ey-entrepreneur-of-the-year
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Mariano Nunez
Mariano Nunez is the CEO and co-founder of Onapsis, the Boston-based company that pioneered security for the business-critical ERP applications - SAP, Oracle and others - that run the world's largest enterprises. A security researcher turned operator, he was among the first to publicly demonstrate cyberattacks against SAP systems and built the first open-source ERP penetration testing framework. Under his leadership, Onapsis Research Labs has discovered and helped patch more than 1,000 zero-day vulnerabilities, and the company partners directly with SAP as an endorsed application security solution. Nunez has been named EY Entrepreneur of the Year, an MIT Top 35 Innovator Under 35, and a Boston Business Journal 40 Under 40.
Sharon Cunningham
Sharon Cunningham is the CEO and co-founder of Shorla Oncology, a specialty pharmaceutical company she launched in 2018 with Orlaith Ryan out of Clonmel, Ireland, focused on reformulating oncology drugs for women's, orphan, and pediatric cancers. A PwC-trained chartered accountant with an MBA from UCD Smurfit, she relocated from Waterford to Boston in 2021 to lead Shorla's U.S. commercialization, which now includes four FDA-approved products. She was named EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Ireland 2024 (with Ryan) and represented Ireland at the EY World Entrepreneur competition in 2025.
Tanya Bakalov
Tanya Bakalov is the CEO and founder of HelloTeam, a Boston-based employee engagement and performance management platform she started in 2016. A Bulgarian immigrant and University of Delaware accounting graduate, she left Deloitte in 2005 to co-found SevOne, the network monitoring company she scaled with her husband from three people to more than 500 employees and roughly $100M in revenue before its acquisition. A 2016 EY Entrepreneur of the Year and Inc. Female Founders 500 honoree, she raised a $10M Series A led in large part by payroll billionaire Tom Golisano and is pointing HelloTeam at AI-driven employee retention.
Vishal Sunak
Vishal Sunak is a Boston software founder best known for co-founding LinkSquares in 2015 and running it as CEO for a decade, building an AI-powered contract-management platform for in-house legal and finance teams that raised roughly $161 million and grew to around 450 employees. Born in Brazil to Indian parents and raised in Rhode Island, he trained as an engineer, worked on military RF electronics, and cut his teeth in Boston B2B software at Backupify and InsightSquared before starting LinkSquares. He stepped back from the CEO role in early 2025, stayed on as a founding board member and advisor, and is now building a new, largely stealth venture called Joyride (joyride.ai).
Robbins Schrader
Robbins Schrader is the co-founder and CEO of SafeRide Health, a San Antonio-based technology company that runs non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) for the country's largest Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and provider programs. A former US Navy officer and Boston Consulting Group project leader with a Wharton MBA, he started the company in 2016 with his brother Whit Schrader and Ben Salter to fix healthcare's hardest mile: getting vulnerable patients to the care they need. Under his leadership SafeRide now coordinates more than a million rides a year and Schrader was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 Gulf South Award winner.
Gaurav Khandelwal
Gaurav Khandelwal is the founder and CEO of Velostics, a Houston-based logistics SaaS company that automates appointment scheduling, dock and yard management, and the gate in/out process for shippers and carriers. The son of a tea blender from India, he came to the US for college at tiny Goshen College in Indiana, built the behavioral-science software studio ChaiOne into a multi-million-dollar firm starting in 2009, then turned his attention to the friction-filled 'middle mile' of commerce. He launched Velostics to digitize the antiquated handoffs between warehouses and trucks, raised a $2.5M seed round led by Flyover Capital, and is a fixture of Houston's startup ecosystem as the founder of START co-working space and a Houston Exponential board member.
Andrew Barnell
Andrew Barnell is the co-founder and CEO of Geneoscopy, a St. Louis life sciences company that turned a sibling conversation about a missed colonoscopy into ColoSense, the first FDA-approved stool RNA test for colorectal cancer screening. A Cornell economics graduate and Wharton MBA who started in J.P. Morgan's healthcare investment banking group and private equity at Lindsay Goldberg, Barnell paired his finance background with the scientific work of his sister and co-founder Erica Barnell, MD/PhD, to build a company that has raised more than $217 million and earned FDA approval for a noninvasive screening test built on patented RNA biomarker technology.
Todd Watts
Todd Watts is the co-founder and CEO of PatientFi, an Irvine, California fintech that lets patients pay for elective and out-of-pocket healthcare in monthly installments at the point of care. Since starting the company in 2017, he has built a platform that has helped roughly 320,000 patients qualify for more than $3 billion in care across aesthetics, fertility, dentistry, ophthalmology and audiology, reaching a $140 million annual revenue run rate and 130 employees. A former J.P. Morgan investment banker with a Yale MBA, Watts was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 Pacific Southwest winner.
Fedele Bauccio
Fedele Bauccio is co-founder and CEO of Bon Appetit Management Company, the Redwood City onsite restaurant operator that runs more than 1,000 cafes for universities, corporations and museums in 33 states. He built the business in 1987 on a then-heretical pitch - hire trained chefs to cook from scratch for cafeteria diners - and turned it into the contract food industry's most outspoken laboratory for local sourcing, animal welfare and farmworker rights.
Jack Kudale
Jack Kudale is the Founder and CEO of Cowbell, a Pleasanton, California-based AI-powered cyber insurance platform built for small and medium-sized enterprises. After 26 years in enterprise software at companies including CA Technologies and SnapLogic, Kudale founded Cowbell in January 2019 to close the cyber insurability gap for the world's 300 million small businesses. The company has raised $209 million in total funding - including a $60 million Series C from Zurich Insurance Group in 2024 - covers nearly 30,000 SMEs across four countries, and has paid out nearly $250 million in claims. Kudale was named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2023 Bay Area Award Winner and placed Cowbell at #13 on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list.
Dean Drako
Dean Drako is a serial entrepreneur and engineer who has founded more than six companies across cybersecurity, cloud video surveillance, physical access control, and electric vehicles. He invented the IT industry's first spam filter appliance at Barracuda Networks, took the company to a NYSE IPO, then turned his restless attention to cloud video security at Eagle Eye Networks and physical access control at Brivo. In December 2025 he merged both into the world's largest AI cloud-native physical security company, assuming the CEO chair at Brivo. He holds 53+ patents and has won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award twice - a feat as rare as his other hobby: co-founding an electric supercar company.