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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.
Otto Marroquin
Otto Marroquin is the Founder of Celera Corporation (operating as Celera Incorporated / Celera Semiconductor), an AI-powered analog semiconductor company headquartered in Alameda, California. Celera has built a patented platform - Nestos - that uses digital twins and behavioral modeling to automate analog IC design, cutting development cycles by up to 10x compared to traditional workflows. Backed by $23 million in funding including a $20 million Series A from Maverick Silicon in August 2025, Marroquin's venture targets the $70 billion analog semiconductor market with a platform that delivers custom analog ICs at a pace the industry has never seen before.
Nico Perdomo
Nico Perdomo is the Guatemalan-American co-founder and CEO of Catch, a San Francisco-based fintech startup that built an alternative payment and rewards platform for direct-to-consumer brands. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who spent time building products at LinkedIn and Affirm, he launched Catch in 2020 with the thesis that every payment transaction should delight the customer. Backed by Sequoia, Index Ventures, and Forerunner, Catch grew to serve hundreds of thousands of primarily Gen Z shoppers across nearly 100 brand partners including Rare Beauty, PacSun, and SoulCycle before ceasing operations in April 2025.