duke
(8)
Tri Vu
Tri Vu is the co-founder and CEO of Lumius, a Durham, North Carolina medical imaging startup building fast, smart, accessible 3D ultrasound - what the team calls a 3D camera for the body. A Duke-trained biomedical engineer with a doctorate in ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging and more than 1,900 research citations, Vu left an academic track to turn a decade of imaging research into a device clinicians actually want to pick up. Lumius went through Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch and is starting with vascular access, where roughly half of first attempts fail.
Lumius
Lumius is a Durham, North Carolina medical device company building a fast, affordable, real-time 3D ultrasound system - a '3D camera for the body.' Founded by three Duke PhDs, it replaces the flat 2D slices clinicians must mentally stitch into anatomy with a live volumetric view and AI that flags vessels, nerves, and muscle. The company starts with vascular access and central line placement, where roughly half of first attempts by newer clinicians fail, and plans to expand into clot detection, nerve blocks, tumor diagnosis, and biopsy guidance.
Nick Patrick
Nick Patrick is the co-founder and CEO of Radar, a New York-based location platform that provides geofencing SDKs, maps APIs and geocoding services to companies like Panera, DICK's Sporting Goods, T-Mobile and Zillow. He started Radar in 2016 with Coby Berman after meeting him at Foursquare, and has raised more than $85 million from Accel, Insight Partners, Two Sigma Ventures, Expa and Heavybit. Before Radar he was Senior Director of Product at Handy and a product manager at Foursquare and Microsoft.
Ashish Desai
Ashish Desai is the CEO of Monograph, the San Francisco software company that helps architecture and engineering firms run the business side of the practice - budgets, staffing, forecasting and billing. An electrical engineer turned product leader, he scaled product at 99designs, Handshake and Shutterfly before joining Monograph as Chief Product Officer in July 2023 and stepping up to CEO in 2026, succeeding co-founder Robert Yuen. His pitch is simple: software that understands how architects actually work, so firms can spend more time on design and less time guessing at their numbers.
Tim Sweeney
Tim Sweeney is the co-founder and CEO of Inflammatix, a Sunnyvale molecular diagnostics company that reads the immune system instead of hunting for pathogens. A surgeon-turned-entrepreneur with an MD/PhD from Duke and a biomedical informatics background from Stanford, he built TriVerity, an FDA-cleared rapid blood test that measures 29 immune-response genes and uses machine learning to score the likelihood of bacterial infection, viral infection, and severe illness. He has raised more than $200 million to bring precision medicine to sepsis and critical care.
Tarang Amin
Tarang Amin is the Chairman and CEO of e.l.f. Beauty, the affordable cosmetics company he took public in 2016 and grew from a $135 million equity story into a multi-brand portfolio anchored by e.l.f. Cosmetics, e.l.f. SKIN, Naturium, Well People, Keys Soulcare, and - as of May 2025 - Hailey Bieber's rhode in a $1 billion deal.
Cody Ko
Cody Ko is a Canadian-American comedian, podcaster, and former software engineer who turned a viral iOS captioning app and a Vine following into one of the most influential creator-led comedy operations of the late 2010s. With Noel Miller he built Tiny Meat Gang, a comedy hip-hop act, podcast, and studio that scaled to hundreds of millions of downloads before he stepped away from TMG Studios in 2024.
Pavan Cheruvu
Dr. Pavan K. Cheruvu is the President and CEO of Bitterroot Bio, a Palo Alto-based biotech pioneering the field of cardio-immunology — the intersection of the immune system and cardiovascular disease. A Rhodes Scholar, board-certified cardiologist, and physician-scientist who trained at Duke, Oxford, Harvard/MIT, Johns Hopkins, and UCSF, Cheruvu is guiding Bitterroot Bio's lead program BRB-002 — a first-in-class CD47-targeting therapy for atherosclerosis — through clinical development after a landmark $145M Series A in 2023 and positive Phase 1 results in 2025.