Living Security is an Austin-based cybersecurity company that pioneered Human Risk Management (HRM), moving organizations beyond check-the-box compliance training toward measurable behavior change. Its AI-native Unify platform correlates behavioral, identity, and threat signals to find the small share of employees who drive most of an organization's risk, then guides targeted interventions. Founded in 2017 by Ashley and Drew Rose, the company serves more than 100 enterprises including Fortune 500 names, and was named a Leader in the 2024 Forrester Wave for Human Risk Management Solutions.
SparkPlug is a San Francisco-based incentive management platform that turns frontline retail and restaurant employees into a brand's most effective sales force. By integrating directly with point-of-sale systems, it automates sales contests, goals, and commissions - often funded by the brands and vendors whose products those employees sell - and pays rewards out automatically. The company works with thousands of retail locations and hundreds of brand partners, betting that the people closest to the customer are the most underused influence in physical commerce.
Andrew Duffy is the co-founder and CEO of SparkPlug, a San Francisco software company that pays frontline retail and restaurant workers cash bonuses for the sales they actually drive. A behavioral-science nerd from Harvard who put in time at Bridgewater Associates and built a luxury whole-leaf tea brand before this, Duffy turned a teenage hot streak selling margaritas into a venture-backed platform that has routed millions of dollars in supplemental income to hourly employees and raised $11.5 million to keep going.
Abhishek Kumar is the co-founder and CTO of Xoxoday, a Bengaluru-based SaaS platform that powers rewards, incentives, and employee engagement for 5,000+ enterprises worldwide. An IIT Bombay alumnus who previously co-founded EveningFlavours (an early food-discovery startup), Abhishek has helped grow Xoxoday from a 2012 experiences marketplace into a $100M+ funded global platform processing 250,000 transactions daily, with products spanning employee engagement, sales gamification, consumer loyalty, and API-based transactional rewards.
Nishant Mungali is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Mindtickle, the AI-powered revenue enablement platform that became a unicorn in 2021. An IIT Guwahati-trained designer and engineer, he co-founded Mindtickle in 2011 alongside Krishna Depura, Mohit Garg, and Deepak Diwakar after experimenting with online gamification through a group called TeraMeraIdea. Mungali has been the product and design force behind Mindtickle's evolution from a gamified onboarding tool to a $1.2 billion platform serving over 2,000 enterprises globally with AI-powered sales coaching, training, and readiness capabilities.
Sumit Khandelwal is Co-Founder and CEO of Xoxoday, a global rewards, incentives, and loyalty technology platform he built from a borrowed desk in Bengaluru in 2012 into a profitable enterprise serving 5,000+ clients across 175+ countries, processing 250,000 transactions daily and surpassing $1 billion in cumulative GMV. A software engineer turned FMCG product manager turned SaaS founder, Sumit embodies the rare combination of technical grounding and brand-building instinct, steering Xoxoday through a Series C raise in January 2026 and eyeing a potential IPO by late 2027 or early 2028.
MEandMine is a Silicon Valley startup that uses AI and neuroscience-backed games to surface the silent struggles of K-12 students. Its platform delivers ten minutes a day of personalized, gamified skill-building, while an AI engine flags psychological risk by analyzing 160+ in-game behaviors, giving teachers and counselors real-time signals for early intervention.
Wen Miao is the co-founder and CEO of Lava.ai, a San Francisco-based company building real-time AI-powered customer engagement and loyalty platforms for sports teams, entertainment venues, and enterprise brands. Before Lava.ai, he was SVP and GM at TIBCO Software, where he led global client services and launched real-time predictive customer engagement platforms. Lava.ai counts Real Madrid, the LA Rams, the Sacramento Kings, and the Cleveland Browns among its clients, and has raised over $33.7M in funding. In 2015, Computerworld named Miao a Premier 100 IT Leader.
Elinor (Wen-Hsin) Huang is the Founder and CEO of MEandMine, a San Jose-based AI-powered mental health platform for K-12 students that uses gamified, neuroscience-backed tools to help children build emotional regulation skills before crises emerge. Motivated by the loss of an MIT classmate to suicide and the 11-year average gap between symptom onset and treatment, she built MEandMine into a certified B Corp with partnerships spanning Google, Stanford Medicine, and the NYC Department of Education, and raised $6.6M in venture funding including a $4.5M round in June 2024.
Touseef Ikram is a 20+ year marketing technologist, serial entrepreneur, and digital product leader currently serving as Associate Director of Digital Products at Interlink Multimedia (Geo TV / Jang Media Group) in Karachi. From building Pakistan's pre-Facebook social network Stop.pk (100K+ users) to helping HarPalGeo become the world's #1 YouTube channel for three consecutive months, he operates at the rare intersection of technology, marketing, and product thinking. He founded Taxlytics (open-data tax analytics), PakSatire.com (political satire animations), invented the GPLLG life-prediction framework, and secured a Google News Initiative grant — making him one of Pakistan's most quietly disruptive digital builders.