gut-health
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Matt Barnard
Matt Barnard is the cofounder and CEO of one.bio, a Sacramento biotechnology company turning plant fiber into odorless, tasteless nutrients that can be dosed into everyday food to reshape the gut microbiome. A seventh-generation Wisconsin farmer turned technology operator, he first became known as the cofounder and CEO of Plenty, the SoftBank-backed indoor vertical farming unicorn. He now applies the same obsession - control what people eat, control their health - to fiber science spun out of UC Davis.
Brad Berman
Brad Berman is the co-owner and CEO of BodyBio, a family-owned cellular-health and nutritional-supplement company in Millville, New Jersey. He arrived not from a lab but from the beverage aisle, with stops at PepsiCo and FIJI Water, and married into the founding Kane family. Since taking the top job in 2019 he has rebranded the 25-plus-year-old practitioner brand, pushed it into direct-to-consumer and mainstream retail, and steered roughly 41% revenue growth that landed BodyBio on the Inc. 5000.
David Friedeberg
David Friedeberg is the founder and CEO of OXOMIO, a wellness and supplements company that pairs Earth's purest natural ingredients with biotechnology under the banner 'The Luxury of Wellness.' Son of Mexican surrealist Pedro Friedeberg, David grew up in an artist's household where making something from nothing was a daily ritual, then carried that mindset through a career that spanned fine-art dealing, hospitality operations, and a Harvard MBA before launching OXOMIO in 2017. He splits his life between San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and Austin, Texas, and runs his days by the Japanese principle of kenkou dai-ichi - health above everything else.
Simon Cheng
Simon Cheng is the founder and CEO of Pique, a Los Angeles-based wellness company that turned whole-leaf tea into dissolvable crystals using a patented cold extraction process. A Hong Kong native who grew up drinking tea with his grandparents, Cheng abandoned those rituals in his teens, then spent his 20s cycling through surgeries and a decade of health crises. He rebuilt his health on a multi-year study trip across Asia learning from medicinal-plant and breathwork masters, and channeled that obsession into Pique, which launched in Whole Foods in 2016 and scaled to thousands of stores. Harvard and Stanford educated, and the youngest member of Harvard School of Public Health's Nutrition Roundtable, Cheng built Pique on three promises: efficacy, purity, and zero prep.
Amanda Luke
Amanda Luke is the CEO of Bonafide Provisions, the family-founded California maker of organic, traditionally-prepared bone broth. A UC Berkeley and Columbia-trained marketer, she spent years building health-and-wellness brands at Safeway and Luvo before joining the small Carlsbad broth company in 2018, rising from VP of Marketing to CEO within roughly a year. Under her leadership the women-led brand pushed beyond frozen broth into keto cups, cooking broths, and shelf-stable pantry products, positioning Bonafide as one of the most recognizable clean-label bone broth names in the United States.
Sam Schatz
Sam Schatz is the CEO and co-founder of Biohm Technologies, a Cleveland-based microbiome company betting that the future of gut health lives in fungi, not just bacteria. After spending a decade as AeroFarms' first employee scaling vertical farming from a startup into a global leader, he pivoted to the gut, turning a direct-to-consumer wellness brand into a B2B ingredients and data company built on a proprietary dataset of bacterial and fungal gut populations. He pairs data science with biology, raised a $4.52M Series B in 2025, and shipped Mycohsa, a probiotic blend clinically shown to break down digestive biofilms. Off the clock he is an Adirondack 46er and open-water swimmer.
David Lester
David Lester is the co-founder and former President of OLIPOP PBC, the prebiotic soda brand that grew from a $100,000 bet into a $1.85 billion company in under seven years. A former Diageo brand marketer who worked with Smirnoff, Gordon's Gin, and Johnnie Walker across three continents, Lester paired his CPG expertise with co-founder Ben Goodwin's scientific formulation genius to create a soda that supports gut health without sacrificing the nostalgia of a cold fizzy drink. OLIPOP now generates over $425 million in annual revenue, holds 65,000+ retail doors, and controls 87% of the functional soda category - a category it essentially invented.