Stephanie Lawrence is the co-founder and co-CEO of Traveling Spoon, the marketplace she built to put travelers at a stranger's dinner table around the world. Born from a failed quest to learn dumplings from a Chinese grandmother, the company connects guests with vetted home cooks - 95% of them women - across dozens of countries for private meals, cooking classes, and market tours. A Dartmouth and UC Berkeley Haas MBA who worked with Alice Waters and Google.org before launching, Lawrence turned a travel frustration into a business that funnels income to local women while preserving family recipes that might otherwise vanish.
Solarbiotech is a U.S.-based synthetic biology and biomanufacturing company that helps companies move precision-fermentation products from lab bench to commercial scale. Built around a Norton, Virginia plant with fermentation capacity from 6L to 10,000L and a modular 'BioNodes' architecture, it offers end-to-end strain-to-shelf services - upstream fermentation, downstream processing, and commercial production - for food ingredients, nutraceuticals, cosmetics, enzymes, and industrial bioproducts. After a 2024 Chapter 11 restructuring, its assets were acquired by Pictor Biotech (led by ex-Novozymes executive Peter Rosholm) and unified in January 2025 with GPC Bio and Eleszto Genetika into a vertically integrated, 100+ person SynBio platform.
MarginEdge is a restaurant management software company that turns the back office paperwork of running a restaurant - invoices, food costs, inventory, vendor payments - into real-time, actionable data. Founded in 2015 by restaurant veterans and technologists, the platform digitizes invoices, tracks theoretical vs. actual food costs, delivers daily profit-and-loss reports, and lets operators pay vendor bills with no added fees. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, it now serves more than 10,000 restaurants across the U.S. and Canada.
TurtleTree is a biotech and food-tech company that makes lactoferrin - one of the rarest and most valuable proteins in cow's milk - without the cow. Using precision fermentation, its flagship ingredient LF+ recreates the bioactive milk protein at scale for use in immunity, gut health, sports nutrition and infant nutrition products. In 2025 TurtleTree became the first company in the world to win an FDA 'No Questions' GRAS letter for precision-fermented lactoferrin, clearing it to commercialize in the U.S.
Rian Mc Donnell is the founder and CEO of FloVision Solutions, an AI company putting cameras and sensors on meat-processing lines so beef and poultry plants can see exactly where yield and quality slip away. He grew up around beef processing in rural Ireland, studied mechanical and manufacturing engineering at Trinity College Dublin (with a year at UC Berkeley), and built the company out of a Trinity student project before moving it to the United States via Notre Dame's ESTEEM program and SOSV's IndieBio. Now headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, FloVision has analyzed more than 23 million kilograms of food and raised an $8.7M Series A led by Insight Partners in 2025.
ezCater is the leading U.S. workplace food platform, connecting companies that need to feed teams, meetings and events with a network of more than 100,000 local restaurants and caterers. Founded in Boston in 2007, it turned the messy, phone-and-fax world of office catering into software - online ordering, delivery logistics, billing and analytics - serving everything from a 5-person lunch to a 2,000-person conference. Now a $1.6B company, it has expanded from a transactional marketplace into an enterprise food management platform.
Fork & Good is a Jersey City-based cellular agriculture company growing real meat from animal cells instead of whole animals. Founded by urban-farming entrepreneur Niya Gupta and cultivated-meat pioneer Gabor Forgacs, the company built a pilot factory that produces cultivated pork using a patented bioprocess centered on muscle cells and high-density bioreactors. Its goal is to reach price parity with commodity meat - targeting roughly $2 per pound - while using a fraction of the land and water of conventional farming. In 2025 it acquired California's Orbillion Bio to combine cultivated pork and beef under one global platform spanning North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Brook Mayer is a senior technology executive at OpenTable, the global restaurant reservation and discovery platform owned by Booking Holdings. With over 25 years of experience spanning engineering, product, and executive leadership roles - including stints as CTO, CPO, Chief Architect, and VP of Engineering - Mayer brings a deep technical foundation to the hospitality technology space. Based in San Jose, California, Mayer has been associated with OpenTable's leadership during a period when the company manages millions of diners and tens of thousands of restaurant partners worldwide. The Facebook and Twitter accounts linked to Mayer's profile point to Foodspotting, the restaurant dish-discovery app acquired by OpenTable in 2013 for approximately $10 million, suggesting an involvement with that product's leadership and integration.
Roger Salameh is a General Partner at Swanlaab Venture Factory's AgriFood Fund I, bringing over 30 years of hands-on agribusiness and biotechnology leadership to the venture world. A veteran of Monsanto, Calgene, and Arcadia Biosciences - where he served as interim CEO and then COO - Salameh now deploys capital into early-stage agri-food tech startups from his perch in Napa, California, while simultaneously running DnA Advisory Services, a consultancy helping AgTech and FoodTech companies navigate the path from innovation to commercialization.
Vaseem Anjum is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and CEO of Innowi Inc., a Santa Clara-based restaurant technology company delivering all-in-one POS, kiosk ordering, QR code ordering, and kitchen management solutions to restaurants across the US. Before entering the restaurant tech space, he founded SchoolCity Inc. in 1999, an influential K-12 assessment and personalized learning platform that served nearly 2 million students across 140+ districts before merging into Illuminate Education in 2018. With a hardware engineering background spanning National Semiconductor and NEC Electronics, Anjum brings a rare arc from chip design to edtech exit to hospitality software.