Michael G. Johnson is the founder, president and CTO of Sea Machines Robotics, a Boston company building autonomous control and perception systems for commercial ships and workboats. A Texas A&M marine engineer who spent two decades in offshore oil, heavy-lift ocean transport and salvage at Crowley and TITAN Salvage, Johnson started Sea Machines in 2015 after seeing how avoidable human error was on an Arctic oil-spill response job. In November 2024 he handed the CEO seat to David 'Chip' Wasson and moved into a technology and product role focused on defense and international expansion.
Michael Pusateri is the CEO and founder of Siepe, a Dallas-based fintech he started in 2012 after a career running technology inside hedge funds. Siepe builds software and managed services for CLO managers, private credit funds, and other alternative investment firms, and closed a $30 million Series B led by WestCap in August 2024. Before Siepe, Pusateri was CTO at Carlson Capital and CTO/co-COO at Highland Capital Management.
Patrick Anderson is Co-Founder and CTO of Moab, a New York based startup building a modern operating system for equipment rental and dealership businesses. He was previously Head of Core Engineering at Ramp, joining the fintech as its 11th employee. In February 2026 Moab emerged from stealth with $16M in combined Seed and Series A funding backed by Elad Gil and Ironspring Ventures.
Paul Martini is the CEO, chief architect and co-founder of iboss, a Boston-based cloud security company he built with his twin brother Peter starting from a San Diego garage in 2003. He holds more than 230 patents in cloud, cybersecurity and networking, and has helped push zero trust and Security Service Edge into the enterprise mainstream. Before iboss he did circuit-board and network software work at Copper Mountain Networks and SAIC.
Rishi Sharma runs Briza, a Toronto-based commercial insurance API platform that connects carriers, MGAs, brokers and software companies through a single interface. He joined in 2018 as CTO/head of product after a stint leading engineering on the FreshBooks redesign, and stepped up to CEO in December 2022 after co-founder Ben Munro departed. His work focuses on API reliability, quote-and-bind automation, and making legacy commercial lines behave like modern developer infrastructure.
Ryan Barone is the co-founder, CEO, and CTO of RentRedi, a New York-based property management platform he started in 2016 after failing to secure an apartment because gathering application documents was miserable. RentRedi now serves nearly 200,000 landlords and renters, manages tens of billions in assets, and has raised more than $17M across seed and Series A rounds. Barone still writes code, still runs the company, and still argues that landlord software should not feel like a spreadsheet with a login.
Sukhmeet Toor is an engineering leader in San Francisco who works in the leadership office at ID.me, the digital-identity company that verifies who you are for the IRS, state unemployment agencies, and retailers. Before identity, he was in the business of matchmaking: he co-founded Dil Mil, a dating app for South Asians that produced roughly a wedding a day, and then, spotting the same family-and-community values in another group, he and his co-founder built Shalom, a Jewish dating app. A Microsoft Outlook-for-Mac engineering manager turned serial builder, Toor has since worked at Meta and Pencil Spaces and is involved with Actual AI, which builds tools for managers whose teams now mix humans and AI agents.
Auden Ehringer is the Chief Technology Officer of Pave Finance and CEO of its technology subsidiary, Pave Labs. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer and computer scientist, he spent the early part of his career keeping some of the world's largest systems running - building Alexa sports features at Amazon Lab126 and serving as a Site Reliability Engineer on YouTube Discovery at Google. In 2023 he traded planet-scale infrastructure for the messier world of money, joining the New York fintech Pave Finance to build software that lets independent advisers automate and personalize portfolio management across thousands of client accounts. The platform he leads now helps oversee billions in assets, and in 2025 the company closed an oversubscribed $14M seed round.
James Crean is the co-founder and Chief Visionary Officer (also serving as President/CTO) of CREAN Inc, an Austin, Texas aerospace engineering and smart factory firm he started in 2002 with his wife Jennifer. A former satellite systems engineer and program manager at Hughes Space & Communications and Boeing - where he worked on DirecTV, NASA's TDRSS and other communications and weather satellites, and built the Lean Six Sigma group for Boeing Satellites - Crean now leads a team of 600-plus aerospace and defense engineers and champions CREAN's AI-enabled Smart Factory Operating System (SFOS), which aims to make American high-mix manufacturing fast, flexible and competitive enough to bring production home from overseas.
Nick Freeman is the co-founder, co-CEO and CTO of Marco Experiences, a San Francisco and New York company that helps companies plan and book team offsites, retreats and group experiences. Before Marco he was one of the founding backend engineers on Instagram Stories, where he helped scale the product from launch to 500 million daily users, and he shipped Cortana for Xbox One at Microsoft. A UC Berkeley computer science and economics graduate, he left Brex in 2020 to build Marco with Suman Siva on the bet that, done thoughtfully, technology can build community. Marco now serves 800+ companies including Meta, Bain and Netflix.
Terry Kennon is a chemical engineer turned investment banker turned clean-energy builder who serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Proteum Energy in Phoenix, Arizona. He took on the President role in March 2019 after roughly four years as CTO. With more than 30 years across chemical engineering, biofuels investment banking at J.P. Morgan, and renewable-energy entrepreneurship, Kennon now leads Proteum's patented technology that reforms renewable ethanol into low-cost, low-carbon hydrogen and 'designer fuels' - and turns wasted flare gas into usable product. He is a named inventor on the company's core patents and directs both its technology roadmap and its intellectual-property strategy.
Thibault Le Conte is the founder, CEO and CTO of OrderOut, a Miami-based software company that funnels orders from UberEats, DoorDash, Grubhub and other delivery apps straight into a restaurant's existing point-of-sale system, killing the tablet pileup that clutters kitchen counters. A computer-science engineer trained at EPITECH and UC Berkeley, he built roughly eight or nine companies before OrderOut, reusing the same core technology each time. OrderOut is deliberately bootstrapped, grown on a single $250,000 partner investment made during COVID and organic revenue since, and now runs a lean distributed team across Miami, Brazil, India, China, Ecuador and Mexico. His latest push moves OrderOut beyond integrations into restaurant finance, with same-day UberEats payouts and a delivery API that lets any business shop for the cheapest or fastest courier.
Adam Hyder is the Chief Development Officer and EVP of Engineering at Juniper Square, the private-markets technology company building the operating system for fund administration, investor relations, and partnership enablement. A technology leader with more than two decades of experience, he has run engineering and product at Malwarebytes, BlueJeans Network, Jobvite, and Yahoo HotJobs, and started his career working on Java in its earliest days at Sun Microsystems. He is known for scaling distributed global teams, shipping large-scale SaaS, consumer, and enterprise products, and turning sprawling roadmaps into shipped software.
Adnan Hamid is the founder and core-technology inventor of Breker Verification Systems, a San Jose EDA company that pioneered graph-based, specification-driven chip verification and helped birth the industry's Portable Stimulus Standard. A Princeton-trained electrical engineer and computer scientist with an MBA from UT Austin, he earned the nickname 'The Breaker' for a simple reason: he breaks things for a living. After leading AMD's verification team to 100% coverage on an x86-class microprocessor and a stint at Cadence, he founded Breker in 2003 with his wife Maheen. He now serves as Executive President and CTO, holds more than 17 patents, and is regarded as one of the original visionaries behind teaching computers to verify the chips inside nearly every modern device.
John Rytel is the co-founder and CTO of Alex (formerly Apriora), a San Francisco startup that builds an agentic AI recruiter which conducts live, real-time video interviews with job candidates. A Brown University graduate in computer science and applied mathematics, Rytel teamed up with Aaron Wang to launch the company in 2023, went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, and has helped raise roughly $20M from Peak XV Partners and 1984 Ventures. He is the builder behind the engine: the person who writes the code that lets an AI named Alex interview thousands of people at once.
Bankole Omodunbi is the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Verbwire, a Web3 infrastructure startup that turns weeks of Solidity, Hardhat and wallet configuration into a single REST API call. A former Managing Director in equities quant trading at Credit Suisse with 16+ years on Wall Street, he left banking in 2021 to build developer tooling that lets engineers deploy smart contracts, mint NFTs, move assets cross-chain and spin up wallets using familiar languages like Python and Java. Verbwire raised a $12.3M Series A and is based in the New York area.
Darryl Barnes is a physician-turned-inventor who co-founded Sonex Health, an Eagan, Minnesota medtech company building ultrasound-guided devices that move carpal tunnel and trigger finger surgery out of the operating room and into the clinic office. A former Mayo Clinic sports medicine doctor, he co-invented the UltraGuideCTR device, holds numerous medical device patents, and helped raise more than $60 million to scale the company. He has served as both CEO and chief technology officer, and was named Medical Devices CEO of the Year for the Upper Midwest in 2018.
Eliot Horowitz is the founder and CEO of Viam, a New York robotics-and-automation software platform that lets developers build, deploy, and manage machines in the physical world. He wrote the original core code of MongoDB, which he co-founded in 2007 and steered as CTO for 13 years through a 2017 IPO and a market cap that climbed into the tens of billions. After tinkering with a cat feeder, a chess-playing robot, and a smarter sprinkler during the pandemic, he concluded that robotics hardware had outrun its software, and built Viam to close that gap.
Gregg Mojica is the founder and CEO of Kinter.ai, the AI-accounting company that grew out of Alloy Automation, the integration platform he co-founded with Sara Du in 2019 (YC W20). He started coding at 12, shipped three apps before he turned 18, got into Cornell and skipped it to build payments infrastructure at First Data/Fiserv, then helped build Alloy into the connective tissue for thousands of ecommerce and AI-agent workflows backed by a16z and Bain Capital Ventures. Today his AI Accountants close the books for enterprises including Amazon, Mastercard and UPS.
Michael Ulin is a three-time AI founder and engineer who builds machine-learning companies in heavily regulated industries. He was the founding AI engineer and VP of AI at ZestyAI, whose property-risk models help underwrite trillions in U.S. insured assets, then co-founded and served as CTO of Paxton AI, a generative-AI legal research tool used by thousands of attorneys that raised a $6M seed round in 2023. He now builds from Bend, Oregon, where his current work centers on Trarian, applying AI to patent underwriting, alongside ventures spanning AI forecasting and probabilistic reasoning. He also writes the Substack 'And Yet It Moves' on entrepreneurship and the case for building startups outside Silicon Valley.
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.
Abhishek Choudhary is the Co-Founder and CTO of TrueFoundry, a Series A-backed AI infrastructure platform that helps enterprises deploy, manage, and govern machine learning models at scale. A former Senior Staff Engineer at Meta — where he worked on infrastructure serving over a billion users — he left to build the platform he wished had existed at Facebook: one that brings Meta-level AI automation to every enterprise. An IIT Kharagpur alumnus, he co-founded TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside batchmates Nikunj Bajaj and Anuraag Gupta, and has since grown it to serve clients like NVIDIA, Siemens Healthineers, and ResMed, raising $21.3M in total funding.
Abhishek Kumar is the co-founder and CTO of Xoxoday, a Bengaluru-based SaaS platform that powers rewards, incentives, and employee engagement for 5,000+ enterprises worldwide. An IIT Bombay alumnus who previously co-founded EveningFlavours (an early food-discovery startup), Abhishek has helped grow Xoxoday from a 2012 experiences marketplace into a $100M+ funded global platform processing 250,000 transactions daily, with products spanning employee engagement, sales gamification, consumer loyalty, and API-based transactional rewards.
Adarsh Hiremath is the Co-Founder and CTO of Mercor, the AI-powered talent marketplace connecting domain experts with AI labs for model training, evaluation, and data creation. At 22, he dropped out of Harvard, received a Thiel Fellowship, and co-built Mercor from a São Paulo hackathon idea into a $10 billion company generating over $500 million in annual revenue - making him one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires alongside co-founders Brendan Foody and Surya Midha.
Advith Chelikani is the co-founder and CTO of Pylon, an AI-powered B2B customer support platform based in San Francisco. A Caltech computer science graduate and former Samsara engineer, Advith co-founded Pylon in November 2022 alongside Marty Kausas and Robert Eng. In under three years, the company raised $51.2M in total funding - including a $17M Series A from a16z in 2024 and a $31M Series B in 2025 - scaled to 750+ customers, and grew revenue 5x year-over-year for two consecutive years. Pylon replaces legacy platforms like Zendesk by meeting enterprise support teams where their customers already are: Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord.
Anand Prajapati is Co-Founder and CTO of Leena AI, an enterprise agentic AI platform that deploys AI colleagues to automate back-office work across HR, IT, Finance, and Procurement. A graduate of IIT Delhi, Anand built Leena AI's technology from scratch after two earlier startup pivots, guiding the company through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch to a $30M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Today Leena AI's platform serves 400+ enterprise customers across 90+ countries - including Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Sony - resolving millions of employee queries autonomously across 100+ languages.
Brendan O'Connor co-founded AppOmni in 2018 after a decade as Salesforce's Chief Security Officer and a stint as Security CTO at ServiceNow. Frustrated by the lack of proper tooling to secure enterprise SaaS environments, he built the solution he wished he'd had. AppOmni pioneered the SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) category, raised over $202 million in funding, protects more than 100 million SaaS user accounts, and counts 25% of the Fortune 100 among its customers. O'Connor now serves as Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder.
Bryson Koehler is the CEO of Revinate, a hospitality SaaS company specializing in guest data platforms, CRM, and marketing automation for hotels. A career technology executive with deep roots in enterprise data and cloud infrastructure, Koehler previously served as CTO at IBM Watson & Cloud Platform and as EVP/Chief Technology, Product, Data & Analytics Officer at Equifax. He built the legendary Weather Company data platform - processing 4GB of data per second from 40 million mobile devices - before IBM acquired it in 2016 partly due to his work. His return to hospitality with Revinate merges two career obsessions: data engineering at scale and the guest experience.
Chaithanya Yambari is the Co-Founder and CTO of Zluri, a next-generation Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) platform that helps enterprise IT teams discover, manage, secure, and automate their SaaS applications. An engineer from BITS Pilani, he spent nearly a decade rising from software developer to Director of Engineering at gamification startup KNOLSKAPE before co-founding Zluri in 2020 alongside Ritish Reddy and Sethu Meenakshisundaram. Under his technical leadership, Zluri has raised $32M in total funding - including a $20M Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in July 2023 - and now serves 270+ employees and hundreds of enterprise customers worldwide.
Chandra Singh is the CTO and Co-Founder of Rescale Technologies, a Thane-based technology firm helping global enterprises navigate digital transformation through cybersecurity, IT staffing, M&A support, and product development. An IIT Bombay graduate, Singh co-founded Rescale Technologies in 2022 alongside Pawan Kumar and Gaurav Meena, positioning the company at the intersection of creative strategy and technical execution.