Tagged: entrepreneur
30 results
Christian Facey
Christian Facey is the co-founder and CEO of Audiomob, the London-based company that built the first non-intrusive audio advertising platform for mobile games. A former Google agency strategist and Facebook marketing science partner, he combined his advertising background with hobbies in game development and hip hop/jazz production to spot a gap: the mobile gaming and audio ad industries had never been connected. He launched Audiomob in 2020 with co-founder Wilfrid Obeng, raised a $14M Series A at a valuation north of $110M, and landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021.
Daniel Chait
Daniel Chait is the co-founder and CEO of Greenhouse Software, the New York-based recruiting platform he started with Jon Stross in 2012 to help companies make hiring a competitive advantage. A University of Michigan computer engineer who spent more than a decade as a software consultant and previously co-founded the investment-banking tech firm Lab49, Chait built Greenhouse around the idea of 'structured hiring.' He is co-author of the book Talent Makers, a frequent conference speaker, and a vocal commentator on how AI is reshaping recruiting - including his warning about an 'AI doom loop' flooding both job seekers and employers.
David Schofman
David Schofman is the CEO and co-founder of Coro Health, an Austin-based company that builds therapeutic music and multi-faith spiritual streaming programs for senior living communities, hospitals and hospices. A serial entrepreneur who built one of the first online golf retail businesses in the 1990s and later ran global ecommerce for Callaway Golf, Schofman turned to health technology in 2008, translating research on music and the brain into a subscription platform now used across thousands of care communities in the US and Canada.
Prajit Nanu
Prajit Nanu is the co-founder and CEO of Nium, the Singapore-born fintech unicorn that has quietly become the plumbing behind global money movement for banks, airlines, and digital platforms. Starting with a frustrating attempt to wire INR 40,000 for a friend's bachelor party in Phuket, he built what is now a $1.4 billion payments infrastructure company processing over $8 billion annually across 190+ countries in 100 currencies. A commerce graduate from Mumbai with a sales background rather than a fintech pedigree, Nanu turned that outsider status into competitive advantage - building what incumbents told him was impossible.
Ganesh Shankar
Ganesh Shankar is the co-founder and CEO of Responsive (formerly RFPIO), a strategic response management platform that helps companies answer RFPs, security questionnaires, and due diligence requests faster. He started the company in 2015 with two colleagues after growing frustrated that responding to proposals ate up nearly a third of his time as a product manager. Under his leadership the company grew to more than 550 employees and 2,000+ customers, including dozens of Fortune 100 firms, while raising only about $27 million.
Geoff Schneider
Geoff Schneider is the co-founder and CEO of GoSaga, a Norwalk, Connecticut holding company that acquires and scales franchised brands across wellness, beauty, and fitness. He founded the personalized-stretching studio brand LYMBR and runs the early-stage investment platform Cava Capital, drawing on more than 25 years operating and investing in consumer brands. Under his 'efficient franchisor' thesis, GoSaga has assembled a portfolio including LYMBR, VIO Med Spa, FitLab, and Squeeze Massage that shares services and vendor scale across roughly a dozen states.
Jack Groetzinger
Jack Groetzinger is the co-founder and CEO of SeatGeek, the mobile-first ticketing platform he started in 2009 to make buying and selling tickets for sports, concerts and theater simpler and more transparent. Under his leadership SeatGeek has raised roughly $400 million, reached a valuation above $1 billion, and won primary-ticketing deals with Major League Soccer, the Dallas Cowboys, the Brooklyn Nets and dozens of Broadway theaters. A Dartmouth economics graduate and serial entrepreneur, Groetzinger has become one of the most vocal challengers to Ticketmaster's dominance, testifying before the U.S. Senate on competition in live-event ticketing.
John Eielson
John Eielson is co-CEO and co-founder of FlatWorld, a Boston-based digital-first publisher that sells college textbooks for roughly $25 to $40 to make higher education more affordable. A former U.S. Coast Guard officer turned strategy consultant, he and longtime business partner Alastair Adam acquired the assets of Flat World Knowledge in 2016 and rebuilt it around a simple idea: instructors matter, and quality and affordability do not have to be a tradeoff. Today FlatWorld's titles are used by professors at more than 2,000 colleges and universities.
Justin Yoshimura
Justin Yoshimura is the founder, chairman, and CEO of CSC Generation, an AI-native retail holding company that acquires and modernizes established brands such as Sur La Table, Z Gallerie, and One Kings Lane. A high-school dropout who built a million-dollar cell-phone marketplace as a teenager, he went on to found the Y Combinator-backed loyalty platform 500friends (acquired by Merkle in 2014) and made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Today he runs CSC Generation as a Constellation Software-style roll-up, buying distressed retailers and rebuilding them on data, automation, and CSC's proprietary Genesis platform.
Karl Kipke
Karl Kipke is the founder and CEO of HealthGrowth Pharmacy Solutions, an Austin, Texas company that gives independent and community pharmacies a single ecosystem of lending, advisory, group purchasing, and transition services. A former Wall Street banker who spent 11 years at Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns before turning to venture investing, Kipke built HealthGrowth Capital into a direct lender for pharmacies and closed a $16.8 million debt-and-equity financing package in April 2020 to expand its reach to independent pharmacy owners across the United States.
Kevin Creusy
Kevin Creusy is the co-founder and co-CEO of Upfluence, an influencer marketing software company he built with Vivien Garnes starting in 2012. What began as an agency that sent products to bloggers for reviews grew into a SaaS platform serving more than 1,600 brands, blending influencer discovery, campaign management, payments and eCommerce tools. A serial entrepreneur who launched his first company at 20, Creusy leads product and eCommerce strategy at Upfluence and has pushed the company toward AI-assisted creator outreach and revenue-driven influencer marketing.
Matt Barber
Matt Barber is Chief Executive Officer of Sera Systems, a Dallas-based SaaS company building field service management software for HVAC, plumbing, and electrical contractors. He came up through operating roles at 4th & 1 Ventures, SHREDmill, and Local Favorite Restaurants before joining Sera, where he rose into the CEO seat following the company's Series B, a round financed largely by home services contractors themselves.
Mike Love
Mike Love is the CEO and a founding team member of Fintiv, an Austin-based fintech that builds patented digital wallet infrastructure bridging traditional finance, loyalty, and Web3. A computer scientist by training and a career-long payments architect, he helped lead technology transformation at First Data (Fiserv) before joining Fintiv in 2012, and also founded Cloud Payments Network. He describes himself as a serial technology entrepreneur with over four decades in TMT and work across 75+ countries.
Dan Martell
Dan Martell is a Canadian entrepreneur, angel investor, and coach who built and sold three software companies before turning his attention to teaching other founders how to scale. He is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Buy Back Your Time, the founder of the SaaS coaching business SaaS Academy, and an early backer of companies including Intercom, Udemy, and Hootsuite. He now runs Martell Ventures, a studio focused on AI-driven software, and reaches millions across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok with content on time, hiring, and business systems.
Yoni Shtein
Yoni Shtein is the CEO and co-founder of Laguna Health, a New York and Tel Aviv company building conversational AI copilots for payer care teams. Born in Chisinau and raised across continents, he moved from an elite Israeli Air Force unit to writing code at Microsoft, then to running more than half a billion dollars of investments before turning entrepreneur. Laguna landed on TIME's Best Inventions of 2024. Shtein pairs an investor's skepticism with a runner's stamina and an immigrant's comfort with the unfamiliar.
Ariel Quinones
Ariel Quinones is the co-founder and co-CEO of Ironhack, a global tech bootcamp he launched in Madrid in 2013 with Gonzalo Manrique after the two met at Wharton. Raised in a Puerto Rican family of educators, he spotted a mismatch he could not unsee: youth unemployment above 50% in Spain sitting beside hundreds of thousands of unfilled tech jobs. Ironhack was his answer - short, intensive, outcomes-obsessed training that has since graduated thousands of career-changers across campuses in Europe, the Americas, and beyond. He now leads from Miami, preaching a gospel of ruthless focus on student outcomes and over-delivering on what people expect.
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.
Jody Glidden
Jody Glidden is the Founder and CEO of Postilize, a Miami Beach-based AI platform that introduced a new software category called Proactive Relationship Management (PRM) for law firms and professional services. A serial entrepreneur with five ventures and four exits, Glidden previously co-founded Introhive — which grew to a near-$500M valuation, 350+ employees, and 40x returns for early investors — before stepping back in 2022 to build Postilize. Rooted in his conviction that law firms lose clients not from poor service but from poor follow-through, Glidden is building AI that surfaces client opportunities before an RFP ever appears, drafts outreach in each partner's authentic voice, and demands zero data entry from its users.
Joe Colangelo
Joe Colangelo is the Founder and CEO of Boxcar Transit, a luxury commuter bus and parking marketplace company he started in 2016 by renting out his own Cranford, NJ driveway for $2/day. A U.S. Navy veteran, UC Berkeley political science graduate, and former President of Consumers' Research, Colangelo built Boxcar into a profitable suburban mobility platform serving 21 New Jersey towns with named luxury bus routes to Midtown Manhattan, nearly 600,000 reservations across 7 years, and a parking network of 1,500+ spaces across 4+ states - positioning the company as the answer to every NJ commuter's prayer during rail strikes, mass transit disruptions, and the general indignities of commuting by train.
John Crowley
John Francis Crowley is the President & CEO of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), the world's largest biotech trade association with 1,100+ member companies in 30+ countries. A Georgetown and Harvard Business School alumnus, Navy Reserve veteran who served in Afghanistan, and author of 'Chasing Miracles,' Crowley co-founded Novazyme Pharmaceuticals - which sold to Genzyme for ~$175-200 million - and later built Amicus Therapeutics from a 5-person startup into a global biopharmaceutical company. His life story inspired the 2010 CBS Films feature 'Extraordinary Measures,' in which Brendan Fraser portrayed him alongside Harrison Ford. Since taking the helm at BIO in March 2024, he has repositioned the organization around U.S. biotech competitiveness, FDA modernization, and patient advocacy.
Allen Hao
Allen Hao is the founder and CEO of CL Global Academy, an international education company he co-founded in 2009 with Katrina Hao after the two met in Cambridge. From offices in the UK, Shanghai, and the US, the academy runs its 'OxCam Programmes' - short, project-based academic courses taught in Cambridge colleges by University-affiliated faculty. Hao has called himself an entrepreneur since age 16 and built the company without external funding into a profitable business serving over 1,500 students a year, with a claimed 24,000-plus alumni. Internally he goes by the title 'Chief Student-Centered Officer.' Born in Shanghai and splitting time between Cambridge and Madison, Wisconsin, he completed a Master's at the University of Cambridge from 2023 to 2025.
Dirk Buikema
Dirk Buikema is the founder and CEO of Hyperwear, an Austin-based functional fitness company he started in 2011. A former corporate attorney and semiconductor strategist turned inventor, he holds multiple US patents for training gear including the SandBell sandbag, the Hyper Vest adjustable weighted vest, and the SteelBell. Under his lean, research-driven, direct-to-consumer approach, Hyperwear grew 85% from 2022 to 2024 and landed on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies.
Peter Yorke
Peter Yorke is the CEO and co-founder of Voyomotive, a San Francisco connected-car company whose VOYO device turns an ordinary car's OBD-II port into a smartphone-controlled second brain. A native Californian who has worn the hats of scientist, venture capitalist, and serial entrepreneur, Yorke built a platform that locks doors by proximity, reads manufacturer fault codes, logs trips, and crowdsources road-hazard alerts. VOYO swept the 2015 SEMA show awards and exhibited as one of the most advanced after-market connected-car systems at CES 2016.
Satayan Mahajan
Satayan Mahajan is the founding CEO of Datalign Advisory, a Cambridge, Massachusetts fintech that matches Americans with vetted fiduciary financial advisors using AI and human-centered design. An MIT alumnus and Media Lab pioneer, he spent two decades building motion-capture and gaming companies (Motus, iClub) before an eight-year run at Amazon as a GM and Head of Product. He returned to startup mode in 2024 when Cogo Labs founder Dave Blundin recruited him to lead Datalign, which has since referred more than $80 billion in assets across thousands of advisors.
Walt Weyler
Walt Weyler is a Portland, Oregon entrepreneur and chemical engineer who turned a career running factories into a second act buying, fixing, and building industrial companies. He is President and CEO of SequenceUSA, a private holding and lending company that backs Pacific Northwest manufacturing and technology firms, and President and Managing Director of Clarus LLC (Clarus Water Solutions), a water-filtration and stormwater venture spun from his work at Crystal Clear Technologies. Before founding his own companies he co-owned Kinetics, a metal-injection-molding shop he grew from a struggling $3M operation to roughly 100 employees and sold to mining giant Phelps Dodge. He sits on the Supply Chain & Logistics Management Advisory Council at Oregon State University's College of Business.
Adam Harris
Adam Harris is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudbeds, the hospitality management platform he started in 2012 with Richard Castle after a sketchy reservation experience at a Brazilian pousada. From a back-of-the-napkin idea, he built Cloudbeds into a fully remote company of 700+ people across 40+ countries that powers tens of thousands of lodging properties in more than 150 countries. A former Wall Street investment banker turned serial entrepreneur, Harris has built and sold multiple companies, traveled to more than 51 countries, and is now steering Cloudbeds through the AI era while championing a no-office culture.
Eric Berridge
Eric Berridge is a 23-year Salesforce ecosystem veteran and CEO of Coastal, a premier Salesforce consultancy he joined in 2020 and took the helm of in September 2023. He previously co-founded Bluewolf in 2000 - one of the first Salesforce-focused consulting firms - and built it to a major acquisition by IBM in 2016. A TED speaker, two-time author, and MFA-holder in creative writing who never studied computer science, Berridge argues that the humanities are tech's most underrated competitive advantage. Under his leadership, Coastal was acquired by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for $700 million in January 2026, the largest professional services acquisition in Salesforce ecosystem history.
Pieter de Villiers
Pieter de Villiers is the Co-Founder and CEO of Clickatell, the company that invented the world's first SMS API in 2000 with four lines of code and went on to pioneer chat banking and chat commerce globally. Based in Stellenbosch, South Africa, he led Clickatell to become the first African startup backed by Sequoia Capital, raised over $118 million in total funding, and built a platform that processes roughly 9 billion messages monthly for more than 10,000 enterprise clients across 220+ countries. He also chairs SiMODiSA, a non-profit focused on digital skills development and startup acceleration in Africa.
David Haisha Chen
David Haisha Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Strikingly, a Y Combinator-backed website builder that lets anyone publish a mobile-optimized site in minutes. He left the University of Chicago in 2012 to move to Silicon Valley with co-founders Dafeng Guo and Teng Bao, was rejected by Y Combinator on the first try, got in on the second, and built a company that became the first Chinese startup to graduate from YC. He runs Strikingly with a product-first, superfan-driven philosophy from offices split between Shanghai and San Francisco.
Nicole Pekerman
Nicole Pekerman is a brand marketer turned founder who spent 17+ years steering billion-dollar names like Tim Hortons, Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Wonder Bread before launching Paid Workout, a fitness-motivation app that pays people to move. Today she runs Health Collective LLC as CEO and Chief Wellness Officer, hosts The Healthy Pod, and builds wellness products aimed squarely at women. Her work fuses big-brand marketing instincts with a community-first take on motivation and gamified habit-building.