking cancer companies from the lab bench to Wall Street and back again. He currently leads Actym Therapeutics, a cancer-immunotherapy company building bacteria-delivered gene therapies, after a career that ran through AnaptysBio, XOMA, Cell Genesys and Genetics Institute. He helped shepherd the PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor that became GSK's Jemperli, founded and sold an antifungal company, and is named in industry records as a CEO and board member at oncolytic-virus company Seneca Therapeutics. His specialty is the unglamorous middle: financings, partnerships, IPOs and acquisitions that decide whether a promising molecule ever reaches a patient.
Troy LeCaire is the co-founder and CEO of GovWell, a New York startup building an AI operating system for local government - the permits, licenses, and inspections that quietly run a town. Before writing a line of code, he and CTO Ben Cohen cold-called hundreds of municipalities and lined up five paying customers. By 2026 GovWell served 130+ municipalities across 34 states and raised a $25M Series A led by Insight Partners, with zero churn on live customers and processing times cut by up to 95%.
Vatsa Narasimha is the CEO of ComplyAdvantage, the London-based regtech building AI-native tools to detect and disrupt financial crime. A ceramics engineer turned consultant turned operator, he ran foreign-exchange platform OANDA before joining ComplyAdvantage as COO/CFO in 2018, then taking the top job in 2022. He has pushed the company past $100M in funding, 3,000+ enterprise customers, and a billion-plus searches a year, while reframing compliance as an asymmetric fight that only AI-native systems can win.
Yang Zhao is the Chief Business Officer of Handshake AI, where he runs business and operations for a fast-scaling human-data business serving frontier AI labs. He spent four years at Scale AI as Head of Product Deployment and Operations before joining Handshake, and earlier led growth and strategy at the consumer-rentals company Zumper. He pitches Handshake's edge not as tooling but as raw access to the largest expert network in the US.
Yongjoon Choe is the founder and CEO of lululab, the Seoul-based AI skincare company that spun out of Samsung's C-Lab in 2017. He turned a genome-sequencing detour at Harvard into Lumini, a system that reads ten-plus skin conditions from a single face photo in about ten seconds and recommends products to match. Under Choe, lululab has won CES Innovation Awards four years running and built its diagnostics on a deep-learning model trained on millions of skin-data points.
Andrea Ippolito is the founder and CEO of SimpliFed, an Ithaca, New York company building a maternal health operating system that delivers virtual breastfeeding, infant nutrition and OB support to families in all 50 states at no cost through health plans. A biomedical engineer by training, she co-directed MIT Hacking Medicine, co-founded Smart Scheduling (acquired by athenahealth in 2016), served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow in the White House, and ran the VA's Innovators Network before turning her own postpartum struggle into a company that now partners with 300-plus health systems and raised an oversubscribed $10.8M Series A in 2026.
Noah Sturcken is the founder and CEO of Ferric, a New York semiconductor company building the world's smallest, most efficient power converters. A Columbia PhD who turned his dissertation into a company, he pioneered integrated voltage regulators (IVRs) that bury thin-film magnetic inductors inside the chip itself, shrinking power delivery by more than 10x. As AI processors grow ever hungrier for clean, dense power, Ferric's tech sits exactly where the bottleneck is - and partners like Marvell are now building it into custom AI silicon.
Perry Patel is President and CEO of Radiate Hospitality (formerly BPR Properties), the Palo Alto-based hotel management and development company his father founded with a single motel in 1973. Under Perry's leadership, the firm now operates a portfolio of branded and lifestyle hotels across the West Coast - from the Crowne Plaza Cabana in Palo Alto to the Hi-Lo Autograph Collection in Portland - with 500+ employees and a reputation for restoring historic properties.
Harman Singh Narula is the Co-Founder and CEO of Canary Technologies, the hospitality industry's leading AI-powered guest management platform trusted by 20,000+ hotels across 100+ countries. A Cornell Hotel School and Wharton MBA graduate, Narula co-founded Canary in 2017 alongside childhood friend SJ Sawhney, tackling the hotel industry's notoriously outdated technology infrastructure one paper form at a time. What started as a solution to clunky credit card authorization forms has grown into a $600 million company backed by Y Combinator, Insight Partners, and Brighton Park Capital, with $175 million raised in total funding including an $80 million Series D in June 2025.
Andrew Verhalen is a General Partner at Matrix Partners who has been investing in infrastructure and communications companies since 1992. A former Intel product manager for the 8086 microprocessor and a divisional VP at 3Com, he brought operator scars to venture before that was a phrase. He helped seed Grand Junction Networks (later a major division at Cisco), led Matrix into Unwired Planet, SiTera, and Alteon WebSystems, and serves as lead independent director at semiconductor company Ambarella.
Arsham Memarzadeh is a General Partner at Meritech Capital in Palo Alto, where he leads enterprise software and infrastructure growth investments. He arrived in early 2025 after six years at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where he helped lead the growth practice and backed Wiz, Chainguard, Verkada, ClickUp, Axonius, Personio, Enable, Payhawk, and Spiff.
Beckie Robertson is co-founder and general partner at Versant Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm focused on biotechnology and drug discovery. A chemical engineer by training, she has spent decades backing early-stage medical device and diagnostics companies, with prior operating roles at Chiron Diagnostics, Lifescan, and Egis. She currently serves as vice chair of the Cornell Board of Trustees and was awarded the Cornell Duffield Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award in April 2026.
Carolina Huaranca Mendoza is co-founder and General Partner of First Close Partners, a fund-of-funds backing venture firms led by underrepresented managers. She got her start in M&A banking, built Girls Who Code's Clubs program from zero, became a Principal at Kapor Capital where she designed the firm's first LP strategy for diverse emerging managers, and now writes checks into 100+ funds worldwide.
John Kremer is the CEO of Rizzle, a San Francisco-based AI video platform that turns written content into broadcast-quality video for publishers and media companies. A 30-year Silicon Valley veteran, Kremer brings operational depth from senior leadership roles at Yahoo!, Adobe, and JP Morgan Chase - having helped Adobe's Digital Media business scale from under $3B to over $12B in revenue. At Rizzle, he leads a platform reaching over 1 billion viewers across MSN, Yahoo, NewsBreak, and social media, cutting video production time by up to 98% and costs by 80% for media clients.
John Balen is a General Partner at Canaan Partners, one of the oldest venture capital firms in the US, where he has been investing since 1995. With a background in electrical engineering and an MBA from Cornell University, he brings both operational and financial depth to early-stage investing across consumer internet, fintech, enterprise software, medtech, and digital health. His portfolio includes companies that have gone public (Cardlytics, Commerce One, eStamp) and been acquired by major players including Akamai, Dell, Expedia, and Oracle. He resides in Hillsborough, California, and is an active Cornell trustee and mentor.
Noel Fenton is a Founding General Partner of Trinity Ventures, the Menlo Park-based venture capital firm he co-founded in 1986. Before entering venture capital, he built two companies from scratch as CEO — Acurex (scaling revenues to $65M over a decade) and Covalent Systems (profitable at $12M in three years) — and that operating DNA defines everything about how he invests. With a BS in Chemistry from Cornell and an MBA from Stanford, Fenton has spent four decades backing enterprise software and B2B companies, with notable wins including LoopNet (IPO), ServiceMax (acquired by GE), SciQuest (IPO), and DotLoop (acquired by Zillow). Despite repeated attempts at retirement, he is still at his desk by 7:30 AM.
Ran Ding is a General Partner and Co-Head of the Growth Equity team at Norwest Venture Partners, one of the most active multi-stage venture and growth equity firms in the world. The son of Chinese immigrants who came to America when he was three years old, Ran joined Norwest in 2011 as the third member of its growth equity team and was elevated to General Partner in February 2024. He focuses on B2B software and tech-enabled services companies across AI, data, SaaS, fintech, and marketplaces, partnering with founder-led businesses scaling from double-digit to triple-digit revenues. A two-time GrowthCap Top 40 Under 40 Growth Investor honoree, he has overseen 10+ successful exits and holds board seats at 8+ portfolio companies. Beyond finance, he spent his twenties producing music that accumulated roughly two million YouTube views and once hit a game-winning shot at Madison Square Garden.
João Diogo 'JD' Falcão is the CEO and co-founder of AiFi Inc., the San Francisco-based company building the world's largest autonomous retail network. A PhD from Carnegie Mellon and Master's from Cornell in Robotics, JD spent years shaping AiFi's core technology as CTO before stepping up as Chief Executive in September 2025. Under his and the team's leadership, AiFi has deployed 300+ camera-only autonomous stores globally, processes over 90 petabytes of spatial data annually, and counts Microsoft, ALDI, and 7-Eleven among its partners. His central thesis: the physical world deserves to be as queryable as the internet.
Dr. Molly Morse is the CEO and co-founder of Mango Materials, a Vacaville, California-based startup that turns waste methane into biodegradable PHA biopolymers. Founding the company in 2010 on the back of her Stanford PhD research, Morse has spent over a decade building a circular bioeconomy solution that converts a potent greenhouse gas into a commercially viable plastic replacement — branded as YOPP pellets. She has won the Postcode Lottery Green Challenge (2012), the C3E Entrepreneurship Award (2018), and was selected as an Unreasonable Fellow in 2022.
Scott Clark is the Co-founder and CEO of Distributional, an enterprise AI testing platform that helps companies identify behavioral drift and unknown failures in AI systems. A triple-degree graduate of Oregon State University with a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell, he co-founded and sold SigOpt (a Bayesian optimization platform backed by Y Combinator and a16z) to Intel in 2020, then led 200 engineers as VP & GM of AI/HPC Supercomputing at Intel before founding Distributional in September 2023. The company raised $30M in under a year, including a $19M Series A led by Two Sigma Ventures in October 2024.
Aaron Nathan is the CEO and co-founder of Point One Navigation, a San Francisco-based precision location company building the infrastructure layer for Physical AI. A Cornell-trained engineer who helped lead the university's DARPA Urban Challenge team, he went on to serve as Chief Architect at Coherent Navigation (acquired by Apple) before co-founding adeptCloud (acquired by Hightail). At Point One, he is turning centimeter-level GPS accuracy from a specialist tool into a universal platform — raising a $35M oversubscribed Series C from Khosla Ventures in 2025 to accelerate a mission: making precise location as ubiquitous as GPS itself.
Arjun Prakash is the Co-Founder and CEO of Distyl AI, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company valued at $1.8 billion after raising $175M in a September 2025 Series B led by Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures. Drawing on nearly a decade at Palantir Technologies where he built and led a 30+ person team of Forward Deployed strategists and engineers, Prakash co-founded Distyl to help Fortune 500 companies become genuinely AI-native - not by layering AI onto existing processes, but by rearchitecting how enterprises operate. Distyl claims a 100% production success rate against an industry norm of 95% failure, serves clients across healthcare, manufacturing, telecom, and financial services, and reached profitability in Q3 2024.
Ashesh Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Coram AI, a Sunnyvale-based startup turning ordinary IP security cameras into AI-powered intelligence endpoints. A Cornell PhD and IIT Delhi alumnus, Jain spent years at the frontier of autonomous vehicles - building perception systems at Zoox and leading Lyft's self-driving program as Head of Autonomy - before pivoting that expertise into reimagining physical security. His research work includes Brain4Cars (a car that predicts driver errors before they happen) and the award-winning Structural-RNN paper (CVPR 2016 Best Student Paper), which has over 1,600 citations. Coram AI raised a $13.8M Series A in January 2025 led by Battery Ventures, and its platform now monitors thousands of cameras across schools, hospitals, warehouses, and manufacturing sites across the U.S.
Felix Ejeckam is the Co-Founder and CEO of Akash Systems, a San Francisco-based deep-tech company that invented GaN-on-Diamond semiconductor technology - a breakthrough that enables dramatically better thermal management for both satellite communications and AI data center servers. A serial entrepreneur with two prior exits, Ejeckam holds 80+ patents and 100+ scientific publications, was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and led Akash to a $68.2M CHIPS Act preliminary agreement and the world's first diamond-cooled NVIDIA GPU server deployment.
Gabe Gotthard is the CEO of DataWalk Inc., a graph analytics and AI-powered investigation platform used by top U.S. and European banks, national security agencies, and defense organizations to detect fraud, money laundering, and organized crime. With over 33 years in enterprise IT - including a stint at 3ParData (acquired by HP for $2.5B) where he coined 'utility storage' - Gotthard now leads a Wrocław-born, Silicon Valley-validated company that has displaced Palantir at the U.S. Department of Justice and earned Ally Financial's 2023 Technology Disruptor Award. Based in Redwood City, California, he is building DataWalk into a leading global alternative to Palantir for government and financial-sector intelligence work.
Jayant Kulkarni is the CEO and co-founder of Quartzy, the world's leading lab management platform serving over 400,000 researchers across 25,000+ organizations. A PhD-trained control systems engineer from Cornell University and alumnus of IIT Madras, Kulkarni co-founded Quartzy in 2011 after completing a Swartz Fellowship at Columbia University's Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. The company - named after the highest-scoring word in Scrabble - went through Y Combinator's Summer 2011 batch and has grown into a vertically integrated procurement and inventory platform for life sciences, raising $23 million in April 2026 from Avenue Capital Group and BroadOak Capital Partners.