fulbright-scholar
(4)
Karn Saroya
Karn Saroya is the co-founder and CEO of Re, a decentralized reinsurance protocol built on Avalanche that connects alternative capital to the nearly $1 trillion global reinsurance market. A Canadian-born, MIT-trained Fulbright scholar, he previously co-founded the YC-backed insurtech Cover and worked as a financial-services consultant at Oliver Wyman before deciding the insurance stack itself needed to be torn down and rebuilt on-chain.
Alexei Dunaway
Alexei Dunaway is the founder and CEO of Pinnacle, a New York and Palo Alto based startup building Pascal, an AI performance and career coach that lives inside Slack, Teams, and Zoom. A Stanford GSB graduate and Fulbright Scholar, he spent five years building an entrepreneur accelerator in Kenya before running an executive coaching practice for venture-backed founders. He now wants to give every worker the kind of coaching that used to be reserved for the C-suite. Pinnacle raised a $2.5M seed round in March 2025 led by eLab Ventures.
Ilana Walder-Biesanz
Ilana Walder-Biesanz is the founder and CEO of National Math Stars, a nonprofit that finds mathematically extraordinary children as early as second and third grade and gives each of them a decade of mentorship, advising, and funding worth more than $100,000. A child prodigy herself who took college courses at 13 and finished her undergraduate degree at 19, she pairs an engineer's rigor with a theater critic's flair. Before building National Math Stars she was a product manager at Yahoo, a Bain consultant, a Gates Cambridge Scholar, a Fulbright researcher of German opera staging, and a working opera critic. In December 2025, Jeff and Lauren Sanchez Bezos named her one of five recipients of a $5 million Courage & Civility Award.
Patrick Cook-Deegan
Patrick Cook-Deegan is the founder and CEO of Wayfinder, a K-12 curriculum company that teaches purpose, belonging, and durable skills to more than 1.5 million students across roughly 4,000 schools. A former All-American lacrosse player turned human-rights advocate in Burma, wilderness guide, and Stanford d.school fellow, he built Wayfinder out of five years teaching character development in an Oakland public high school. He named the company after the ancient Polynesian navigators who crossed oceans without instruments - his bet on how to redesign the American high school for the 21st century.