founding-engineer
(5)Nick Freeman
Nick Freeman is the co-founder, co-CEO and CTO of Marco Experiences, a San Francisco and New York company that helps companies plan and book team offsites, retreats and group experiences. Before Marco he was one of the founding backend engineers on Instagram Stories, where he helped scale the product from launch to 500 million daily users, and he shipped Cortana for Xbox One at Microsoft. A UC Berkeley computer science and economics graduate, he left Brex in 2020 to build Marco with Suman Siva on the bet that, done thoughtfully, technology can build community. Marco now serves 800+ companies including Meta, Bain and Netflix.
Nora Apsel
Nora Apsel is the co-founder and CEO of Morty, the New York-based online mortgage marketplace she helped build from a Techstars idea in 2016 into a full-stack platform that has facilitated over $2 billion in home loans across 45+ states. She joined as Morty's founding engineer, rose to COO, and took the CEO seat in 2020. A former nonprofit worker who retooled as a software engineer at Meetup and Flurry, she is driven by using product and technology to democratize access to financial products and make one of life's most opaque transactions - getting a mortgage - transparent and buyer-first.
Saureen Shah
Saureen Shah is a San Francisco based founder and engineer. He was an early engineer at YouTube, co-founded Instawork (YC S15) and served as its CTO, advised Mozart, and now leads Nudge AI as founder and CEO. Carnegie Mellon graduate in business administration and computer science.
Nathan Stewart
Nathan Stewart is a founding engineer at Merge (merge.dev), the unified API platform that lets B2B SaaS companies connect to hundreds of HRIS, ATS, CRM, accounting, and ticketing systems through a single integration. Based in New York and educated at The Ohio State University, Stewart is a backend developer who joined Merge in its early days and has helped scale the company to over 140 employees and $74.5M in funding. He describes himself as a 'Software Engineer & Puzzle Aficionado,' an apt description for someone building the connective infrastructure that keeps the modern SaaS stack wired together.
Tyler Allen
Tyler Allen is the CEO of Unit21, the AI risk infrastructure company he helped build from the ground up as its founding software engineer in 2019. Starting by writing Unit21's earliest lines of code, he progressed through Head of AI and COO before being appointed CEO in April 2026, succeeding co-founder Trisha Kothari. Under his AI leadership, customer usage of Unit21's AI Agents grew 30x in a single quarter. Unit21's platform now handles over 200,000 monthly reviews, has detected $14 billion in suspicious activity, and files approximately 5% of all U.S. SARs submitted to FinCEN.