Maev is an Austin-based direct-to-consumer pet brand making the first human-grade raw food for dogs. Founded by MIT engineer and Harvard MBA Katie Spies after her own dog's health scare, Maev sells frozen raw food, supplement bars, bone broth and freeze-dried treats built on USDA-certified protein, no fillers, and formulas vetted by PhD veterinary nutritionists. The company raised a $10M Series A led by VMG Partners in 2022 and expanded into retail via Chewy.
Tizra is a Providence, Rhode Island software company that builds a cloud content delivery platform for associations, publishers, and professional organizations. Its modular system lets clients upload, protect, search, sell, and showcase digital content - ebooks, PDFs, periodicals, audio, and video - through a secure digital library, an eStore for direct sales, and an API-driven 'Connected Hub' that ties content into AMS, CRM, LMS, and AI tools. Founded in 2006 by document-engineering scientist David Durand and former Popular Mechanics editor Abe Dane, Tizra helps content-driven organizations turn their archives into discoverable, revenue-generating, member-serving experiences.
Rashad Hossain is the founder and CEO of RYZE Superfoods, the mushroom coffee brand he started in his mother's basement in March 2020 and grew into a multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer company. A Harvard economics graduate who quit a brand-marketing job at Kraft Heinz to build a coffee he would actually want to drink, he blended six functional mushrooms with organic arabica into a product that has racked up more than 175,000 customer reviews. He earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list in 2022. Before RYZE he founded Keepspace, a social journaling platform that won a $50K Harvard innovation award and later became the HOW I RYZE gratitude app.
Rishabh Jain is the co-founder and CEO of FERMÀT, a San Francisco AI-native commerce platform that builds personalized, content-native shopping experiences for direct-to-consumer and enterprise brands. A LiveRamp alum who saw Apple's privacy changes coming before most, he launched FERMÀT in late 2021 to rewire how brands sell when shoppers can no longer be tracked across the web. The company has raised roughly $86M across rounds, capped by a $45M Series B in June 2025, and counts Glossier, GNC, ILIA Beauty, BISSELL and Unilever's Olly among its customers.
Bobby Farahi is the co-founder and CEO of Dolls Kill, the San Francisco alternative-fashion brand he built with his wife and co-founder Shaudi 'Shoddy' Lynn after the two met at a Los Angeles rave. A serial operator who earlier founded and sold the broadcast-monitoring company Multivision, Farahi turned a stack of foxtail keychains in an apartment into a Sequoia- and Maveron-backed e-commerce label for self-described 'misfits and miss legits.' He also invests as an angel in e-commerce and lifestyle companies.
Function of Beauty is a New York-based beauty company that makes personalized hair, skin, and body care products. Customers take an online quiz about their hair type, goals, and preferences, and the company's in-house technology mixes a formula made to order - down to color and scent. Founded in 2015 out of MIT, it helped popularize mass personalization in beauty and has since expanded from a pure DTC model into major retailers like Target and CVS.
RateS was a Singapore-born, Indonesia-focused social commerce platform that let anyone - housewives, students, small shop owners - start an online business with no inventory and no upfront capital. The app sourced products directly from suppliers and handled warehousing, logistics, payments and financing, while its network of micro-entrepreneurs handled sales through their social networks. Spun out of the foreign-exchange startup RateX, RateS grew to more than 500,000 resellers across Indonesia's tier-2 and tier-3 cities before being acquired by e-commerce enabler SIRCLO in 2023.
Remarkable AI (formerly Chatdesk) is a New York-based customer engagement platform that pairs AI with a network of vetted brand experts to handle support, retention, and acquisition for consumer and e-commerce brands. Its software connects to a brand's existing stack - Shopify, Zendesk, email, SMS, and social - to resolve tickets, win back lapsed customers, and turn social comments and DMs into sales, 24/7 and in the brand's own voice.
Shauna Drumright runs Savage X Fenty, the inclusive lingerie brand Rihanna built. A subscription-commerce operator who cut her teeth at Procter & Gamble before spending years scaling TechStyle's JustFab and FabKids, she stepped into the CEO seat to turn a celebrity launch into a durable, data-driven retail machine. Her brief: keep the body-positive swagger that made the brand famous while making the math work across membership, stores, and a sprawling product range.
Sylvana Ward Durrett spent eight years producing the Met Gala as Vogue's director of special projects before walking away to build Maisonette, a curated online marketplace for children's clothing, toys and home decor she co-founded in 2017 with fellow Vogue alum Luisana Mendoza de Roccia. She turned a parent's frustration - the missing 'Net-a-Porter for kids' - into a venture-backed consumer company headquartered in Brooklyn, applying the editorial taste and relentless work ethic she absorbed in 14 years at Conde Nast to the messy, fragmented world of kids' retail.
Viveka Hulyalkar is the co-founder and CEO of Beam Impact, a New York customer engagement and loyalty platform that lets shoppers direct a slice of everyday purchases to nonprofits at no extra cost. A McKinsey alum and Brown honors graduate, she set out to fix what she calls broken retention marketing by tying brand loyalty to the causes young consumers actually care about. Beam works with 130+ mission-driven brands including Instacart, IKEA and Roots Canada, and Hulyalkar's stated goal is to shift $10 billion from brands to high-impact nonprofits. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Social Impact.
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.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman is the founder and CEO of Teikametrics, a Boston-based AI platform that helps Amazon and Walmart sellers optimize advertising and pricing across more than $10 billion in marketplace transactions. A former Great Britain 800m runner and Harvard track captain, he started selling sporting goods from his dorm room in 2001, became one of Amazon's first third-party retailers in 2003, exited a fitness startup to News Corp, and has raised roughly $65 million for Teikametrics from investors including Intel Capital, Jump Capital, Centana Growth Partners and SoftBank's Lydia Jett.
Ari Daie is the founder, CEO and president of FEVO, a New York social-commerce platform that turns the lonely online checkout into a group activity. After a career that ran through Goldman Sachs, two startups he built and sold, and a senior dealmaking seat at Ticketmaster/Live Nation, Daie built FEVO on a simple bet: people would rather buy tickets and merchandise together than alone. The platform now powers more than 750 partners across the NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, MLS and Formula 1, and FEVO has reported scaling past a billion dollars in sales while raising tens of millions in venture funding.
Dan McCormick is the co-founder and CEO of Create Wellness, the New York brand that turned creatine from a bodybuilder's powder into a daily gummy. After years inside high-growth consumer companies like Away, Parade and the Not Boring newsletter, he started Create in 2022 with his wife Sienna and pioneered the first creatine monohydrate gummy. The company has sold over 250 million gummies, reached GNC and Target shelves, and raised a $20M Series B in 2026 led by Alliance Consumer Growth.
James Hirschfeld is the co-founder and CEO of Paperless Post, the New York company that turned the dread of sending an invitation into an act of design. He started it from a Harvard dorm in 2008 with his older sister Alexa, after his own 21st birthday party left him stuck between expensive paper and lifeless email. More than 175 million people have since sent or received a Paperless Post, across roughly 20 million events. He runs it as a design company that happens to live in a browser.
Peter Zhou is the co-founder and CEO of Rutter, the New York-based unified API that connects business financial data across accounting systems, commerce platforms, payment processors, and ad networks. Often described as the 'Plaid for commerce,' Rutter lets B2B fintech companies plug into QuickBooks, Shopify, Amazon, Stripe and dozens more through a single consistent schema. A Yale-trained computer scientist and Y Combinator alum, Zhou and co-founder Eric Yu pivoted through years of failed startups before landing on Rutter, which raised a $27M Series A led by a16z in 2022.
Sarah Miyazawa LaFleur is the founder and CEO of M.M.LaFleur, the New York workwear brand she named after her mother and built to take the guesswork out of getting dressed for professional women. A Harvard graduate who walked away from a private equity job after four months, she launched the company in 2013 with designer Miyako Nakamura and Narie Foster, popularized the curated Bento Box, and later coined the post-pandemic dress code she calls Power Casual.
Sophia Edelstein is the co-founder and co-CEO of Pair Eyewear, the direct-to-consumer brand that turned eyeglasses into a fashion accessory you can swap as fast as your mood. She and Stanford classmate Nathan Kondamuri started the company in their senior year after interviewing 400 families about why kids hate their glasses, and built it into a vertically integrated eyewear company with the most automated lens lab in the United States. By late 2023 the company had raised roughly $145 million, grown revenue 24x in three years, and sold millions of interchangeable 'Top Frames'. Edelstein leads brand, creative, web and product design while sharing the CEO seat in one of the more visible co-CEO partnerships in consumer tech.
eBay is one of the original internet marketplaces, a global platform where roughly 136 million buyers shop across hundreds of millions of listings in about 190 markets. Born in 1995 as a hobby site called AuctionWeb, it pioneered the idea that strangers could trust strangers enough to trade online. Three decades later it has reinvented itself around enthusiast categories, certified collectibles, and recommerce - selling the new, the rare, and the gloriously second-hand.
a.k.a. Brands is a portfolio operator of next-generation, digitally native fashion brands, including Princess Polly, Culture Kings, Petal & Pup and mnml. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, it reaches Gen Z and millennial shoppers who discover fashion on social media and primarily buy online. A data-driven 'test and repeat' merchandising model lets its brands launch fresh, exclusive styles weekly. The company trades on the NYSE under the ticker AKA and reported net sales of $600.2 million in fiscal 2025.
Blue Bottle Coffee is an Oakland-born specialty roaster and cafe chain that helped define the third-wave coffee movement. Founded in 2002 by clarinetist James Freeman, it built a reputation on freshly roasted single-origin beans, an obsessive 48-hour freshness rule, and a spare, Japanese-influenced cafe aesthetic. It now runs roughly 140 cafes across the US and Asia plus a sizable e-commerce and subscription business, and changed hands in 2026 when Centurium Capital agreed to buy its retail operations from Nestle.
e.l.f. Beauty is an Oakland-based, publicly traded cosmetics company (NYSE: ELF) built on a simple disruptive idea: prestige-quality makeup and skincare that almost everyone can afford. Founded in 2004 as e.l.f. (Eyes Lips Face) and reshaped under CEO Tarang Amin since 2014, it has grown into a multi-brand house spanning e.l.f. Cosmetics, e.l.f. SKIN, Well People, Keys Soulcare, Naturium, and Hailey Bieber's rhode. Every product is vegan and cruelty-free, most cost under $20, and the company has become a case study in social-first, community-driven brand building.
Flywheel is a Baltimore-born digital commerce company that helps brands grow on Amazon, Walmart, Instacart and 400-plus other online marketplaces. Born in 2014 as one of the first specialists in the messy mechanics of selling through Amazon, it pairs cloud software (the Flywheel Commerce Cloud) with managed services across retail media, retail operations and market intelligence. After being bought by Ascential and then by Omnicom for roughly $835 million in 2024, Flywheel now serves more than 4,500 brands - including over half of 2022's top 100 publicly listed CPG companies - with about 2,600 colleagues across the Americas, Europe, APAC and China.
francesca's® was an American women's fashion and lifestyle retailer known for its eclectic mix of clothing, jewelry, accessories and giftable items sold across hundreds of small boutiques and online at francescas.com. Founded in Houston in 1999, it grew from a single store into a national chain of more than 700 boutiques, went public on the Nasdaq in 2011, and built a loyal following of women shopping for affordable, trend-driven, occasion-ready style. After two Chapter 11 bankruptcies, the company wound down and closed its remaining locations in early 2026.
Paula's Choice is a Seattle-based, research-backed skincare brand founded by consumer advocate Paula Begoun in 1995. Built on the radical idea that beauty should be judged by ingredients rather than marketing, the company sells fragrance-free, cruelty-free, science-driven products direct to consumers around the world. Its cult 2% BHA Liquid Exfoliant and a culture of ingredient transparency turned a self-published 'Cosmetics Cop' into a roughly $300M brand that Unilever acquired in 2021.
P. N. Gadgil Jewellers (PNG Jewellers) is one of India's oldest jewellery houses, founded in 1832 and headquartered in Pune, Maharashtra. The company designs and retails gold, diamond, silver and platinum jewellery through a fast-growing network of stores across Maharashtra, Goa and an outlet in the United States, plus an online D2C platform. After a heavily over-subscribed ₹1,100 crore IPO in September 2024, PNG Jewellers blends nearly two centuries of goldsmithing heritage with modern omnichannel retail, BIS hallmarking, lifetime buyback and a stable of Bollywood brand ambassadors.
Specialized Bicycle Components is a Morgan Hill, California maker of high-performance bicycles, components and gear founded in 1974 by Mike Sinyard. It built the first mass-produced mountain bike, the 1981 Stumpjumper, and today designs road, mountain, gravel and Turbo e-bikes alongside helmets, apparel and the Retul fit system. With roughly 1,300 employees and an estimated $500M in revenue, it is one of America's 'Big Three' bike brands and a fixture in pro road, mountain and triathlon racing.
ThredUp is one of the world's largest online resale platforms for secondhand women's and children's apparel, shoes and accessories. Founded in 2009, the Oakland-based company combines automated distribution centers, a managed marketplace, and a 'Resale-as-a-Service' (RaaS) platform that powers branded resale programs for major retailers. It went public on Nasdaq in 2021 under ticker TDUP and frames its mission around extending the life of clothing to reduce fashion's environmental footprint.
Williams-Sonoma, Inc. is a San Francisco-based, vertically integrated specialty retailer of premium home furnishings and cookware. From a single 1956 cookware shop in Sonoma, California, it grew into a portfolio of in-house-designed brands - Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, Pottery Barn Teen, West Elm, Williams Sonoma Home, Rejuvenation, Mark and Graham, and GreenRow - sold through e-commerce, catalogs, retail stores, and a growing B2B business. It is one of the largest digital-first home retailers in the United States, with roughly $7.7-7.9 billion in annual revenue.