forbes-technology-council
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Rayan Ghandour Is Turning Pharma’s Rolodex Into a Search Engine
A chemistry-and-economics graduate saw pharmaceutical collaboration getting lost in spreadsheets, consultants, and familiar names. Now he is building G LNK to make expertise searchable - and opportunity less dependent on who already knows whom.
Brian Wilson
Brian Wilson is the Chief Executive Officer of Kion, a cloud governance and management software company based in Columbia, Maryland. He was appointed CEO in October 2025 after more than two decades leading SaaS, observability, and customer experience companies, including roles as CEO of Monetate, COO of Kibo Commerce, and Chief Customer Officer at Zenoss. At Kion he is driving a 'FinOps+' strategy that combines cloud cost management, governance, and policy automation for multicloud and AI-driven workloads. He is based in Austin, Texas, and is a member of the Forbes Technology Council.
Clay Ritchey
Clay Ritchey is the Chief Executive Officer of Verato, a Tysons, Virginia healthcare technology company whose referential identity matching platform helps hospitals, life science firms and government agencies resolve who is who across fragmented records. A Penn State electrical engineer and Harvard MBA, he has spent more than two decades building and scaling healthcare software businesses, including a turn as CEO of Evariant, which merged with Healthgrades in 2020. He took the helm at Verato in 2021 and has become a frequent voice on why patient matching sits at the center of healthcare's digital transformation.
David Stein
David Stein is the co-founder and CEO of Ash (formerly Ash Wellness), a New York-based B2B platform that lets healthcare organizations run their own at-home testing programs. He launched the company out of Cornell Tech's MBA program in 2019 after a frustrating personal experience getting sexual health testing, first building a direct-to-consumer brand for the LGBTQ+ community and then pivoting to white-label infrastructure for providers and payers during COVID-19. Today Ash handles kit design, a CLIA/CAP-certified lab network, logistics, and patient-facing software across all 50 states, and has shipped more than a million test kits.
Karthik Bettadapura
Karthik Bettadapura is the co-founder and CEO of DataWeave, an AI-powered SaaS platform that delivers competitive intelligence to retailers and consumer brands. Founded in 2011 in Bengaluru with co-founder Vikranth Ramanolla, DataWeave aggregates and analyzes billions of unstructured data points across the web - tracking prices, assortment, and digital-shelf performance for enterprise clients. Karthik leads product vision and business development, and drove the company's pivot from India to the US market. An IIIT-Bangalore engineer who earlier helped build CNBC's Web18, he now runs DataWeave from the Austin, Texas area.
Micah Remley
Micah Remley is the CEO of Robin, a Boston-based workplace platform for hybrid offices - meeting room booking, desk hoteling, wayfinding, and space analytics. He took the top job in January 2022 after selling MineralTree to Global Payments, and previously helped scale energy-management software company EnerNOC from startup to Nasdaq. He is a Yale SOM MBA, a University of Maine ecology grad, and a member of the Forbes Technology Council.
Nicolai Baldin
Nicolai Baldin is the co-founder and CEO of Synthesized, a London and New York-based DataOps and AI-powered test data automation platform he launched after a PhD in machine learning and statistics at the University of Cambridge. Synthesized generates synthetic, compliant, production-like data that enterprises use to test software, train models, and share information across regulatory boundaries. In September 2025 the company raised a $20M Series A led by Redalpine to expand into automated software testing for the age of 'vibe coding.'
Shameel Abdulla
Shameel Abdulla is the co-founder and CEO of Clootrack, an AI-driven Voice of Customer analytics platform used by enterprises to convert billions of customer conversations into decisions. A serial entrepreneur out of Bangalore, he previously built the mobile studio Kode Blink and the local-grocery marketplace Jiffstore, which PepperTap acquired in 2015. He started Clootrack with Subbakrishna Rao in 2017 and raised a $4M Series A led by Inventus Capital India in 2021.
Shubh Sinha
Shubh Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of Integral Privacy Technologies, a San Francisco company that certifies, transforms, and activates privacy-regulated data (HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA) for healthcare and other regulated industries. Integral compresses compliance workflows that once took months into hours. Before Integral, Sinha led regulated-data product work at LiveRamp. He is a Purdue-trained computer engineer, an angel investor, and a Forbes Technology Council member. In July 2026 the company raised its Series A, bringing total funding to about $25M.
Stephanie Feraday
Stephanie Feraday is President and CEO of aPriori Technologies, a Concord, Massachusetts digital manufacturing simulation software company, where she has spent nearly 17 years steering the business from the 2009 financial crisis through a Series D funding round, turning cost and sustainability estimation for manufacturers into a cloud SaaS platform used across aerospace, automotive, and industrial sectors.
Nihal Advani
Nihal Advani is the founder and CEO of QualSights, a Chicago-based insights technology platform that helps global brands decode real-world human behavior through live video, mobile ethnography, sensors and AI. A former internationally ranked junior tennis player from India who came to the US on a full scholarship, he cut his teeth at Google and Microsoft before founding the travel startup Georama in 2012, then pivoting it into QualSights in 2018. On roughly $3.5M raised over a decade, he built one of America's fastest growing market research companies, ranked by Inc. as the fastest growing company in Illinois.
Kam Eshghi
Kam Eshghi is Chief Business Officer at OpenInfer, the Inference OS for the agentic era. He co-founded Lightbits Labs, where he helped pioneer NVMe/TCP storage and drove its adoption across data centers and AI clouds before the company was acquired by NVIDIA. Earlier in his career he led strategic alliances at DSSD (acquired by EMC for $1B), built the NVMe controller business at IDT, and shaped server chipset and Ethernet switch roadmaps at Intel. MIT EECS and Berkeley Haas MBA. Forbes Technology Council member.
Gerry Poirier
Gerry Poirier is the founder and CEO of AngeLink, billed as the world's first social crowdfunding platform powered by women. After more than two decades on Wall Street trading floors at Credit Suisse and Lazard, where she was often the only woman in the room, she built an AI-driven, fraud-resistant fundraising platform that has grown to roughly 55,000 active users across 100 currencies and raised over $7.3 million in seed funding. A Wharton-trained, globe-trotting risk-taker based in Naples, Florida, she also runs the AngeLink Community Foundation, a 501(c)(3) making direct impact grants.
Vinay Goel
Vinay Goel is the CEO and co-founder of Wald.ai, a Palo Alto startup building contextual data-loss protection for the age of generative AI. After more than 30 years in product and technology - a decade at Google leading Maps and Local, then top product roles at JLL, Kiavi, Check Point and Webroot - he co-founded Wald.ai in 2024 to solve the 'shadow AI' problem: employees feeding sensitive company data into ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Wald.ai redacts sensitive data inline, lets the AI answer, then restores the original context before the user sees it. He raised a $4M seed round in December 2024 and sits on the Forbes Technology Council.
Samuel Ethiopia
Samuel Ethiopia is the CEO and co-founder of DocSpera, a Silicon Valley surgical coordination platform used by thousands of surgeons and 300-plus health systems to synchronize the messy stretch between a surgical decision and a patient's recovery. A chemical engineer turned strategy consultant turned operator, he carried a Kellogg MMM dual degree and stints at Dow, Eli Lilly, PwC's Strategy&, and Yahoo into the operating room's back office, where he now bets that real-time, AI-driven data can make surgery run on time. He also co-founded The Par Fund to back underrepresented entrepreneurs.
Luke Han
Luke Han is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kyligence, the enterprise data analytics company built by the team that created Apache Kylin - the first Apache Software Foundation top-level project developed in China. A former eBay big data product lead, Han co-invented Apache Kylin in 2013, open-sourced it in 2014, then founded Kyligence in 2016 to commercialize the technology. Under his leadership, Kyligence raised $110M+ in funding including a $70M Series D, serves clients including UBS, McDonald's, and L'OREAL, and has evolved into an AI-powered metrics platform. Han is also a Microsoft Regional Director, Apache Kylin VP, Forbes Technology Council member, and Fortune China 40 Under 40 honoree.
John Pritchard
Dr. John Pritchard is the CEO of Radiant Logic, where he leads a platform that unifies identity data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments for Fortune 500 enterprises. With a PhD in open innovation in AI from the University of Denver and over 25 years spanning Lockheed Martin, IBM, Adobe, and Okta, Pritchard joined Radiant Logic in 2022 as Chief Product Officer and expanded the company from a virtual directory provider into an AI-powered Identity Security Posture Management platform - before being appointed CEO in January 2025. He is a Forbes Technology Council contributor, Identiverse keynote speaker, and a vocal advocate for treating identity data as a strategic organizational asset.
Mika Newton
Mika Newton is the CEO of xCures Inc., an Oakland-based AI company transforming how cancer patients and oncologists navigate clinical data. With over two decades in life sciences and health technology, she leads a platform that automatically retrieves, structures, and surfaces medical records to support real-world evidence generation and precision oncology - helping patients find clinical trials and helping researchers capture regulatory-grade data at scale.
Oleg Lola
Oleg Lola is the CEO and founder of MobiDev, a custom software development company he built from a startup in 2009 into a 334-person global operation serving clients across healthcare, retail, fintech, and beyond. Based in San Francisco and known for his pragmatic take on AI adoption, Lola is also a Forbes Technology Council member and co-founder of Treegress, an autonomous QA startup launched in 2023. He's the kind of engineer-turned-executive who will tell you straight up that AI is 'heavily overhyped' - and then show you exactly how to use it anyway.
Saleel Awsare
Saleel Awsare is President and CEO of Lantronix, the Irvine, California-based provider of compute, connect and management solutions for the intelligent edge. He took the top job in November 2023 after a quarter-century run that included senior leadership posts at Synaptics, Conexant Systems and Nuvoton Technology Corporation America. Under his watch, Lantronix has been repositioning from a networking-hardware vendor into a full-stack edge-AI and 'Physical AI' systems player, with drone, smart-city and industrial IoT deployments leading the pivot.
Sean Behr
Sean Behr is the CEO of Fountain, the San Francisco-based hiring platform that moves frontline and hourly workers from application to onboarded in minutes. Before Fountain he founded Stratim (acquired by KAR) and helped scale Adap.tv into AOL. He has spent two decades turning Series A and B companies into acquisition stories, and now spends his time arguing that high-volume hiring is where AI actually earns its keep.
Karan Kanwar
Karan Kanwar is the co-founder and CEO of Wing Assistant, a managed virtual assistant marketplace that grew from his UC Irvine dorm room to over 1,000 employees across 8 countries and $20 million in annual revenue. Born in Mumbai and raised in Hong Kong, Kanwar speaks five languages, started coding at age 8, and previously consulted for Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and the United Nations before building Wing into one of the fastest-growing B2B staffing platforms in the US.
Prem Kiran
Prem Kiran is the Founder and CEO of Hypersonix Inc., an agentic AI platform that helps retail and commerce businesses maximize profit through autonomous pricing, forecasting, and promotion optimization. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years in enterprise technology, Kiran previously served as Global VP at SAP, founded and exited CLYP Technology, and held C-suite roles at Fishbowl before building Hypersonix into a $200M-valued company backed by B Capital, Intel Capital, and investor Gokul Rajaram. His ProfitGPT platform now makes over 100,000 autonomous daily pricing decisions across 5M+ SKUs for 100+ retail brands.