detroit
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At Newlab, the Pitch Has to Survive the Street
A Brooklyn shipyard became a home for hardware startups. Now Newlab is taking their inventions into ports, city streets and factories - where a working demo meets a much tougher audience.
Thomas LeDuc Put Cybersecurity’s Invisible Defenders on the Big Screen
He helped take Semperis from a few million dollars in recurring revenue to centaur status. Then the Detroit-area CMO returned to filmmaking to tell the human story behind cyber defense.
Sudhish Subhash Connects the Systems Behind the Lab - and the People Beyond It
At Data Innovations, his work turns the hidden plumbing of clinical laboratories into a story people can understand. In Detroit, his quieter commitment is just as practical: years spent mentoring readers and helping a literacy nonprofit grow.
Jon Schulz Has Spent a Career Making Advertising Answer for Itself
From Windows 3.0 migrations to Ford's digital showroom and Viant's AI-era advertising platform, his work keeps returning to one stubborn question: did the marketing actually work?
Sandra Moran Is Turning Training Into a Business Instrument
The Schoox CMO began in systems, learned to translate complex software into business value, and now wants workplace learning judged by what people can do next - not merely by what they completed.
Maureen Eisbrenner Put Buildings on the Spreadsheet - Then Made the Spreadsheet Useful
The arbnco co-founder spent a decade translating the hidden behavior of buildings into decisions a property owner can actually make. Her story is about an unfashionable advantage: measure first, retrofit second.
The banker who hated banks built a better one
She left a 20-year agency career, took a pay cut, and bet on a broken bank in the middle of a financial crisis. Fifteen years later, roughly 11 million people bank with the brand she built.
Nate Buelow Knows the Dashboard Is Also a Listening Device
The Stellantis marketing executive built his career by reading signals early. Now he is applying that habit to some of Detroit's most identity-heavy brands - from the return of the HEMI to Ram's return to NASCAR.
Jim Carlton and the Work Behind Selling a Place to Work
At Regus, Jim Carlton's brief sits where real estate, hospitality and software meet. The product is not simply an office - it is the ability to choose how much workplace you need, where you need it and for how long.
Carl Skanderup
Carl Skanderup is the CEO of Carats & Cake and Bliss & Bone, two wedding-tech brands he runs with his wife Cindy. A former Wells Fargo director who once managed more than $1 billion in real-estate loans, he traded corporate finance for the messy craft of building companies in the wedding industry. His through-line is a hard-won lesson: the product is rarely the problem, the marketing is. He writes about it publicly on Substack, part confession, part field notes from 15 years of building and running businesses.
Remora
Remora is a Detroit-area climate-tech company that bolts carbon capture onto the things already burning fuel - semi-trucks and freight locomotives - instead of building giant plants to pull CO2 back out of the sky. Its zero-backpressure device threads exhaust through proprietary adsorbents, captures up to 90% of the CO2, reduces soot and NOx to Tier 4 levels, then liquefies the gas to be sold into a supply-constrained industrial CO2 market. Operators share the revenue, so cutting emissions becomes a line item that pays rather than one that costs.
Grant Drzyzga
Grant Drzyzga is the founder and CEO of Revela, a Detroit-based property management software company he started in 2014 with $50,000 and no real estate experience. After bootstrapping for roughly nine and a half years, he raised a $9 million Series A led by FirstMark Capital in November 2023. Revela now serves more than 200,000 units and has become one of the largest lenders to property managers in cities like Detroit, St. Louis, and Gary. Drzyzga's pitch is that real estate software should be built 'from the books out' - accounting first - and that embedded financial services can bring liquidity to a market that has long been low-margin and illiquid.
Paul Gross
Paul Gross is the co-founder and co-CEO of Remora, a Detroit-area climate hardware company that bolts a carbon-capture device onto the tailpipes of semi-trucks and locomotives, grabbing the CO2 before it ever hits the sky and selling it as beverage-grade gas to breweries and greenhouses. He read a stranger's PhD dissertation on mobile carbon capture during his senior year at Yale, wrote the author a business plan, and convinced her to quit the EPA to build a company with him. Remora has raised roughly $117 million and signed pilots with Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, Ryder, Werner, and Cargill.
Steven Wang
Steven Wang is the founder and CEO of dub, a regulated, SEC-registered copy-trading app that lets everyday investors mirror the portfolios of vetted managers, hedge funds, and members of Congress with one tap. A Detroit-area kid who opened a custodial brokerage account in second grade, he sold a VR company at 17, built Apple Watch software at 18, invested out of a Harvard dorm as a Dorm Room Fund partner, then dropped out to launch dub. The company has crossed 1 million downloads and raised about $47 million, including a $30M Series A in May 2025.
Jessica Kobeissi
Jessica Kobeissi is a Lebanese-American fashion and portrait photographer from Detroit, Michigan, recognized as the #1 female photographer on YouTube with over 1.87 million subscribers and 140+ million views. Known for viral series like '4 Photographers Shoot The Same Model' and 'Taking Pictures of Strangers,' she turned a graphic design career pivot into a media empire — shooting celebrities, teaching workshops across the U.S., and becoming famous for photographing PewDiePie and Marzia's wedding.
Rashida Tlaib
Rashida Tlaib is a groundbreaking American politician and lawyer serving as the U.S. Representative for Michigan's 12th Congressional District since 2019. Born in Detroit to Palestinian immigrant parents as the eldest of 14 children, she made history as the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress and one of the first two Muslim women in the House. A founding member of 'The Squad' progressive coalition, Tlaib champions working-class issues, economic justice, and human rights with authentic grassroots energy. From raising her 13 siblings while her parents worked Ford assembly lines to fighting for the unhoused, higher wages, and accountability, she brings Detroit grit and moral clarity to Washington.