SurgiQuality is a Rockville, Maryland health-tech company built by a practicing surgeon to fix the information gap patients face when they are told they need an operation. Its platform brings medical records and imaging to the cloud, routes them to a network of 45,000+ surgeons for independent written opinions, and uses proprietary AI (SurgiGPT) to score surgeons on risk-adjusted outcomes pulled from de-identified EMR data. The goal: help patients pick the right surgeon and the right approach, avoid unnecessary surgery, and help employers lower the cost of surgical benefits.
Zarminali Pediatrics is a venture-backed, multi-specialty pediatric care group building purpose-designed clinics that bundle primary care, urgent care, specialty care, behavioral health, and telehealth under one coordinated roof. Founded in 2024 by healthcare operator Danish Qureshi after his own family struggled to coordinate care for a child with an autoimmune disorder, the company has grown to roughly 28 clinics across 8 states and raised $110M in Series A funding (about $150M total) to fix what it calls a fragmented, broken pediatric system.
Robert K. Weigle is a medical device and diagnostics executive with more than 25 years of experience taking healthcare products from pre-clinical research to commercial launch. He is CEO of NOW Diagnostics, an independent board member of Tenon Medical, and a former entrepreneur-in-residence at DigitalDx Ventures. He led Benvenue Medical as CEO for over a decade, raising more than $200 million and launching spine devices in two markets, and later ran saliva-based diagnostics companies focused on cancer detection. His career spans Fortune 500 names like Johnson & Johnson and Baxter as well as a string of venture-backed startups.
FeedbackNow is a New York-based real-time customer experience company best known for the Smiley Box - the push-button terminals that ask travelers, patients and shoppers how their visit went and route that sentiment to operations teams within minutes. Founded in Switzerland in 2012, acquired by Forrester in 2018, and spun back out as an independent, venture-backed company in 2024, it pairs physical feedback devices and environmental sensors with AI analytics to help airports, hospitals and retailers fix problems before they show up in a survey.
Sesame is a direct-pay, cash-only healthcare marketplace that lets patients shop for doctor visits, labs, imaging, prescriptions and specialty care online without insurance. Often called 'the Expedia for medical care,' it lists transparent prices from thousands of providers across all 50 states, with one-time visits starting around $39 and memberships from $19. Founded in 2018 by David Goldhill, Michael Botta and John Fontein, Sesame aims to strip bureaucracy out of healthcare so patients and clinicians transact directly.
Spark Advisors is a New York-based technology-enabled Medicare brokerage that builds an all-in-one platform for independent agents, agency principals, and call centers. It combines an agency management system, a Medicare-specific CRM, back-office services, and AI-powered tools to help brokers grow their books of business and keep clients enrolled. The company supports more than 10,000 brokers and powered roughly 250,000 Medicare enrollments in 2025.
SuperDial is a San Francisco voice AI company that builds agents to handle the endless administrative phone calls between healthcare providers, billing companies and insurers - navigating phone trees, waiting on hold, and conducting live conversations with payer reps. Its agents automate benefits verification, prior authorizations, claim status follow-up, credentialing and provider data attestation, logging structured results directly into a customer's EHR or RCM platform. Founded by Stanford classmates Sam Schwager and Harrison Caruthers (originally as the billing startup SuperBill), the company launched in late 2023, scaled to seven-figure revenue and tens of thousands of calls per week, and raised a $15M Series A in June 2025 led by SignalFire.
Andrea Ippolito is the founder and CEO of SimpliFed, an Ithaca, New York company building a maternal health operating system that delivers virtual breastfeeding, infant nutrition and OB support to families in all 50 states at no cost through health plans. A biomedical engineer by training, she co-directed MIT Hacking Medicine, co-founded Smart Scheduling (acquired by athenahealth in 2016), served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow in the White House, and ran the VA's Innovators Network before turning her own postpartum struggle into a company that now partners with 300-plus health systems and raised an oversubscribed $10.8M Series A in 2026.
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.
Bright Now! Dental is one of the largest affordable dental care brands in the United States, operating a network of roughly 160 affiliated offices across about a dozen states. Backed by parent company Smile Brands Inc., it offers general dentistry, orthodontics, cosmetic care, implants, clear aligners and emergency services, with evening and weekend hours, financing options and an in-house OneSmile discount plan designed to make routine and specialty dentistry accessible to families who might otherwise skip the dentist.
Carbon Health is an American chain of tech-enabled primary and urgent care clinics that pairs brick-and-mortar visits with telemedicine, all running on its own AI-powered electronic health record. Founded in 2015 in San Francisco by Udemy co-founder Eren Bali, it set out to make seeing a doctor feel as simple as using a consumer app - same-day appointments, transparent records, and a single platform tying diagnostics, virtual visits, and prescriptions together. After raising more than $600 million and scaling past 100 clinics, the company filed for Chapter 11 in February 2026 to restructure its debt while continuing to operate.
El Camino Health is a not-for-profit healthcare system that has served Silicon Valley and the South Bay for more than 60 years. Born from a 1950s community vote and a tax that residents levied on themselves, it runs two acute care hospitals in Mountain View and Los Gatos plus roughly two dozen care locations across Santa Clara County. With 471 beds, about 4,480 employees and 1,585 physicians, it blends a community-rooted mission with the technology-forward instincts of the valley it sits in.
Reputation (reputation.com) is a San Ramon, California SaaS company that helps multi-location and enterprise brands manage what the internet says about them. Its platform pulls reviews, surveys, social posts, business listings and customer feedback into one place, scores it with a proprietary metric called RepScore, and uses AI to help companies respond, rank locally, and turn sentiment into operational decisions. It serves roughly 750 enterprise customers across industries like healthcare, automotive, retail, financial services, hospitality, senior care and property management.
Kees Hertogh is Vice President of Public Sector & Healthcare Marketing at Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington. A Netherlands-born executive who joined Microsoft via the 2002 Navision acquisition, he has spent over two decades at the company rising from product management on Microsoft Dynamics AX through to VP-level leadership over the global marketing strategy for Microsoft's healthcare, life sciences, education, and government verticals. He is the primary public face of Microsoft Dragon Copilot - the AI clinical workflow assistant reaching 100,000+ clinicians - and a prolific industry blogger and conference speaker on responsible AI in healthcare.
Alex Mauricio is the President and CEO of Bristol Hospice, one of the largest and fastest-growing hospice organizations in the United States, spanning approximately 80 locations across 25 states. With 20+ years in healthcare and 13+ years in hospice, Mauricio rose through the ranks from home care roots to leading a $214M-funded organization of ~2,500 employees. He became CEO in February 2023, succeeding founder Hyrum Kirton, and has since driven aggressive acquisition-led expansion while championing specialty programs including pediatric hospice, COPD-focused care, and palliative services.
Bo Lu is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Clipboard Health, a billion-dollar healthcare staffing marketplace connecting nurses, CNAs, and other healthcare professionals with facilities that need them. Before Clipboard Health, he co-founded FutureAdvisor, a Y Combinator-backed digital wealth management platform that Sequoia Capital invested in and BlackRock acquired for an estimated $150-200 million in 2015. He served as Managing Director at BlackRock before joining Clipboard Health, where he focuses on marketplace design, operational excellence, and building a culture of curiosity and speed. He was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer at Davos in 2015.
Cecilia Aviles, MBA, BSN, RN, is the Chief Executive Officer of LifeLong Medical Care, a Federally Qualified Health Center serving over 55,000 patients across Contra Costa and Alameda Counties in the East Bay. A native San Franciscan who started her career as a trauma nurse, she brings more than 20 years of healthcare leadership experience — including 11 years at Sutter Health and earlier stints at Kaiser Permanente, UCSF, KPMG, and McKesson — to lead one of the Bay Area's most vital safety-net providers. A Carol Emmott Fellow and recognized among the Bay Area's top Hispanic nurses, she is committed to making healthcare accessible, equitable, and affordable for underserved communities.
David Pearlstein is the Chief Executive Officer of New Horizons In-Home Care, Oregon's largest in-home care agency with over 570 employees and 12 locations statewide. A serial entrepreneur with 30+ years spanning healthcare, insurance, and real estate, Pearlstein built and sold multiple companies before taking the helm at New Horizons — transforming it into an award-winning, people-first organization recognized for both care quality and employer culture. Based in Lafayette, California, he leads a company providing around-the-clock care to seniors, adults with disabilities, and medically fragile children across Oregon.
Dr. David Werdegar, MD, MPH is the former President and CEO of Institute on Aging (IOA), San Francisco's leading nonprofit dedicated to helping older adults and adults with disabilities live with dignity and independence. A physician trained at New York Medical College and UCSF, Werdegar transformed IOA from a community program into a comprehensive elder-care organization serving thousands annually across the San Francisco Bay Area. Under his watch, IOA opened a landmark 50,000-square-foot campus on Geary Boulevard in 2011, consolidating programs spanning home care, dementia day enrichment, and the 24/7 Friendship Line warmline. He retired in 2022 after steering the organization to nearly $100 million in annual revenue with a staff of around 900.
Michael Harrington is the Chief Executive Officer, Practice Management at Vituity, the physician-owned, multispecialty partnership headquartered in Emeryville, California. An accountant by training, he has spent more than three decades inside healthcare operations and stepped into the CEO role in 2002 after years as Vituity's CFO.
Marty Lynch, PhD, MPA, is CEO Emeritus of LifeLong Medical Care, the Berkeley-based federally qualified health center he led for nearly four decades. He grew a small Over 60 Health Center into a 16-clinic network covering Alameda, Contra Costa, and Marin counties, and now lectures at UC Berkeley while serving on California's Master Plan for Aging Advisory Committee.
Kerem Ozkay is the CEO of Carbon Health, the modern primary and urgent care chain. An aerospace engineer turned marketer turned operator, he ran growth and operations at Carbon for years before founder Eren Bali handed him the top job in August 2024. He now steers the company through a Chapter 11 restructuring designed to refocus on its hybrid care model and homegrown EHR.
Kevin Klockenga is President and Chief Executive Officer of Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital in Santa Clarita, California, a 357-bed not-for-profit community hospital and Level II trauma center. He took the corner office in March 2023, following a decade running Providence's Northern California region and a long arc through hospital administration that began in central Illinois and ran through Washington University in St. Louis. He sits on the board of the Hospital Association of Southern California and is known inside the building for an old-school work ethic, a vintage Corvette he tinkers with, and a stated mission to leave a culture behind that outlives him.
Misty R. Jones is the president and CEO of Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley, a Pleasanton-based hospital affiliated with Stanford Medicine. A nurse-turned-operator with an MSN and MBA, she stepped in on June 9, 2025, after two decades running academic medical centers in the Midwest, and is now steering a 66,000-square-foot east wing expansion that will more than double the emergency department.
Owen Tripp is the co-founder and CEO of Included Health, the San Francisco company formed in 2021 when Grand Rounds Health and Doctor On Demand merged. A serial founder with prior turns at Reputation.com, eBay and Accenture, he's known for an opinionated, plain-spoken leadership style and a thesis that better outcomes come from blending clinical expertise, software and human navigation.
Paul A. King is President and CEO of Stanford Medicine Children's Health and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford, where he has led a 5,200-person pediatric and obstetric enterprise since January 2019. He calls himself a 'professional crap-cutter' and ran the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital at the University of Michigan before heading west.
Pedro Toledo is the CEO of Petaluma Health Center, a federally qualified health center serving more than 40,000 patients across Sonoma County and West Marin. The son of a Bracero-program farmworker, he holds degrees from Stanford, Cornell Law, and Georgetown, and was one of 14 Californians chosen for the 2020 Citizens Redistricting Commission.
Pete Pallarés is the Barcelona-born founder and CEO of Center for Social Dynamics (CSD), an Alameda-based provider of in-home and center-based ABA autism services that has scaled across six western states since 2012. A former college basketball player at the University of Hawaii, he turned a personal experience with dyslexia and ADHD into a multidisciplinary, multilingual treatment company and a foundation that funds students entering the autism field.