Thread AI is a New York enterprise software company building composable infrastructure for AI-powered workflows. Founded in 2023 by former Palantir AI/ML leaders Angela McNeal and Mayada Gonimah, its flagship platform Lemma pairs a drag-and-drop workflow builder with orchestration infrastructure so organizations can connect disparate systems, data, and AI models into governed, observable, end-to-end workflows - without ripping out their existing stack. The company raised a $20M Series A in 2025 to help enterprises and public-sector agencies deploy mission-critical AI with control, traceability, and security.
Tim Mahlman is the CEO of Narrative I/O, a New York-based data collaboration platform that lets companies buy, sell, and share data as easily as sending an email. He took the top job in May 2023 after a 25-plus-year run through the plumbing of digital advertising: founding member of one of the first ad networks in 1996, co-founder of the video exchange Vidible, president of platforms at AOL and then Verizon Media where the division grew from $1.5B to $4B, and president of the pet-health startup Petabyte before it was acquired by Chewy. He splits his time between New York City and the Bay Area.
Jonathan Sherry is the CEO and co-founder of Alium, a New York-based buyer intelligence platform that replaces pay-to-play analyst ratings with structured, AI-analyzed interviews from real enterprise practitioners. A Columbia MBA and Penn engineering grad, Sherry previously co-founded CB Insights alongside Anand Sanwal - building it from a near-shuttered startup in 2009 into the venture industry's premier market intelligence platform with 250+ employees and eight-figure revenue. Alium, which operated in stealth for four years before publicly launching in January 2025 with $7M in seed funding from Greycroft and Primary Venture Partners, has already conducted 1,000+ in-depth vendor performance interviews with decision-makers at companies including Walmart, Nike, Marriott, and Spotify.

Diego Asenjo is the CEO and co-founder of Mesh, an Austin-based B2B identity startup that verifies the legitimacy, licensing, insurance, and compliance of small businesses and sole proprietors in real time. A former Amazon product leader who built Business Prime into a multi-billion-dollar program, Diego left to fix a problem he 'could not unsee': the broken data infrastructure that quietly penalizes new, small, and micro businesses. His mission is personal, rooted in watching his father's small auto-parts shop in Argentina lose access to fair credit and opportunity as commerce went digital. Mesh raised a $5.7M seed round led by Greycroft and reports 99%+ satisfaction from the businesses it verifies.
Fawad Butt is the co-founder and CEO of Penguin AI, a Palo Alto-based healthcare AI platform company that raised $29.7M in Series A funding in September 2025. A former Chief Data Officer at Kaiser Permanente, UnitedHealthcare, and Optum, Butt spent years on the buyer side spending hundreds of millions on generic tech before deciding to build the solution healthcare actually needed. Penguin AI targets the $1 trillion annual administrative burden in US healthcare with purpose-built agentic AI, small language models, and digital workers that compress prior authorization reviews from 30 minutes to under two, positioning itself as 'the Epic of the healthcare back office.'