Paul Meinshausen is the CEO and co-founder of Aampe, a San Francisco company that deploys agentic AI infrastructure so consumer apps can learn from each user's behavior and adapt their messaging in real time. An anthropologist turned data scientist who started his career in US Army Intelligence, he co-founded the Indian fintech PaySense (acquired by PayU for $185M) before building Aampe with collaborators he first met in a military analysis unit. He argues that businesses win not by understanding the past but by making better decisions about the future, and that personalization should be about responsiveness rather than prediction.
Philippe Noël is the co-founder and CEO of ParadeDB, an open-source Postgres extension that brings Elasticsearch-grade full-text search and analytics directly into the database, eliminating the brittle ETL pipelines companies build to sync Postgres with a separate search engine. A Harvard computer science and economics graduate raised in rural Quebec, he previously co-founded the cloud-browser startup Whist before pivoting into ParadeDB during a contracting stint. In 2025 ParadeDB raised a $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures, with customers including Alibaba, Modern Treasury, and Bilt Rewards.
Raj Gajwani is Chief Business Officer at OpenArt AI, the San Francisco generative-AI creator suite for images and video. Before OpenArt he spent over a decade at Google, scaling DoubleClick's channel program to $1.3 billion in revenue and founding Orion Wifi, one of the most successful projects out of Google's Area 120 incubator (now part of Android). He also runs Day 0, an enterprise AI strategy consultancy, and serves as a board member, advisor, and angel investor across startups including Couchsurfing, MultiView, and the Wireless Broadband Alliance. A Harvard graduate who also studied at the London School of Economics, he sits at the intersection of frontier AI products and enterprise go-to-market.
Rashad Hossain is the founder and CEO of RYZE Superfoods, the mushroom coffee brand he started in his mother's basement in March 2020 and grew into a multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer company. A Harvard economics graduate who quit a brand-marketing job at Kraft Heinz to build a coffee he would actually want to drink, he blended six functional mushrooms with organic arabica into a product that has racked up more than 175,000 customer reviews. He earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list in 2022. Before RYZE he founded Keepspace, a social journaling platform that won a $50K Harvard innovation award and later became the HOW I RYZE gratitude app.
Ryan Janssen is the Co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic, a New York-based AI-powered business intelligence platform that lets non-technical users query data in plain English. A former McKinsey consultant and 6-year venture capital investor with advanced degrees from Harvard and Oxford, Ryan co-founded Zenlytic in 2020 alongside CTO Paul Blankley after spotting a gap: companies had modern data infrastructure but no accessible way to use it. Zenlytic has raised $15.4M including a $9M Series A in 2024 led by M13, and its AI analyst Zoe can now onboard itself autonomously to any data warehouse.
Shankar Ramaswamy is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Kriya Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company building one-time gene therapies for common, highly prevalent chronic diseases rather than only rare ones. A physician by training who started his career evaluating drug candidates at Roivant Sciences and helping launch Axovant's record biotech IPO, he founded Kriya in 2019 and has since raised more than $600 million to vertically integrate gene therapy design, computational biology and in-house GMP manufacturing.
Stephen Chao is the co-founder and CEO of WonderHowTo, the Santa Monica how-to video network he launched in 2008 after a combustible career in television. He created the reality formats America's Most Wanted and Cops at Fox, rose to president of Fox Television Stations, and was fired ten weeks later for hiring a model to strip during a speech about censorship in front of Rupert Murdoch. He later ran programming at USA Network. A Harvard classics major and former National Enquirer reporter, Chao built a second act around free, searchable tutorials covering everything from food hacks to augmented reality.
Timothy Noyes is the President and CEO of Newleos Therapeutics, a Boston clinical-stage biotech that raised an oversubscribed $93.5M Series A to revive four neuropsychiatric compounds shelved by Roche. A Harvard-trained operator with three decades in biopharma, he has taken Proteon and Aerovate public, launched Renagel at GelTex/Genzyme, and built teams that carry molecules from bench to late-stage trials.
Tom Hadfield is the British entrepreneur and CEO of Mio, an Austin-based company that makes enterprise chat tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Google Chat talk to each other. He is the kid who built Soccernet with his dad at 12 and sold it to ESPN for $40 million at 17, attended Harvard, ran a biotech, then went through Y Combinator to attack the problem of messaging interoperability with backing from Khosla Ventures, Cisco and Zoom.
Valentin Ruest is the co-founder and US co-CEO of Classtime, a Zurich-born edtech company building a formative and summative assessment platform used by educators and learners in more than 90 countries. A University of St. Gallen and Harvard-trained economist who once ran mortgages at a Swiss fintech, he traded banking for classrooms, splitting his life between Santa Barbara and Zurich while teaching personal finance in public schools and arguing that software should help teachers decide, not decide for them.
Will Nitze is the founder and CEO of IQBAR, a brain-and-body nutrition brand he built from a Kickstarter campaign into a nine-figure CPG company selling plant-based protein bars, hydration mixes, and instant coffee in more than 10,000 retail doors. A Harvard psychology and neuroscience graduate who once sold software to oil-and-gas companies, he formulated his first products with no food-science background, scaled IQBAR past 100 million bars sold, and now hosts the founder podcast Eating Glass.
Will O'Brien is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and the CEO and co-founder of NFT Oasis, the metaverse platform owned and operated by Provenonce, Inc. A blockchain and gaming veteran, he co-founded and led Bitcoin security pioneer BitGo (later acquired by Galaxy Digital for $1.2B) and was named Bitcoin industry 'CEO of the Year' in 2014. Before that he ran corporate development at Big Fish Games and held operating roles at Keen IO and TrialPay. He has backed 70-plus early-stage startups, holds a Harvard computer science degree and an MIT Sloan MBA, and moonlights as an improvisational pianist.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman is the founder and CEO of Teikametrics, a Boston-based AI platform that helps Amazon and Walmart sellers optimize advertising and pricing across more than $10 billion in marketplace transactions. A former Great Britain 800m runner and Harvard track captain, he started selling sporting goods from his dorm room in 2001, became one of Amazon's first third-party retailers in 2003, exited a fitness startup to News Corp, and has raised roughly $65 million for Teikametrics from investors including Intel Capital, Jump Capital, Centana Growth Partners and SoftBank's Lydia Jett.
Alexa Buckley is the co-founder and co-CEO of Margaux, the New York footwear label she started at 22 with her Harvard roommate Sarah Pierson. Margaux fixes a problem most brands ignore - fit - by offering made-to-order shoes in three widths and an extended size run, handmade in Spain and sold direct to consumers. The pitch grew out of the 'shoe shuffle' the two women watched office workers perform: pretty heels in a bag, ugly commuter flats on their feet. Buckley has been named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and has built Margaux into a brand that has raised millions across Seed through Series B rounds.
Ali Dastjerdi is the co-founder and CEO of Raylu, a New York AI company that turns an investor's thesis into booked founder meetings in minutes instead of weeks. A Harvard machine-learning student turned Insight Partners investor, he started Raylu in 2022 with his freshman-year roommate and a friend they met at AWS. The trio raised a $4M seed and an $8M Series A, and now sell their 'Deal Engineering' platform to 45-plus funds managing over $500 billion. They keep one unopened beer in the office fridge, to be drunk only the day the company dies.
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.
Anne Fulenwider spent 25 years turning sentences into magazine covers, capped by eight years as editor-in-chief of Marie Claire. Then she walked away from the masthead to co-found Alloy Women's Health, a digital company that connects women in perimenopause and menopause to menopause-trained physicians and doctor-prescribed treatment delivered to the door. She runs it as co-CEO alongside Monica Molenaar, applying an editor's instinct for storytelling to one of medicine's most overlooked subjects.
Ben Brook is the co-founder and CEO of Transcend, the data-privacy infrastructure company he started in 2017 with Harvard classmate Mike Farrell. He flew to San Francisco the day after graduation to build software that lets the world's largest companies find, delete, and control personal data at machine speed. Under his lead Transcend has delivered actionable data rights to over a billion people and raised nearly $90M, including a $40M Series B in 2024. A Toronto-born, award-winning filmmaker turned privacy engineer, Brook argues that privacy only works when it is encoded directly into the systems that touch personal data.
Bob Elliott is the co-founder, CEO and CIO of Unlimited Funds, a New York firm that uses Bayesian machine learning to replicate the returns of hedge funds, venture capital and private equity inside low-cost ETFs. A Harvard-trained botanist turned macro investor, he spent roughly 15 years at Bridgewater Associates, where he sat on the Investment Committee, helped run the flagship Pure Alpha fund, and built and led Ray Dalio's personal research team for nearly a decade. Today he is one of the most-followed independent macro voices on financial Twitter and the manager behind the HFND and HFGM ETFs.
Brad Olson runs Sollis Health, the members-only concierge urgent and emergency care company that treats your time as the real luxury. He came to medicine sideways - from Bain consulting to Starwood's loyalty empire to Peloton's first 100 employees - and now applies the playbook of emotional loyalty and hospitality to a 15,000-member, 11-clinic operation where the average wait to see an ER-boarded doctor is zero to fifteen minutes. His pitch is blunt: if any consumer business ran like a hospital ER, it would be out of business the next day.
Brynn Putnam is the founder and CEO of Board, a New York startup making a face-to-face game console that blends board games and video games on a 24-inch touchscreen that reads physical pieces. A former professional ballerina with the New York City Ballet and a Harvard graduate, she built the boutique studio Refine Method and then Mirror, the connected-fitness company she sold to Lululemon for $500 million in 2020. In 2026 Board raised a $20M Series A led by Union Square Ventures, with the device already in tens of thousands of homes, schools, hospitals and restaurants.
Dylan Parker is the co-founder and CEO of Moment, the AI operating system for investment management. A former Citadel Securities and Jane Street fixed income quant, he and two Harvard friends set out to drag the $150-trillion bond market out of spreadsheets and chat threads. In under four years Moment went from $300 billion to over $10 trillion in client assets monitored and raised $134 million across three rounds, counting Edward Jones, LPL Financial, and Hightower Advisors as customers.
Francis Thumpasery is the co-founder and CEO of PermitFlow, a New York-based startup using AI to drag construction permitting out of the fax-machine era. After a Harvard economics degree, a stint at McKinsey, and years investing in workflow software, he watched relatives outside Washington, DC wrestle with permits and decided the $1.6 trillion construction industry deserved better software. Since 2021 PermitFlow has powered over $20B in construction value, raised $90.5M, and turned a famously paper-bound process into something measured in days instead of months.
Jai Glazer is a Harvard junior in Pforzheimer House concentrating in Social Studies who has stacked an unusually deep venture and go-to-market resume before finishing his degree. He is Vice President of Strategy at the Harvard Undergraduate Venture Capital Group, a scout at Afore VC, and has worked on go-to-market teams at Rho and at Sana, a Forbes AI 50 startup, plus a summer as an analyst at Alinea Ventures. He also writes opinion pieces for the Harvard Independent and practices Muay Thai.
James Hirschfeld is the co-founder and CEO of Paperless Post, the New York company that turned the dread of sending an invitation into an act of design. He started it from a Harvard dorm in 2008 with his older sister Alexa, after his own 21st birthday party left him stuck between expensive paper and lifeless email. More than 175 million people have since sent or received a Paperless Post, across roughly 20 million events. He runs it as a design company that happens to live in a browser.
Jamie Beaton is the New Zealand-born co-founder and CEO of Crimson Education, the global university-admissions consultancy he started at 18 from a Harvard dorm room. After getting into all 25 elite universities he applied to, he built Crimson into a roughly billion-dollar company spanning 25+ countries, while personally collecting degrees from Harvard, Stanford, Yale Law, Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar) and more. He is the author of the bestselling admissions guide ACCEPTED!
Jeff Feldman is the CEO of Imprint, the New York visual-learning app that turns dense nonfiction into illustrated, bite-sized lessons. He joined in 2019 as Imprint's Founding Head of Product, became Chief Product Officer, and stepped into the CEO seat in 2024 as founder Daniel Terry moved to Executive Chairman. Before Imprint he built product at Resy and Pronoun, and studied at Harvard. Under his watch Imprint became a Google Best App of the Year and an Apple Editor's Choice.
John Voith is the CEO and co-founder of InStride Health, a Boston-based virtual specialty care company built to scale a proven hospital model for treating pediatric anxiety and OCD through insurance. A repeat healthcare entrepreneur who previously founded teledentistry company Virtudent and rose from intern to general manager at athenahealth, he pairs an operator's obsession with measurement with a mission-first conviction that evidence-based care should reach every family that needs it.
Lawrence Herman is the Chief Financial Officer and AI Strategy Leader at Cents, the all-in-one operating system for laundromats and dry cleaners. A payments and fintech finance veteran, he has steered the books at Dwolla, Accrete, and Paxful, and logged earlier stretches at Mastercard, American Express, Dataminr, EY, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. Harvard-trained in economics, he is known for calm during industry cycles, a preacher's zeal for financial literacy, and a habit of walking into every meeting with three discussion points and three asks.
Mark Hoadley is the co-founder and CEO of Hauler Hero, a vertical software company building cloud-native, AI-powered tools for the waste and recycling industry - CRM, dispatch, routing, billing and customer portals for the haulers that pick up the trash. A former ServiceTitan sales leader, he and brother-in-law Ben Sikma launched the company in 2020 after watching how outdated the software running garbage trucks really was. Hauler Hero now serves more than 200 hauling companies and has facilitated roughly 35 million trash pickups, raising a $16M Series A led by Frontier Growth in early 2026.