Gerry Poirier is the founder and CEO of AngeLink, billed as the world's first social crowdfunding platform powered by women. After more than two decades on Wall Street trading floors at Credit Suisse and Lazard, where she was often the only woman in the room, she built an AI-driven, fraud-resistant fundraising platform that has grown to roughly 55,000 active users across 100 currencies and raised over $7.3 million in seed funding. A Wharton-trained, globe-trotting risk-taker based in Naples, Florida, she also runs the AngeLink Community Foundation, a 501(c)(3) making direct impact grants.
Jerming Gu is the Taiwanese founder and CEO of CANDY HOUSE, the company behind SESAME, the smart lock that clamps onto an existing deadbolt and turns a smartphone into a key. He started the company as a Stanford mechanical engineering master's student in 2014 with co-founder Jongho Shin, then turned a 3D-printed dorm-room prototype into a Kickstarter phenomenon that raised roughly $1.4 million in 2015. After a decade building a dominant smart-lock business in Japan - including funding from ITOCHU and a strategic alliance with lock maker MIWA - he relaunched CANDY HOUSE in the US and Canada in 2025 with a lineup spanning SESAME 5, face recognition, palm-vein biometrics and Matter-compatible hubs.
Mark Russell is the founder and CEO of HyperSciences, a Spokane, Washington company turning a piece of aerospace exotica - the ram accelerator - into a tool that drills through rock up to ten times faster than a conventional rig. A former Blue Origin lead engineer on the crew capsule and a self-described third-generation miner, Russell fires projectiles at hypersonic speed every few seconds to crack rock for geothermal energy, mining and tunneling, and to lob payloads toward space through his sister venture Pipeline2Space. He raised roughly $9.6 million from thousands of small investors and won early backing from NASA and Shell.
Oleksiy Lubinsky (also known as Alex Lubinsky) is the co-founder and CEO of Rentberry, a San Francisco-based platform that automates the long-term rental process from search and custom-offer negotiation to digital leases, rent payments and maintenance. A Ukrainian native and UC Berkeley economics graduate who came out of investment banking, he sold his first company, the networking app City Hour, in 2015 before launching Rentberry that same year. He has pushed the company through one of crypto's most-talked-about ICOs, an AI rebrand, and serial equity-crowdfunding rounds, framing Rentberry as a bid to strip the friction, fees and middlemen out of renting.
Ezra Goldman is the co-founder and CEO of Upshift, a San Francisco-based company reinventing how city dwellers access cars. Rather than owning or leasing a vehicle full-time, Upshift members subscribe to a car that appears at their door when needed and vanishes when they don't - a fractional model that eliminates insurance headaches, maintenance costs, and the guilt of a depreciating asset sitting idle 95% of the time. Goldman brings 25+ years of shared-transportation obsession to the role, starting with a communist-themed campus bikeshare in 1999, through an MIT master's in urban planning, a PhD stint in Copenhagen studying why Danes ride bikes, and stints at City CarShare and ReachNow before building Upshift into a platform backed by MINI (BMW), Ford, and thousands of crowdfunding investors.
GoFundMe is the world's largest social fundraising platform, where individuals, communities, and nonprofits raise money for everything from medical bills and tuition to disaster relief. Founded in 2010, it has helped people raise over $40 billion through nearly 200 million donations.
Sarah Wood is a Senior Executive Business Partner at GoFundMe and the founder of Easy Living Collective, a household management company supporting working women and caregivers. A 15-year veteran of Google across roles in learning & development, program management, people operations, and Google.org, she brings operational depth and a people-first philosophy to everything she touches. Based in Los Angeles, she has been instrumental in GoFundMe's partnerships supporting women-owned businesses recovering from the 2025 LA wildfires.
Scott Cahill is the co-founder and former CEO of LEXI, an intelligent enterprise IoT platform headquartered in Lebanon, Ohio. He built the company from a smart lighting passion project into a universal wireless building automation system that claims up to 90% cost savings over competitors. Over 7.5 years he led LEXI through a $2.6M seed round, a $3.5M pre-Series A, and multiple equity crowdfunding campaigns, accumulating $5.5M raised and a $30M valuation by 2024. In 2024 he handed the CEO role to Hans Bukow to accelerate LEXI toward IPO, while remaining as an advisor.