Tagged: georgetown
30 results
Guardian RF
Guardian RF builds low-cost, passive radiofrequency sensors that make low-altitude airspace observable in real time. Founded in 2024 by three Georgetown physics majors, the company deploys palm-sized 'Scout' sensors that detect the control signals drones and their operators emit, triangulating both across a mesh network. Its systems have been battle-tested on the front lines in Ukraine and are now fielded at Vandenberg Space Force Base and across U.S. airports and event venues, turning drone detections into structured, shareable intelligence.
Christina Diiorio
Christina Diiorio is the founder and CEO of The Yay Company, the Charlottesville-based startup behind Yay Lunch, a modern K-12 school lunch program that partners with local caterers and chefs to deliver fresh, kid-approved meals directly to schools at no cost to the school. A former food editor at Goop, MindBodyGreen and Zagat and a Georgetown graduate, she launched Yay in 2018 after her own son came home hungry and unhappy with his cafeteria options. She has raised roughly $15.5M+ across Series A and later rounds from investors including Valor Siren Ventures, Reach Capital and FJ Labs, growing the company past 200% year-over-year and into markets from Atlanta to New York.
Anjali Sardana
Anjali Sardana is the 24-year-old founder and CEO of Pronto, a Bengaluru-based instant home-services startup that brings household help - sweeping, mopping, dishwashing, laundry - to a customer's door in about ten minutes. A Georgetown biology graduate and former investor at Bain Capital and 8VC, she launched Pronto in 2025 and scaled it from roughly 1,000 daily bookings to more than 25,000 within a year, reaching a $200 million valuation with backing from Epiq Capital, General Catalyst, Bain Capital Ventures and Lachy Groom. Her stated mission is less about speed than dignity: giving India's invisible domestic workforce a formal identity, real pay, and standing.
Andrew Herr
Andrew Herr is the founder and CEO of Flykitt (and its parent company Fount), a health and human-performance company that builds systems to eliminate jet lag by targeting circadian disruption and travel-induced inflammation. Before entrepreneurship, he spent over a decade advising the U.S. military on human performance and biotech strategy from the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, working with Navy SEALs and fighter pilots. Holding three Georgetown master's degrees and twice named an Army 'Mad Scientist,' Herr has turned the performance secrets of special operators into products trusted by pro sports teams, executives, and everyday travelers.
Dan Leahy
Dan Leahy is the co-founder and CEO of MakerSights, a San Francisco consumer-insights platform that helps apparel, footwear, and accessories brands decide what to make before they make it. His pitch is blunt: the fashion industry still builds product the way it did in the 1980s, guessing at what shoppers want and burning through unsold inventory in the process. MakerSights collects consumer feedback at scale and ties it to real sales data so brands like Ralph Lauren, New Balance, Everlane, and Madewell can produce less waste and more of what people actually buy. Before MakerSights, Leahy founded Savored, a restaurant yield-management startup acquired by Groupon, and cut his teeth in finance at Silver Lake and Brown Brothers Harriman. A Maine kid who once mailed handwritten letters to NBA stars begging for autographs, he built a career on the same stubborn premise: ask enough people for what you want, and enough of them say yes.
Emily Stone
Emily Stone is the founder and CEO of Uncommon Cacao, the first specialty cacao trader to publish verifiable prices for every transaction along its supply chain. From a base that started in the jungles of Belize and Guatemala, she built a Transparent Trade model that sources from more than 10,000 smallholder farmers across 15+ countries and supplies hundreds of craft chocolate makers worldwide. An Ashoka Fellow and Georgetown-trained sociologist, she is trying to decommoditize cacao by making farmers the protagonists of the chain rather than its afterthought.
John Tenet
John Tenet is the co-founder and CEO of CHAOS Industries, a Los Angeles defense technology company he started in 2022 that reached a $4.5 billion valuation in three years on the strength of its Coherent Distributed Networks - a synchronization-based platform that spots airborne threats like drones and missiles roughly ten minutes faster than legacy radar. A former finance and venture operator at Allen & Company, Valar Ventures and 8VC, and a co-founder of counter-drone pioneer Epirus, Tenet has raised over $1 billion for CHAOS and recruited his father, former CIA Director George J. Tenet, as executive chairman.
Kevin Tian
Kevin Tian is the co-founder and CEO of Doppel, an AI-native social engineering defense platform that scans the internet for impersonation campaigns and shuts them down automatically. A Georgetown grad who built dispatch systems and flying-car software at Uber and Lyft, he started Doppel in 2022 after spotting social engineering becoming the top source of breaches and cyber-insurance claims. Doppel raised a $70M Series C in November 2025 at a $600M+ valuation, backed by Bessemer, a16z, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, and a bench of WNBA stars.
Jaqui Rice Gold
Jaqui Rice Gold is the co-founder and CEO of G.O.A.T. Fuel, a health-forward sports energy drink she launched in January 2020 with her father, NFL Hall of Famer Jerry Rice, and her husband Trevion Gold. Built as the first Black-owned energy drink to lean on cordyceps mushrooms instead of sugar and synthetic stimulants, the brand grew from a pandemic-era direct-to-consumer scramble into a nationally distributed product in tens of thousands of retail doors, with sponsorship deals spanning the Los Angeles Lakers and the WNBA's Chicago Sky.
Andrew DeSomma
Andrew DeSomma is the Chief Business Officer of K2bio (K2 BioLabs), a Houston-based hybrid contract research organization that gives early-stage life-science companies the equipment, vivarium, and scientists they could never afford to build alone. A career investor with a 25-plus-year track record across technology, biotech, consumer, and retail, he is the founder and manager of Resolute Investments and previously analyzed companies for crossover hedge funds in the San Francisco Bay Area. A Georgetown graduate who now works from Santa Fe, he sat on K2's board at founding before stepping into the operating seat that turns the lab's science into deals.
Anna Ford
Anna Ford is the co-founder and CEO of Bookclubs, the free app and website that has grown into the organizing layer for more than a million readers and over 100,000 book clubs worldwide. A former public health policy advocate with a Georgetown degree and a Harvard Kennedy School MPA, she built the platform out of pure frustration after the tangled email threads of her own Philadelphia book club nearly killed it. The fix - coded by a friend named Ian Campbell, who later became her husband - turned a logistics problem into a company, and a public health career into a mission against loneliness. She runs it all from Camden, Maine.
Dorian Pieracci
Dorian Pieracci is the Co-Founder and CEO of MOVRS, a Los Angeles sports-technology company that turns ordinary video into structured, labeled 3D data about how humans move. Founded in 2020, MOVRS builds AI-powered biomechanics and digital-twin tools for sports and entertainment partners, from baseball pitching analysis to immersive broadcast experiences. A Georgetown-trained sports industry executive and UC Berkeley graduate, Pieracci is a Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech accelerator alum who pivoted MOVRS from direct sales to a partner-led model and assembled a team drawn from MLB and major sports media.
Jack Sardinia
Jack Sardinia is the co-founder and CEO of FavorDrop, a Buffalo-based platform for sending time-bound digital gifts and promotions. He launched it in 2021 with his father, longtime Buffalo restaurateur Tim Sardinia, around a simple idea: buy a friend a drink at their favorite bar even when you cannot be there. What began as a consumer app for sending restaurant gift cards grew into a B2B customer-engagement tool used by car dealerships, marketing agencies, and home-services companies, with more than a million FavorDrops sent and a patent on the 'bounce back' that returns unredeemed gifts to the sender.
Mariel Reed
Mariel Reed is the co-founder and CEO of Pavilion (formerly CoProcure), a San Francisco software company building a search engine for the $2 trillion world of state and local government purchasing. A Georgetown valedictorian who taught in Xinjiang and helped Coursera expand across Asia before working inside San Francisco's Mayor's Office, she became obsessed with one unglamorous lever for changing lives at scale: procurement. Pavilion lets public servants find and reuse contracts other agencies have already competitively bid, cutting months of duplicated paperwork. She launched it during the COVID-19 pandemic and grew it from a two-person team into a venture-backed company.
Obiaku Hill
Obiaku Ohiaeri Hill is the founder and CEO of Binkey, a Washington, DC fintech that turns FSA and HSA accounts into a checkout button. After years inside healthcare's machinery as a scientist, a McKinsey expert, and a product VP, she built an API-enabled payment service that lets merchants accept pre-tax health dollars at the point of sale and auto-files the paperwork so customers stop forfeiting the money they already set aside. Binkey raised a $3.3M seed round in December 2023 led by Wellington Access Ventures and was selected for the Mastercard Start Path program.
Ricardo Flores
Ricardo Flores is the co-founder and CEO of MiChamba, a startup that turns WhatsApp into an AI-powered management platform for deskless teams in construction, logistics, hospitality, and industrial services across Latin America. A kid who worked scorching El Paso roofs before heading to Georgetown and Wall Street, he left finance and an early seat at fintech Wealth.com to build software for the blue-collar workforce he came from. Less than a year after launch, MiChamba raised a $2.25M pre-seed led by Wollef and signed names like Pemex, Hilton, and Repsol, betting that for the 3 billion people who run their work lives on WhatsApp, management should live there too.
Robert Page
Robert Page is the CEO and founder of Pulse Protocol (formerly MedRepublic), a Los Angeles healthcare marketplace and B2B SaaS platform that helps clinics and facilitators run medical-travel businesses - matching patients to vetted providers, automating coordination, payments and marketing. A global-health operator since 2000, he previously built MedToGo International, co-authored three industry guidebooks, took MedRepublic into TechCrunch Disrupt's top 25 startups of 2016, and graduated from Amplify LA's accelerator. His through-line is unglamorous but stubborn: transparent pricing, quality control, and giving patients real options.
Dane Holewinski
Dane Holewinski is a San Francisco-based executive coach and former venture-backed founder who runs Decode Coaching, where he works one-on-one with startup CEOs and founders at companies like Tonal, Zendrive and RealBlocks. Before coaching, he spent more than a decade building and operating technology companies, including co-founding the mobile deep-linking startup Yozio. He now also serves as CEO & Founding Team Coach at Seen Health, a culturally focused senior-care company. His coaching blends Silicon Valley operating experience with formal training from Harvard's Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey, and a practice grounded in meditation, exercise and breathwork.
Thatcher Spring
Thatcher Spring is the founder and CEO of GearLaunch, a print-on-demand and end-to-end ecommerce platform he launched in 2013 to give independent online sellers the same backend muscle - manufacturing, fulfillment, payments, and customer service - that big marketplaces take for granted. A Georgetown English major who started a nationally distributed wholesale apparel company right out of college, he detoured through J.P. Morgan, the Mars graduate leadership program, and an MBA at UNC Kenan-Flagler before going back to what he knew best: merchandise and supply chains. GearLaunch raised a $4.8M Series A in 2017 and grew to a few hundred employees, letting creators build custom-product businesses without ever touching inventory.
Christina Edling
Christina Edling is Chief Business Officer at Flex, the New York fintech that lets renters split a month's rent into smaller payments instead of fronting it all on the first. She joined in February 2022 and grew into the role from VP of Strategy & Chief of Staff to SVP of Strategy & Operations, building the operating spine of a company that has raised over $225M. A Georgetown finance grad, she came up through Houlihan Lokey, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Next Street and the social-enterprise advisory Incandescent before betting on consumer fintech.
Christine de Wendel
Christine de Wendel is the co-founder and U.S. CEO of sunday, the QR-code checkout company that shrinks the worst part of dinner - waiting for the bill - from roughly fifteen minutes to about ten seconds. She spent two decades scaling European e-commerce unicorns Zalando and ManoMano out of Paris before founding sunday at age 40 with Big Mamma restaurateurs Victor Lugger and Tigrane Seydoux, then moved home to Atlanta to plant the company's U.S. flag. A Georgetown School of Foreign Service graduate who once wanted to run the United Nations, she now runs a hospitality-payments business that has processed billions in restaurant transactions.
Diana Heldfond DiGia
Diana Heldfond DiGia is the founder and CEO of Parallel, the first tech-forward provider of special education care in the United States. Diagnosed with severe dyslexia and ADHD at seven, she built Parallel to deliver virtual psychoeducational assessments, teletherapy, and specialized instruction to K-12 school districts. The company now serves more than 10,000 students across 25 states, has raised $48.9M including a $20M Series B led by Valspring Capital, and reports that 98% of its students meet or exceed their IEP goals. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 (Education, 2024) honoree.
Michelle Larivee
Michelle Larivee is the co-founder and CEO of WTHN, the New York wellness company turning acupuncture from a months-long waitlist into a walk-in ritual. A Georgetown and Wharton graduate who spent 13 years in healthcare finance - Merrill Lynch, the World Bank's IFC, Deloitte, and a secondment to the World Economic Forum - she traded debt financings for needles after Traditional Chinese Medicine resolved pain that Western medicine could not. Since 2018 she has built WTHN into a chain of New York studios, an e-commerce line of acupressure tools and herbs stocked in 200+ retailers including Ulta, and a brand backed by a $5M Series A led by L Catterton.
Monica Belsito
Monica Belsito is the CEO of Function of Beauty, the made-to-order personal care company that turns an online quiz into a custom bottle of shampoo. She took the top job in July 2025 after a career spent building consumer brands that get acquired: founding CMO at feminine-care brand LOLA, CMO at hummus maker Sabra (bought by PepsiCo in 2024), and senior brand manager at Dollar Shave Club before its $1 billion sale to Unilever. A Georgetown grad and Harvard MBA who started in crisis PR and Colgate's management program, she now steers Function of Beauty's push from DTC into shelves at Target, Sephora, Walmart, and Amazon.
Neal Shenoy
Neal Shenoy is the CEO and co-founder of BEGiN, one of the fastest-growing early childhood education platforms in the world, the company behind HOMER, codeSpark, Little Passports and Learn with Sesame. A serial entrepreneur, he has built, run and sold a $3B+ portfolio of subscription ventures spanning education, music, sports and data, including JioSaavn, the largest South Asian music streaming service, which Reliance Industries acquired in a deal valued above $1 billion. He is also a founding partner at [212]MEDIA.
Sedarius Perrotta
Sedarius Tekara Perrotta is the co-founder and CEO of Shelf, a New York-based knowledge management and AI data-quality platform. A former Peace Corps volunteer turned serial software entrepreneur, he has spent two decades applying machine learning and NLP to the unglamorous problem of finding the right answer fast - building knowledge systems for the World Bank, Harvard Business School, MIT and Stanford before turning that craft into a company that raised $52.5M in Series B funding led by Tiger Global and Insight Partners.
Danielle Pletka
Danielle Pletka is a distinguished senior fellow in Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where she has shaped conservative thinking on the Middle East, Iran, and national security for more than two decades. A former senior Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer under Jesse Helms, she co-hosts the AEI podcast 'What the Hell Is Going On?' with Marc Thiessen, teaches at Georgetown, and appears regularly across major print and broadcast media.
Sarah Armstrong
Sarah Madden Armstrong is Vice President of Global Marketing Operations at Google, where she leads global marketing infrastructure across one of the world's most complex and far-reaching advertising ecosystems. With over 25 years in global marketing - including two decades at The Coca-Cola Company overseeing agency operations across 200 countries and a stint as a McKinsey partner - she brings rare operational depth to a role that touches every corner of Google's marketing machine. Named one of Advertising Age's 'Women to Watch' in 2009, Armstrong is also a published author of two books: 'The Mom's Guide to a Good Divorce' and 'The Art of the Juggling Act: Bite-Sized Guide for Working Parents' (2024). A former Georgetown University volleyball player turned global executive, she mentors across industries and volunteers with multiple nonprofits while raising her daughter Grace.
Brendan Foody
Brendan Foody is the 22-year-old co-founder and CEO of Mercor, the AI talent and data company that became a $10 billion decacorn in under two years. A Georgetown dropout and former Thiel Fellow from Menlo Park, California, Foody co-founded Mercor with high school debate teammates Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha at a São Paulo hackathon in early 2023. Mercor connects AI labs — including OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic — with domain experts (scientists, doctors, lawyers, bankers) who train frontier AI models through human feedback, growing from $1M to $500M in annual run rate within 17 months and making Foody one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires.
Bradford Oberwager
Bradford Oberwager is the Executive Chairman of Linden Lab and CEO of Tilia, the fintech arm powering Second Life's virtual economy. A serial entrepreneur who built and sold companies in personalized vitamins, healthy snacks (Bare Snacks, acquired by PepsiCo), and labor technology (Jyve, acquired by Advantage Solutions), Oberwager led the 2020 acquisition of Linden Lab alongside investor Randy Waterfield. Since then he has staked $35 million on securing money transmitter licenses in all U.S. states to enable real-money payouts from Second Life's Linden dollar economy, grown monthly active users to 600,000, and championed a mobile-forward future for the world's original metaverse.