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Akash Raju
He made Forbes 30 Under 30 for a company he then threw away. The second version of Glimpse - AI that fights retail's most boring, most expensive fee - just raised $35 million.
Larry Nusbaum
Larry Nusbaum is a consumer-products and retail turnaround executive who serves as President and Chief Marketing Officer of Work 'N Gear, the Mid-Atlantic and New England workwear, footwear and healthcare-apparel chain, and as an operating partner at Dark Alpha Capital. Over two decades he has run companies as CEO, CMO and COO across housewares, electronics, personal care, apparel and fitness, most visibly at Ronco, the Ron Popeil gadget brand he bought out of bankruptcy with Marlin Equity Partners in 2007 and steered from a reported $7.5 million annual loss to roughly $4 million in profit on about $30 million of 2009 sales. He has also led Midwest Trading Group, where he acquired the phone-accessory brand TYLT in December 2023, and restructured the artisan-goods company GlobeIn into a subscription model. At Work 'N Gear he took a 25-year-old, roughly $40 million retailer through a 2025 Chapter 11 filing, a DIP financing, a shrink from 38 stores to 26, and a April 2026 asset sale to a family-office-backed operator that repaid the lender in full and set up a relaunch of the e-commerce platform and up to ten stores.
Dana Kim
Dana Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Highlight, a New York-based product intelligence platform that modernizes in-home product testing for consumer brands. A former qualitative market researcher who spent years collecting insights the slow way - standing in stores with paper surveys for brands like Coca-Cola and Nike - she went to Wharton for an MBA, met co-founder Ethan Kellough, and built a technology-driven alternative that pairs a proprietary consumer community with logistics automation and AI analytics. Founded in 2020, Highlight has raised more than $30 million and works with brands including Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Mondelez. Kim has been named to GreenBook's 2022 Future List and Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders 250 list.
Gina Perrelli
Gina Perrelli is the co-founder and CEO of Stay AI, a subscription and retention platform for Shopify brands that treats subscriptions as a performance channel rather than a payment mechanism. A self-described 'retention girlie' with over a decade in lifecycle marketing, she previously co-founded the ecommerce agency Lunar Solar Group and now leads a company that helps hundreds of DTC brands - including Olipop, Vita Coco, and Momofuku - reduce churn and grow subscriber revenue. Stay AI raised $15.1M in Series A funding and has expanded through acquisitions of RetentionEngine and Bellwethr.
Marlow Nickell
Marlow Nickell is co-founder and CEO of Grocery TV, the largest in-store retail media network for U.S. grocery. From a University of Texas physics degree and a stint at McKinsey, he took the unusual path of writing the original software himself before running the company that now puts screens in over 6,500 grocery stores reaching roughly 95 million shoppers.
Matt Beaton
Matt Beaton is CEO of Mike's Hot Honey, the Brooklyn-based chili-infused honey brand he built with college friend Mike Kurtz. He joined in 2015 when the company was pulling in $100,000 a year, and grew a one-SKU business into a roughly $40 million operation stocked in more than 30,000 retail stores and 3,000 restaurants. He came out of brand-management jobs at Wrigley and PUR Water and an MBA from Kellogg, and now runs the classic case study for what happens when you refuse to launch a second product.
Patrick Smith
Patrick Smith is a Boston-based software executive currently serving as Chief Revenue Officer at Onebeat, a retail inventory intelligence platform. A Providence College graduate with roots in enterprise supply-chain software, he has spent his career at the intersection of merchandising strategy and inventory optimization, with prior stops at ToolsGroup, antuit.ai, ESG, and Park City Group. He writes and speaks about the 'Retail Margin Spiral' and the 'Inventory Intelligence Loop,' arguing that softlines retailers must move from reactive planning to continuous, real-time decisioning.
Ricky Ashenfelter
Ricky Ashenfelter is the co-founder and CEO of Spoiler Alert, a Boston-based B2B software company that helps major food and CPG brands sell, discount, and donate excess and short-dated inventory before it becomes waste. He co-founded the company in 2015 with Emily Malina while earning his MBA at MIT Sloan, building on earlier work in sustainability consulting at Deloitte and the U.S. EPA. Under his leadership Spoiler Alert works with global brands like Nestle, Kraft Heinz, and Danone, and has helped keep more than 500,000 tons of product out of landfills. He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs list in 2017.
Russ Wallace
Russ Wallace is the co-founder and CEO of Freestyle, a Santa Monica baby-care brand rebuilding the diaper aisle for modern parents. A recovering NYU-trained lawyer who traded courtrooms for supply chains, he cut his operating teeth scaling Hello Bello past a $100M run rate before teaming up with Cameo co-founder Mike Constantiner. Freestyle's tree-free, bamboo-core diapers launched online in 2022 and now sit on shelves at Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods, riding roughly 400% year-over-year growth and a fresh $10M Series A.
Jerome Tse
Jerome Tse is the founder and CEO of Berri Organics (also branded Berri Pro), a Southern California maker of certified-organic, plant-based hydration drinks. A Cornell-trained Hotelie and former competitive rower, he built the world's first plant-based organic fitness beverage, Berri Fit, from a dorm-kitchen prototype into a national brand. Its follow-up, Berri Lyte, an organic electrolyte solution, now anchors the company and sells in roughly 2,000 stores including Whole Foods, CVS, Target, Wegmans and Sprouts. Tse was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list in 2019, and the company has raised more than $7 million.
Alex Abelin
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
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
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.
Amanda Luke
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.
Hudson Davis-Ross
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
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
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.
Sarah Jahnke
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Sean Banks
Sean Banks is the founder and CEO of Krisp Drinks LLC, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania beverage company that makes Krisp Flava, Krisp Fruitish, and Krispwtr - a line of zero-sugar flavored spring waters sourced from Pennsylvania's Locust Mountains. He built the company from a convenience-store insight into a brand now stocked at Giant Food Stores, Amazon, and bodegas across all five New York City boroughs, while running it as a family operation with his wife and daughters.
Michael Mauze
Michael Mauze is the Co-Founder and General Partner of VMG Partners, a San Francisco-based consumer-focused growth equity firm he co-founded in 2005. With a career spanning investment banking at PaineWebber and Lehman Brothers to private equity at TSG Consumer Partners, Mauze has spent decades backing consumer brands before 'consumer' became the hottest word in venture capital. VMG has backed over 60 brands including Spindrift, Drunk Elephant, KIND Snacks, and Daily Harvest, and closed its sixth fund at $1 billion in 2025. Beyond the portfolio, Mauze is known for his jazz philanthropy, a five-year cross-country bicycle odyssey, and a $3 million gift to his alma mater Davidson College.
Dan Hoskins
Dan Hoskins is the President & CEO of Sundia Corporation and its parent entity GT Brands, a plant-based snacking company headquartered in Orinda, California. A veteran of the food and beverage industry with 25+ years of experience, Hoskins helped turn Sundia from a fresh watermelon branding startup into one of the fastest-growing plant-based snacking brands in the US, distributing preservative-free True Fruit refrigerated cups and True Chia products to more than 6,000 grocery and convenience stores across the US and Canada. Before Sundia, he built his chops scaling Odwalla's national distribution and managing e-commerce at Hello Direct. An English Lit grad and former varsity swimmer and rower at UC Berkeley, Hoskins brings a rare blend of operational discipline and consumer intuition to a category he has helped define.
Will Salcido
Will Salcido is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bedrock Analytics, an AI-powered CPG data analytics platform that transforms syndicated and retailer data into compelling sales stories for consumer goods manufacturers. A Cornell-trained economist who cut his teeth at Nestlé, Novartis, Ghirardelli, and Lindt & Sprüngli across 12 countries, Salcido bet half his 401(k) on the idea that data storytelling - not raw dashboards - was the missing link between CPG brands and retail shelf space. Today, Bedrock tracks over $100 billion in CPG sales monthly, serves clients across 350+ product categories, and runs a multi-model AI stack using ChatGPT, Claude, and Llama to automate insight generation at scale.