Bedrock Analytics is an Oakland-based B2B SaaS company that turns the messy syndicated sales data CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands buy from sources like NielsenIQ and Circana into clear, automated selling stories. Built 'by CPG people for CPG people,' its cloud platform harmonizes retail data and uses a multi-model AI stack (ChatGPT, Claude, Llama) to generate visualizations, insights, and AI-driven sales decks - helping brand sales teams win shelf space and category reviews. The company tracks more than $100 billion in CPG sales across 80+ categories every month.
Tezza Foods makes the first dairy-free yogurt that goes spoon-for-spoon with Greek yogurt. By culturing and straining organic American-grown soymilk, the Oakland-based company turns whole soybeans into a thick, high-protein yogurt with the protein and probiotics of dairy Greek yogurt - plus fiber and omega-3s - using about 90% less land, water and emissions than dairy. Founded in 2019 by MIT-trained microbiome scientist Nathaniel Chu and Josh Moser, Tezza is a public benefit corporation built on the idea that the world's most nutritious and sustainable protein should be the one we all eat.
Alex Abelin is the co-founder and CEO of PlantBaby, the Hawaii-based company behind Kiki Milk, a whole-food, organic plant-based milk built for kids. A three-time founder who spent seven years at Google and sold his smart-city startup LQD WiFi to Verizon in 2016, he traded payphone kiosks for pumpkin seeds after he and his wife Lauren couldn't find a clean plant milk for their son. PlantBaby has raised roughly $7M and hit $4.8M in revenue in 2024, selling through its own site plus Sprouts, Wegmans, Erewhon, Amazon and Thrive Market.
Brad Berman is the co-owner and CEO of BodyBio, a family-owned cellular-health and nutritional-supplement company in Millville, New Jersey. He arrived not from a lab but from the beverage aisle, with stops at PepsiCo and FIJI Water, and married into the founding Kane family. Since taking the top job in 2019 he has rebranded the 25-plus-year-old practitioner brand, pushed it into direct-to-consumer and mainstream retail, and steered roughly 41% revenue growth that landed BodyBio on the Inc. 5000.
Daniel Medvene is the CEO and co-founder of Quantum Energy Squares, a Santa Monica plant-based energy bar company he started in 2019 with partner Leah Marquez. After years of relying on pre-workout powders and gallons of coffee that left him 'wired but tired,' Medvene set out to engineer a cleaner source of all-day energy. He and Marquez ran more than 200 recipe iterations with a sports dietitian, food scientist, and pastry chef before landing on a bar powered by organic green coffee and balanced plant-based macros. The company raised $2.5 million in seed funding in 2021 from a roster of pro athletes, became the official energy bar of the IRONMAN and Rock 'n' Roll Marathon series, and now sells nationally through Whole Foods and Sprouts.
SymphonyAI builds vertical, industry-specific AI software that runs core workflows for demanding sectors - financial services, retail and CPG, manufacturing, media, and enterprise IT. Founded in 2017 by billionaire technologist Dr. Romesh Wadhwani and led by CEO Sanjay Dhawan, the Palo Alto company stitched together a string of startups and acquisitions into a single, profitable enterprise AI company built on its Eureka generative AI platform. With a roughly $500M revenue run rate, 2,000+ customers across some 40 countries, and around 2,300-2,500 employees, SymphonyAI sells ready-to-deploy AI rather than build-it-yourself tooling - and has openly signaled plans to go public.
Alloy.ai is a San Francisco-based software company that gives consumer goods brands a real-time, end-to-end view of demand and inventory across every retail and e-commerce channel. Its platform automatically ingests and harmonizes point-of-sale, inventory, and ERP data from hundreds of trading partners, then layers analytics, forecasting, and AI agents on top so brands can sense demand shifts, catch stockouts and phantom inventory, and respond in seconds rather than days. Customers like Crayola, BIC, Valvoline, Melissa & Doug, and Anker use it to cut out-of-stocks and protect revenue with their retail partners.
i-Genie.ai is an AI-powered consumer insights platform that replaces traditional surveys and focus groups by synthesizing hundreds of billions of digital signals - Google searches, social posts, transcribed videos, ratings and reviews - into real-time, actionable intelligence on what consumers think about every product, brand and trend. Its agentic copilot Presto lets marketing, insights and innovation teams ask natural-language questions and get data-backed answers across 25+ countries and 20+ languages. Major consumer brands including Unilever, Coca-Cola, Kenvue, Bayer, Danone and Clorox use it to spot trends, benchmark brands and accelerate product R&D.
Little Sesame is a Washington, D.C.-born food company that makes freshly spun, organic hummus from regeneratively farmed American chickpeas. What began in a 500-square-foot basement beneath a deli has grown into a two-part business: a fast-casual hummus restaurant and a national consumer-packaged-goods brand sold in more than 1,000 retail doors, including Whole Foods, Sprouts and Wegmans. The company pairs chef-driven flavor with a direct, traceable supply chain that supports regenerative organic farmers and treats good agriculture as a climate tool.
Amanda Luke is the CEO of Bonafide Provisions, the family-founded California maker of organic, traditionally-prepared bone broth. A UC Berkeley and Columbia-trained marketer, she spent years building health-and-wellness brands at Safeway and Luvo before joining the small Carlsbad broth company in 2018, rising from VP of Marketing to CEO within roughly a year. Under her leadership the women-led brand pushed beyond frozen broth into keto cups, cooking broths, and shelf-stable pantry products, positioning Bonafide as one of the most recognizable clean-label bone broth names in the United States.
Planet FWD is a San Francisco climate management platform that helps consumer brands measure, reduce and neutralize their carbon footprint. Founded in 2019 by Zume co-founder Julia Collins, the company pairs an AI-powered life-cycle assessment engine and a database built on 16+ years of research with Scope 1, 2 and 3 corporate inventories aligned to the GHG Protocol and the Science Based Targets initiative. The result: brands like Patagonia Provisions, Kashi, Just Salad and Numi Organic Tea can put an auditable carbon number on the products people actually buy - and get a roadmap to shrink it, on average by about 35% per product.
Hudson Davis-Ross (also published as Hudson Gaines-Ross) is the co-founder and CEO of Plant People, the Austin-based functional wellness brand whose gummies rank as the #1 best-selling supplement at Whole Foods Market, Sprouts and Erewhon. A Brooklyn-born, Brown-educated serial entrepreneur, he previously co-founded nitro cold brew company RISE Brewing Co. and branding consultancy Crosby Advisory, was COO of wellness brand ALOHA, and launched divisions at Gilt Groupe. He started Plant People in his apartment after he and co-founder Gabe Kennedy bonded over recovery from spinal surgeries, and in November 2025 raised a roughly $7.9M Series A led by private-equity firm Manna Tree.
Joel Beal is the CEO and co-founder of Alloy.ai, a demand and inventory control tower that helps consumer goods brands like Bic, Bosch, Crayola and Ferrero turn messy retailer data into daily, SKU-store-level decisions. A would-be economics academic who walked away from a Stanford PhD because it felt too theoretical, Beal built a career in applied data science at Applied Predictive Technologies and helped scale fintech Addepar from pre-revenue to $300B in assets before founding Alloy in 2016. The idea came from his sister, who spent her weeks manually stitching together retailer spreadsheets for a luxury shoe brand.
Nick Wiseman is the co-founder and CEO of Little Sesame, a Washington, D.C. born hummus company that grew from a 500-square-foot restaurant basement into a national consumer brand sold in nearly 3,000 stores. A third-generation Washingtonian who started cooking at 15 and trained on New York's fine-dining line, Wiseman built Little Sesame with chef Ronen Tenne and cousin David Wiseman, anchoring the brand to regeneratively grown organic chickpeas from Montana. In July 2025 the company closed an $8.5M Series A to fund a new 23,000-square-foot manufacturing facility and a push to convert 10,000 acres to regenerative farming by 2027.
Foodberry is a Boston food-technology company that reverse-engineers the way nature wraps fruit. Its proprietary plant-based coatings turn purees, nut butters, dairy, and even ice cream into self-contained, mess-free, bite-sized snacks - no plastic wrapper required. Spun out of Harvard and MIT lab research and backed by 20-plus issued patents, Foodberry works as a B2B innovation and co-manufacturing partner to consumer brands, with a recent strategic partnership with Bel Group (Babybel, GoGo squeeZ) aimed at the $6B+ U.S. fruit-snack category.
Profitmind (operated by Netail, Inc.) is a Pittsburgh-based retail decision-intelligence company that builds agentic AI to help merchandising teams make faster, more profitable pricing, assortment, inventory, promotion, and marketing decisions. Founded by retail veteran Dr. Mark Chrystal and incubated inside Andrew Ng's AI Fund/Landing AI ecosystem, its platform unifies a retailer's strategy, internal data, and external competitive signals into prioritized, explainable recommendations - serving retailers from $20M to $100B in revenue across three continents.
QualSights is a Chicago-based insights technology platform that helps brands decode real-world human behavior. It blends the depth of qualitative research with the speed of quantitative methods through patented always-on Smart Sensors, a mobile video participant app, and AI-powered analysis - capturing how consumers actually use products in everyday life. Trusted by Fortune 500 brands in CPG, pharma, and technology.
Spoiler Alert is a Boston-based B2B software company that helps the world's largest consumer packaged goods makers sell off excess and short-dated inventory before it ends up in a landfill. Its platform digitizes the messy, manual liquidation process - automating listings, optimizing pricing and freight, and matching surplus product to a curated network of discount retailers and food banks. Founded by MIT Sloan classmates in 2015, the company works with brands like PepsiCo, Nestle, Kraft Heinz, Campbell's, and Danone, and says it has helped divert more than 200 million pounds of food from waste.
Aisle is a New York-based retail marketing platform that turns any marketing channel into a trackable in-store purchase. Brands run cashback and incentive campaigns that reach shoppers over text; consumers snap a photo of their receipt and get paid back via Venmo within minutes. Along the way, Aisle captures the first-party customer data and offline attribution that consumer-goods brands have historically been blind to. Over 600 brands and 450,000+ shoppers use it.
PINATA (Go Pinata Inc.) is a New York-based enterprise SaaS company building the operating system for front-line brand execution. Its platform unifies budgeting, scheduling, task execution, reporting, and payments so brands, distributors, agencies, and field teams can plan, run, and measure real-world activations in stores, warehouses, trade shows, and the field. Originally focused on experiential marketing, PINATA now serves the beverage-alcohol, CPG, and cannabis industries, replacing clipboards and spreadsheets with data-driven TaskFlows used across thousands of organizations.
SparkPlug is a San Francisco-based incentive management platform that turns frontline retail and restaurant employees into a brand's most effective sales force. By integrating directly with point-of-sale systems, it automates sales contests, goals, and commissions - often funded by the brands and vendors whose products those employees sell - and pays rewards out automatically. The company works with thousands of retail locations and hundreds of brand partners, betting that the people closest to the customer are the most underused influence in physical commerce.
Sarah Jahnke is the CEO and co-founder of Homecourt, the luxury fragrance and homecare brand she built with actress Courteney Cox. A former L'Oreal fragrance marketer turned operator, she treats dish soap and counter spray like fine perfume, and has doubled the company's revenue every year since its 2022 launch while keeping the core team famously tiny. Homecourt raised an $8M Series A led by CULT Capital and now sits in 300-plus retail doors including Nordstrom and Bluemercury.
Will Nitze is the founder and CEO of IQBAR, a brain-and-body nutrition brand he built from a Kickstarter campaign into a nine-figure CPG company selling plant-based protein bars, hydration mixes, and instant coffee in more than 10,000 retail doors. A Harvard psychology and neuroscience graduate who once sold software to oil-and-gas companies, he formulated his first products with no food-science background, scaled IQBAR past 100 million bars sold, and now hosts the founder podcast Eating Glass.
William Hicks is the co-founder and CEO of Magic Mind, the mental-performance shot that wants to retire your second cup of coffee. A Princeton cum laude grad who left Barclays after deciding investment banking was too soulless to stomach, he went on to co-found the lupini-bean snack company BRAMI before partnering with James Beshara to build Magic Mind into a brand poured into the morning routines of tens of thousands of people. He preaches '90-day trailing average emotions' as the only sane way to survive the violence of startup life.
Arnaud Plas is the co-founder and CEO of Prose, the New York based beauty-tech company that makes custom haircare and skincare to order, one formula per person. A former L'Oreal digital and e-commerce executive, he left big CPG in 2017 to attack the one-size-fits-all model with AI-driven consultations and a software-run, make-after-you-buy factory. Under his watch Prose reached profitability in 2023, sold more than 10 million bespoke products, and pushed net sales past $140 million on its way to an estimated $160 million in 2024.
Sienna McCormick is the co-founder and co-CEO of Create Wellness, the New York company that turned creatine - long stuck in the bodybuilder aisle - into a daily gummy. After six years at Goldman Sachs, she and her husband Dan bootstrapped the brand from their apartment in 2022, shipped the first creatine monohydrate gummy after more than twenty manufacturers said it could not be done, and have since sold north of 250 million of them. In March 2026 the company raised a $20 million Series B led by Alliance Consumer Growth, with the stated ambition of getting 100 million Americans onto daily creatine by 2030.
Tiffin is the founder and CEO of Aisle, a New York retail growth platform that turns real-world shopping into measurable in-store sales: a customer photographs a receipt, texts it in, and gets Venmo'd within minutes. He built the whole thing through text because, in his words, no one has room on their iPhone for another app. Before Aisle he talked his way into an internship at Super Coffee in 2017, dropped out of school, slept on the founders' couch, and helped scale the brand from $700K to $5M in a year - then realized brands had no idea who was buying them off the shelf. Aisle, now trusted by hundreds of CPG brands, is his answer to that blind spot.
Jennifer Burke is an Area Vice President for Digital Experience in the Media & Entertainment vertical at Adobe, where she leads enterprise sales and customer engagement for one of the company's most competitive industry segments. Based in Gainesville, Georgia, she brings over three decades of high-stakes commercial experience spanning retail, CPG, and enterprise technology - from rising through Catalina USA's brand development ranks to closing strategic accounts at Microsoft before joining Adobe's go-to-market machine. She is currently at the sharp edge of Adobe's push into agentic AI, championing AI-driven customer experience products to some of the largest media and entertainment companies in the world.
Deren Baker is the CEO of Flywheel Ventures, the innovation arm of Flywheel Commerce Network - now part of Omnicom Group after a landmark $835 million acquisition in 2023. A serial operator with deep roots in digital commerce analytics, Baker has led transformative companies including Jumpshot (which tracked 160 billion monthly clicks) and Edge by Ascential. He is a recognized thought leader in ecommerce strategy, retail media, and data-driven advertising, with bylines in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Entrepreneur Magazine.
CommerceIQ is a Mountain View-based AI platform that helps the world's largest consumer brands - Nestle, Colgate, Whirlpool, Kellogg's, Bayer - grow profitably on Amazon, Walmart, Target, Instacart and 450+ other retailers by automating retail media, digital shelf, supply chain and sales operations with AI agents.