Pedro Coelho is the founder and CEO of Biorce, a Barcelona-based health AI company building software that designs and manages clinical trials in minutes instead of months. A Portuguese entrepreneur with over eight years in life sciences consulting, he started Biorce after a clinical trial bought his father, who was dying of melanoma, ten extra months of life. In February 2026 the company closed a $52M Series A led by DST Global, the largest Series A in Iberian healthtech and AI, backed by angels including the CEOs of Mistral, Revolut, OutSystems and Seedtag.
Peter Martin is the co-founder, President and CEO of Siesta Medical, a Los Gatos medical device company building minimally invasive treatments for obstructive sleep apnea that need no masks and no machines. Since 2009 he has guided the company from an idea to FDA-cleared products - the Encore System, the Revolution Suture Passer and the AIRLIFT hyoid suspension procedure - that reposition the airway with two small implants and a stitch. A Duke and Stanford trained mechanical engineer, he spent 15-plus years in medical device operations before turning Siesta into one of the most-cited names in surgical sleep apnea care.
Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, the company putting AI data centers into orbit. In November 2025 his team flew an Nvidia H100 GPU to space aboard Starcloud-1, then trained the first large language model off-planet. Five months later the company raised a $170M Series A and became the fastest unicorn in Y Combinator history. A British applied mathematician and ex-McKinsey space-agency consultant, Johnston argues the cheapest place to build a gigawatt-scale data center is no longer Earth - it is low Earth orbit, where sunlight is free and the cold of space does the cooling.
Rajen Sheth is the CEO and co-founder of Kyron Learning, a public benefit company using AI to give every student access to high-quality one-on-one teaching. Before founding Kyron, he spent 17 years at Google, where he was the original product manager behind Google Apps (now Workspace), launched Chromebooks for Education, and rose to Vice President of Google Cloud AI and Industry Solutions. A Stanford-trained engineer who once pitched enterprise Gmail to Eric Schmidt and got turned down, he has built tools used by millions of businesses and hundreds of millions of students, then walked away from big tech to chase a teacher-shaped problem he has carried since sixth grade.
Rashad Hossain is the founder and CEO of RYZE Superfoods, the mushroom coffee brand he started in his mother's basement in March 2020 and grew into a multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer company. A Harvard economics graduate who quit a brand-marketing job at Kraft Heinz to build a coffee he would actually want to drink, he blended six functional mushrooms with organic arabica into a product that has racked up more than 175,000 customer reviews. He earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list in 2022. Before RYZE he founded Keepspace, a social journaling platform that won a $50K Harvard innovation award and later became the HOW I RYZE gratitude app.
Rebecca Krauthamer is the co-founder and CEO of QuSecure, a San Mateo company building software that lets governments and banks swap out their encryption before quantum computers learn to break it. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who jumped from AI to quantum in 2017, she turned a U.S. Air Force grant into a Series A-funded leader in post-quantum cryptography, counting the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Banco Sabadell among its users. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and World Economic Forum council member, she argues cybersecurity is a mission for humanity, not just a product category.
Reza Javan is the CEO and co-founder of Telescope, a London-based AI prospecting platform that automates B2B outbound across email and LinkedIn. Before he sold software to salespeople, he was Dr. Reza Rezaei Javan, an Oxford DPhil microbiologist who sequenced thousands of pneumococcal genomes and discovered new families of antimicrobial peptides. He swapped the lab bench for a startup at Entrepreneur First's LD17 cohort, where Telescope was born in 2021. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Soma Capital and Entrepreneur First.
Richard Gerstein is the Chairman and CEO of Cargomatic, the marketplace that matches local and regional freight with the trucks already driving past it. He grew up on the docks of his father's less-than-truckload business in Chicago, founded the multi-modal logistics software company IntelliTrans, and since 2017 has rebuilt Cargomatic into a leading provider of local LTL, drayage, and white glove freight services. He pairs a UC Berkeley transportation engineering background with a lifetime spent around loading docks.
Robert Mallernee is the founder and CEO of Eton Solutions, the Research Triangle Park company behind AtlasFive, an integrated, cloud-native, AI-driven platform that runs the back office for more than 1,000 of the world's wealthiest families. A CFA with three-plus decades in ultra-high-net-worth wealth management, he built the software inside a real multi-family office (Eton Advisors) before spinning it out to sell to the rest of the industry. His pitch is blunt: spreadsheets are 'separate-sheets,' and the modern family office needs one system, not a hundred. In 2025 Eton closed a $58M Series C to push AtlasFive and EtonAI deeper into private equity, funds and global private banks.
Robert Smithson is the founder and CEO of Just (just.insure), a Los Angeles pay-per-mile auto insurer that prices drivers on how they actually drive instead of credit scores and zip codes. A Cambridge philosophy graduate and former fund manager, he previously built Genius Sports (sold for $280M in 2018) and the Python platform PythonAnywhere before turning telematics and AI loose on the $300-billion car-insurance market - aiming squarely at making coverage fairer for lower-income drivers.
Bobby Farahi is the co-founder and CEO of Dolls Kill, the San Francisco alternative-fashion brand he built with his wife and co-founder Shaudi 'Shoddy' Lynn after the two met at a Los Angeles rave. A serial operator who earlier founded and sold the broadcast-monitoring company Multivision, Farahi turned a stack of foxtail keychains in an apartment into a Sequoia- and Maveron-backed e-commerce label for self-described 'misfits and miss legits.' He also invests as an angel in e-commerce and lifestyle companies.
Robin Berzin is the founder and CEO of Parsley Health, a holistic, root-cause medical practice she launched in 2016 to make functional medicine modern, data-driven, and reachable online nationwide. A Columbia-trained physician who started out chasing securities fraud as a paralegal at the U.S. Attorney's office, she co-founded the doctor-messaging app Cureatr in medical school before building Parsley into one of the largest functional medicine practices in the country. She is the author of State Change, a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer, and one of Inc.'s 100 most innovative women in business.
Zubin Koticha is the CEO and cofounder of Raindrop, a San Francisco startup building observability and alerting for AI agents, often described as 'Sentry for AI.' Before Raindrop, he cofounded Opyn, the DeFi options platform that pioneered the power perpetual (Squeeth), crossed $15B+ in volume, and was acquired by Coinbase. A UC Berkeley alum who taught himself to code there, he pairs a fascination with esoteric financial derivatives with bachata, deadlifting, and obscure geography trivia.
Saad Umar is the founder and lead engineer of Appzay, a mobile app development agency that turns funded startup ideas into shipped iOS and Android products. Working out of Karachi with a globally distributed team, he positions himself less as a vendor and more as a technical co-founder, owning everything from product strategy and native Swift/Kotlin engineering to App Store deployment. His shop has built and shaped apps used by millions, including the official Inter Miami CF app and the driving-rewards app OnMyWay.
Raheel Zubairi is a Pakistani-born, Malaysia-based technology founder and product builder who has bounced from mobile games to fintech to deep-tech medical imaging. He is the CEO of Pixelence, a Cyberjaya startup using AI to produce contrast-like brain scans without injected dyes, which won the Deep-X track of the 2025 Selangor Twin Accelerator. Before that he founded the mobile gaming studio The Game Loop and led BMN Enterprise Solutions, and he has logged stints around Antler, MYPINPAD, EBP and GoodCore Software as an AI/ML product manager working across the Web2 and Web3 worlds.
Ron Cohen, M.D., is a biotech entrepreneur with a 30-year record of building companies that ship medicines for the nervous system. He founded Acorda Therapeutics in 1995 from his apartment and grew it into a public company that brought multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's therapies to market. After Acorda's sale to Merz in 2024, he evaluated roughly two dozen startups before taking the CEO seat at Oryon Cell Therapies in March 2026, a Belmont, Massachusetts company developing autologous neuron replacement therapy for Parkinson's. He is a past Chair of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO).
Roy Mill is the Co-Founder and CEO of Joshu, a no-code insurance product platform that lets carriers and MGAs launch digital distribution channels in weeks rather than years. A Stanford PhD economist who pivoted into product, he spent years at Ancestry and At-Bay before founding Joshu in 2020. The company has raised $11.7M in total funding and was named to the InsurTech100 list in 2024.
Ross Guberman is the founder and CEO of BriefCatch, a Word-native AI legal-writing platform used by 50+ AmLaw 200 firms, courts, and federal judges. A bestselling author of Point Made and Point Taken and president of Legal Writing Pro, he has trained thousands of lawyers and judges to write more clearly and persuasively, then built software to do it at scale. In December 2025 BriefCatch closed a $6M Series A led by Full In.
Russell Beckerman is a biotech entrepreneur and Co-Founder & CEO of Overture Therapeutics, a Cambridge-based company engineering precision antibody medicines targeting obesity and metabolic dysfunction. He previously co-founded 82VS, a venture studio embedded within Alloy Therapeutics that has launched nine drug companies since 2020. His work sits at the intersection of cutting-edge antibody biology, company creation, and the conviction that the next generation of obesity drugs will be antibodies - not peptides.
Rui Jing Jiang is the Founder and CEO of Avisi Technologies, a Redwood City-based clinical-stage medical device company developing VisiPlate, the world's thinnest freestanding ophthalmic implant for treating glaucoma. Built on University of Pennsylvania nanotechnology, VisiPlate is a multichannel aqueous shunt composed of alumina and Parylene-C that is 20 times thinner than a human hair. Rui Jing co-founded the company in 2017 as a junior at Penn's Wharton School, won the $100,000 President's Innovation Prize in 2018, secured FDA Investigational Device Exemption approval in October 2025 for the US SAPPHIRE trial, and closed a $10.7M Series A in February 2026 to advance pivotal clinical development.
Sage Wohns is the CEO and Co-Founder of Jericho Security, a New York-based AI cybersecurity company that trains humans and AI systems to defend against AI-powered attacks including hyper-realistic phishing, deepfakes, and voice cloning. A Seattle native and 10-year AI industry veteran, Wohns previously built and led Agolo, a Google- and Microsoft-backed NLP summarization company, before co-founding Jericho Security in 2023. The company made history by winning the Pentagon's first-ever generative AI defense contract through AFWERX in December 2023, and has since raised $18M in total funding, including a $15M Series A in April 2025. With 39 employees and 30+ enterprise clients, Jericho Security is at the frontier of AI-versus-AI cyber defense.
Salman Ahmad is the co-founder and CEO of Mosaic, a Phoenix-based, tech-enabled general contractor reinventing how build-to-rent homes get planned and built. He grew up in a construction household, then stacked degrees in computer science from Arizona State, Stanford, and a PhD from MIT before deciding the most interesting unsolved software problem was the most analog industry there is: pouring foundations and framing walls. Mosaic's software platform, Mosaic Hub, coordinates contractors, schedules, and payments so homebuilders can offload construction the way startups offloaded servers to AWS.
Salomon Serfati is the co-founder and CEO of Chariot, the New York fintech building payment rails for the $326 billion donor-advised fund market. Its flagship product, DAFpay, turned the clunky multi-step process of donating from a DAF into a three-click checkout button now live on over 100,000 nonprofit donation forms, from the American Cancer Society to GoFundMe, and was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025. A University of Pennsylvania computer scientist and former BlackRock engineer who opened a separate 10%-of-income charity account with his first paycheck, Serfati turned a personal tithing habit into financial infrastructure for giving.
Sam Holliday is the co-founder and CEO of Oshi Health, the first nationwide virtual GI center of excellence, built on value-based, whole-person care. A digital health operator since 2013, he scaled companies across diabetes management, patient acquisition and population health before launching Oshi in 2019. In October 2024 the company raised a $60M Series C led by Oak HC/FT, reaching all 50 states and more than 40 million in-network members.
Sara Polon is the co-founder and CEO of Soupergirl, the Washington, DC plant-based soup company she launched in 2008 with her mother Marilyn (a.k.a. Soupermom). A former stand-up comedian who once led tours through the Middle East, she turned a reading of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma into a mission to fix a broken food system one bowl at a time. Soupergirl survived a no-deal turn on Shark Tank, raised a $2M Series A from sustainability investors, became the first brand to earn Fair Food Program certification, went plastic-neutral, and now sells in hundreds of retailers including Whole Foods, Costco and Kroger.
Sameer Al-Sakran is the co-founder and CEO of Metabase, the open-source business intelligence tool that grew into an 8-figure ARR company used by more than 70,000 organizations. He spent four years building Metabase without charging a dollar, then turned it into a product-led growth case study by burying a single call-to-action deep in the admin panel and letting the software sell itself. A career machine-learning and data person, he worked in data science, engineering, and venture before deciding the world needed a simpler way to ask a database a question.
Santiago Rosenblatt broke into PayPal and NBA League Pass at age six, found a marketplace glitch at fourteen that let him buy electronics for the price of shipping, then turned that curiosity into a career defending banks and fintechs. Today he is Founder and CEO of Strike, an AI-led continuous pentesting platform that compresses vulnerability detection from months to hours, protects 120+ companies across 20+ countries, and raised a $13.5M Series A to expand across the U.S. and Brazil.
Sophie Soowon Eom is the co-founder and CEO of Adriel, an AI-powered marketing intelligence and ad-reporting platform used by hundreds of brands and agencies across more than 20 countries. A HEC Paris finance grad turned two-time AI founder, she first built Solidware, a machine-learning credit-scoring startup that landed her on the 2017 Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list, then pivoted to fixing the chaos of cross-channel ad data. She has sat alongside Melinda Gates and Jack Ma on the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation and served on South Korea's Presidential Committee on the 4th Industrial Revolution.
Sergiy Nesterenko is the founder and CEO of Quilter, a Los Angeles company building AI that designs printed circuit boards on its own. A former SpaceX avionics engineer who spent five years on Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy electronics, he watched one of his first boards literally burn up in his hands and decided manual PCB layout was a problem worth a decade. Quilter trains its system on physics and constraints rather than copying human designers, and in 2025 it produced the world's first fully functional computer laid out by AI.
Severence MacLaughlin is the founder and CEO of DeLorean Artificial Intelligence, a Palm Beach-based company building predictive AI products for healthcare and sales. A Cornell-trained scientist with a PhD from the University of Adelaide, he ran AI and data science practices at Cognizant and Capgemini Invent before bootstrapping DeLorean AI with his own savings. The company says its Medical AI was the first to be biologically validated by two independent laboratories, trained on tens of millions of patient records and backed by seven patents. He advises the United Nations and World Health Organization on AI.