forbes-next-1000
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Alicia Tulsee
Alicia Tulsee is the founder and CEO of Moxie Scrubs, the direct-to-consumer apparel brand for nurses she built out of the Harvard Innovation Labs, and now Moxie360, an AI workforce platform aimed at nurse burnout and retention. A daughter of Trinidadian immigrants raised in Queens, she sold costume jewelry at a flea market at 19, talked her way into marketing jobs in India, and stitched together an unconventional path that ended in an economics degree from Harvard. She is not a nurse herself; she built a brand for them because nurses cared for her dying father, and she designed Moxie 'for nurses, by nurses' by collaborating with the people who wear the clothes. She raised about $2.4M in pre-seed funding in 2022 and was named to the Forbes Next 1000.
Nick Anastasiades
Nick Anastasiades is the co-founder and CEO of Benji, a New York-based startup building a universal API for loyalty partnerships - what the industry calls the 'Plaid for loyalty.' Benji lets airlines, hotels, retailers and consumer brands link their rewards systems so members can earn and redeem points across companies, collapsing integrations that once took a year into a matter of days. In May 2026 the company raised a $6.25M seed round and counts JetBlue, CookUnity, 1-800-Flowers and Chip City among a network representing more than 50 million members. Benji is the third company Nick has built with co-founders Jon Elron and Arik Gaisler, following 2ndKitchen, the B2B virtual-kitchen platform acquired by REEF Technology in 2021. Raised in Beirut and trained at UC Berkeley and Northwestern, he is a Forbes Next 1000 entrepreneur and a Chicago Innovation Award winner.
Brooks Powell
Brooks Powell is the founder and CEO of Cheers (formerly Thrive+), a Houston-based consumer health brand built around DHM, a plant extract he first read about as a Princeton sophomore writing a neuroscience paper on alcohol. He licensed a permeabilizer technology from the university, launched in 2017, pitched on Shark Tank, and grew the company past $25M in revenue and 13M+ doses sold. A former religion major and Division I swimmer, he turned a class assignment into a category and earned a spot on the Forbes Next 1000 list.