Amanda Greenberg is the CEO and co-founder of Balloon, a SaaS platform that eliminates groupthink and cognitive bias from team collaboration through anonymous idea submission and merit-based voting. A former public health researcher who developed behavior-change campaigns for the CDC, EPA, and DOE, Greenberg pivoted to tech entrepreneurship after observing how social dynamics suppress good decision-making in rooms full of smart people. She co-founded Balloon in 2015 with her husband and CTO Noah Bornstein, bootstrapped to a Fortune 50 client within 11 months, raised $2.6M in seed funding from investors including Jason Calacanis and Matt Mullenweg, and was named to Inc. Magazine's Female Founders 100 list in 2022. Balloon's advisory board includes Adam Grant, Amy Edmondson, and Daniel Pink.
Alexander Kates is the cofounder and CEO of Vetcove, the free ordering platform that lets veterinary practices, zoos, aquariums and animal welfare groups shop every supplier at once - think Kayak, but for the stuff that keeps animals healthy. He built it with his brother Mitch after watching the inventory manager at their father's equine veterinary practice juggle 30-40 vendor tabs by hand. Before veterinary supply chains, Kates was a digital strategist who advised Fortune 500 companies, taught executives on four continents, and co-wrote a bestselling marketing textbook. Vetcove now employs hundreds and serves a large slice of US veterinary hospitals.
Alexandra Mysoor is the co-founder and CEO of Alix, an AI-powered estate settlement platform built to guide families through the 600-900 hours of paperwork that follow a death. After 20 years launching and scaling consumer brands and running her own global manufacturing and investment firm, Mysoor Industries, she started Alix in 2022 when settling a best friend's mother's estate consumed 900 hours of her life. Alix raised a $20M Series A in July 2025 from Acrew Capital, Charles Schwab and Edward Jones Ventures. She also sits on the board of Security National Financial Corporation.
Anastasia Leng is the founder and CEO of CreativeX, a New York technology company that uses AI and computer vision to measure the quality, consistency, and effectiveness of the images and videos brands put into the world. Fortune 500 giants like Unilever, Heineken, Mondelez, Nestle, and Google use it to bring data to the one part of marketing that has always resisted measurement: the creative itself. A lifelong nomad raised across seven countries and a former Google product lead who co-founded the celebrated ecommerce startup Hatch, Leng has built CreativeX into one of the defining companies in the emerging field of creative data, raising about $30 million along the way.
Andrew Chadeayne is the founder and CEO of CaaMTech, an Issaquah, Washington psychedelic pharmaceutical company building safer, patentable psychedelic-inspired medicines. A chemist (PhD, Cornell) and patent attorney (JD, George Washington) who began his career proving sugar is addictive through opioid pathways, he has filed more than 100 patent applications mapping the chemistry of psilocybin, tryptamines and other psychedelics. His strategy is to expand 'the universe of available compounds' rather than bet on a single molecule, giving researchers a toolbox of characterized psychedelics for mental health treatment.
Andrew Le is the co-founder and CEO of Buoy Health, an AI-driven health navigation platform he started out of Harvard Innovation Labs in 2014 after taking three years off from Harvard Medical School. A physician by training who once researched brain cancer, Le built Buoy to answer one deceptively simple question for people who reach for Google first: when do I actually need to see a doctor? Under his leadership Buoy has raised more than $66 million and reached millions of users, drawing backing from major insurers including Optum, Cigna and Humana.
Angela Rastegar is the co-founder and CEO of Sunfish, a Los Angeles fertility-finance company that treats the cost of building a family as a problem worth engineering around. After a 2016 egg-freezing attempt left her facing a confusing, expensive and isolating bill with no insurance to lean on, she went to work inside the fertility industry, watched patients drain 401(k)s and sell engagement rings, and then built a platform of loans, grants, guidance and a money-back IVF Success Program priced off a patient's own biodata. A two-time founder with a Stanford biology degree and a Stanford MBA, she raised a $10M Series A in early 2025 and put a refund guarantee at the center of an industry that has long charged for attempts rather than outcomes.
Animesh Koratana is the founder and CEO of PlayerZero, an AI platform that acts as an immune system for large code bases, catching and fixing bugs before they ship. He started the company out of Stanford's DAWN lab, where he researched data-intensive machine learning systems under Matei Zaharia and Peter Bailis. In 2025 PlayerZero raised a $15M Series A led by Foundation Capital, backed by the CEOs of Dropbox, Figma, and Vercel. Koratana's bet is simple and contrarian: when AI writes most of the code, software quality becomes the hardest and most valuable problem in engineering.
Ankarino Lara is a product-minded entrepreneur who co-founded Thismoment, a San Francisco enterprise content-marketing platform that helped global brands collect, curate and publish user-generated content across social channels. A Harvard-trained archaeologist who once conserved Maya artifacts at the Peabody Museum, Lara moved from museums to the early consumer web, building products at CNET and Yahoo! before launching Thismoment in 2008 around the idea that the basic unit of human experience is the 'Moment.'
Antonio Juliano is the founder and CEO of dYdX, one of the largest decentralized exchanges for crypto perpetuals and derivatives. A Princeton computer science graduate who learned crypto at Coinbase, he launched dYdX in 2017 and built it into a leading DeFi protocol. After stepping back from daily operations in 2024, he returned as CEO six months later, declaring he was going into 'Founder Mode' to revitalize the company.
April Koh is the co-founder and CEO of Spring Health, a New York-based mental health company that uses machine learning to match people to the right care instead of leaving them to trial and error. She started it as a Yale senior in 2016 after reading a research paper that suggested algorithms could outperform the average psychiatrist at picking treatments. By 2021, at 29, she became the youngest woman to lead a unicorn; by 2024 the company raised a $100M Series E at a $3.3 billion valuation, serving employers and health plans across more than 200 countries. She was a 2025 TIME100 Next cover star.
Ari Evans is the founder and CEO of Maestro, the Los Angeles-based white-label live streaming and interactive video platform he started in 2015. He built Maestro on a simple conviction: creators and rights holders should own their audiences and data instead of renting them from algorithm-driven giants. The platform powers interactive streams, monetization and analytics for clients ranging from Billie Eilish and Post Malone to Epic Games, PlayStation and ViacomCBS, and counts Sony Music among its investors. A former Zynga product manager who ran CityVille at its peak, Evans frames the creator economy as the biggest job-creation engine since the Industrial Revolution.
Arjun Mahadevan is the co-founder and CEO of doola, a New York based company that turns the headache of starting a U.S. business into a few clicks. Built after his own frustrating attempt to incorporate a company across borders, doola handles LLC formation, banking, bookkeeping and taxes for founders in more than 175 countries. A Wharton and Penn dual-degree graduate and former Dropbox growth PM, Arjun walked away from a comfortable big-tech job at 24 to build a 'Business-in-a-Box' on the belief that talent is everywhere but opportunity is not. He hosts the 15-Minute Founder podcast and writes a newsletter read by a large weekly audience.
Arnold Engel is the co-founder and CEO of Tundra, a zero-commission wholesale marketplace he started in 2017 with his wife Katie Engel after years running a global supply chain company. A Dartmouth economics graduate and former McKinsey consultant, Engel built Tundra to hand independent retailers the same buying power as big-box giants - no transaction fees, no markups, free shipping. The platform grew to more than two million ready-to-ship products and over 30,000 retailers, raising about $42 million across rounds including a $26M Series B led by Emergence Capital in 2021.
AT Nakanishi (Atsushi Nakanishi) is the founder and CEO of Triple W, the company behind DFree, the world's first personal wearable ultrasound sensor that predicts toilet timing. He launched the company in 2015 with high school and college friends, took it from Tokyo to Berkeley, and steered it to a Best of CES award and Series D funding. A self-described non-engineer who built a hardware company from zero, Nakanishi blends business pragmatism with a stubborn focus on solving an unglamorous, very human problem.
Bankole Omodunbi is the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Verbwire, a Web3 infrastructure startup that turns weeks of Solidity, Hardhat and wallet configuration into a single REST API call. A former Managing Director in equities quant trading at Credit Suisse with 16+ years on Wall Street, he left banking in 2021 to build developer tooling that lets engineers deploy smart contracts, mint NFTs, move assets cross-chain and spin up wallets using familiar languages like Python and Java. Verbwire raised a $12.3M Series A and is based in the New York area.
Barclay Rogers is the co-founder and CEO of Graphyte, a carbon removal company that turns waste biomass into dense, dehydrated carbon blocks and buries them to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere for over a thousand years. A former environmental lawyer and mechanical engineer turned multi-time agtech and climate founder, he built Graphyte's 'Carbon Casting' process to deliver durable carbon removal at under $100 a ton, an order of magnitude cheaper than direct air capture. The company is backed by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures and runs its first commercial plant in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Rogers also teaches a climate change solutions course as an adjunct professor of law at Tulane University.
Ben Rattray is the founder and Executive Chair of Change.org, the world's largest platform for social change. He started it in 2007 with a borrowed $1,000 after his brother's coming-out reframed how he thought about bystanders and responsibility. What began as a social network for activists became a petition engine that has grown to hundreds of millions of users worldwide, turning ordinary signatures into pressure on corporations and governments. Named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People and Fortune's 40 Under 40, Rattray has spent his career trying to shift the balance of power between individuals and large institutions.
Bernard Ravina is a Johns Hopkins-trained neurologist who spent two decades treating people with dystonia before deciding the field needed a drug that did not yet exist. In 2025 he founded Vima Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is its CEO, advancing VIM0423, a once-daily oral therapy aimed at the dopamine-acetylcholine imbalance behind movement disorders. The company emerged from stealth with a $60 million Series A, later extended to $100 million, and dosed its first Phase 2 dystonia patient in March 2026.
Bill Catania is the founder and CEO of OneRail, an Orlando-based last-mile delivery orchestration platform he started in 2018 with his wife Lisa at their kitchen table after a broken refrigerator exposed the gaps in same-day delivery. A three-time founder whose first company began in his Cornell dorm, Catania built OneRail into a venture-backed logistics technology company connecting enterprise retailers to a network of millions of drivers, raising a $42M Series C in late 2024 and earning recognition from Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, Gartner and FreightWaves.
Bret Kugelmass is the founder and CEO of Last Energy, an Austin-based company building factory-made 20-megawatt nuclear power plants designed to be shipped, assembled, and switched on like industrial equipment rather than built on-site like cathedrals. A Stanford-trained roboticist who once helped build a lunar rover control device at NASA, he sold a drone startup, then interviewed more than 800 nuclear experts on his Titans of Nuclear podcast before concluding that the technology was never the problem - the cost of slow, custom construction was. Last Energy has raised about $164 million, closing an oversubscribed $100 million Series C in December 2025, and is racing to plug a pilot reactor into the Texas A&M-RELLIS grid by mid-2026.
Brian Barnes is the founder and CEO of M1, a Chicago-based personal finance platform that blends investing, borrowing, and spending into one automated 'finance super app.' He started investing in the fifth grade with a real brokerage account opened by his parents, studied economics at Stanford, and launched M1 in 2016 after concluding that the tools for managing money had barely improved in two decades. M1 has raised more than $320 million, reached unicorn valuation, and grown to roughly a million members and billions in assets under management.
Brock Arnason is the founder and CEO of Droit, a New York regtech firm that turns the live text of financial regulation into auditable, machine-readable logic - a discipline it calls computational law. A Cornell-trained engineering physicist and former Morgan Stanley fixed-income e-commerce executive, he started Droit in 2012 to solve the Dodd-Frank derivatives mess from the inside. Droit's Adept platform now answers 'can I trade this?' and reports trades for clients including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and UBS, and in 2025 the company was acquired by capital-markets technology giant FIS.
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.
Bryan Bennett is the CEO and founder of Cortex (formerly Cortex Building Intelligence, now Cortex Sustainability Intelligence), a New York-based software company that uses machine learning to cut energy use, costs, and carbon emissions in commercial buildings. Raised in a family that worked commercial real estate for four decades and trained as a management consultant advising utilities on smart-grid technology, Bennett built Cortex around a simple observation: buildings generate thousands of data points every minute, and almost no one was turning that data into action. His software-only platform now optimizes more than 50 million square feet, including the Empire State Building.
Charvi Shetty is the co-founder and CEO of Aluna, a San Francisco respiratory-health company that makes an FDA-cleared, pocket-sized spirometer paired with games and AI so patients can track lung function from home and send the data to their doctors. A UC Berkeley bioengineer with a UCSF master's in biomedical imaging, she left an algorithm-engineering job at Genentech to build the device, became the youngest recipient of an NSF SBIR grant, and is recognized as one of the youngest female CEOs to bring an FDA-cleared healthtech device to market. In 2023 Aluna raised a $15.3M Series B, bringing total funding to about $27M.
Chat Joglekar is the co-founder and CEO of Baton, a New York marketplace that wants to be the Zillow for small businesses - giving Main Street owners fast, data-backed valuations and a private way to sell. Before Baton he spent two decades building $100M+ businesses inside Zillow, Spotify and Google. In January 2025 Baton raised a $10M Series A led by Obvious Ventures, with backing from Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff, pushing total funding past $15.5M as the company chases a roughly $10 trillion wave of retiring-boomer business transitions.
Cheryl Sew Hoy is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Tiny Health, an Austin-based microbiome science company that raised an $8.5M Series A in 2024. Born in Malaysia and trained as an engineer at Cornell, she sold her startup Reclip.It to Walmart Labs in 2013, then was recruited to run MaGIC, Malaysia's national innovation agency. She co-founded the #MovingForward campaign for diversity in venture capital and was named one of Time's 2017 Silence Breakers, the magazine's Person of the Year.
Chinedu Eleanya is the founder and CEO of Mulberry, a New York based product protection platform that lets online retailers and direct-to-consumer brands offer affordable extended warranties at checkout. Born in Nigeria and raised in New Jersey after his father won a US visa lottery, he started a used-laptop export business from his Cornell dorm, co-founded the lease-to-own company Katapult in 2011, and launched Mulberry in 2018. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he has raised more than $37 million to build a consumer-first alternative to the legacy warranty industry.
Chris O'Dowd is the co-founder and CEO of WIN Reality, an Austin-based virtual reality training platform for baseball and softball hitters. A former professional catcher who played six seasons in the minor leagues after starring at Dartmouth, he built WIN Reality with his father, longtime MLB executive Dan O'Dowd, to close the gap between practice speed and real game speed. The Meta Quest-based product lets players face game-speed pitching from a library of thousands of real pitchers, and is now used by youth players, more than 200 colleges, and a majority of MLB franchises. The company raised a $45M+ round led by Spectrum Equity in June 2022.