Karat is a Seattle-based company that runs technical interviews on behalf of employers through its 'Interviewing Cloud' - a global network of trained Interview Engineers who conduct 24/7 live, structured technical interviews backed by enterprise infrastructure and hiring analytics. Used by enterprises like Roblox, American Express, Intuit, Pinterest and Wayfair, Karat lets engineering teams scale hiring capacity, reclaim engineer time, and make fairer, more consistent hiring decisions.
BetterUp is a San Francisco-founded human transformation company that pairs certified human coaches, behavioral science, and AI to deliver personalized professional and leadership development at enterprise scale. It coaches employees at hundreds of companies and government agencies, blending one-on-one coaching, assessments, and data-driven insights, and has increasingly moved toward AI-powered coaching that runs around the clock.
Sarah Franklin is the CEO of Lattice, the people-management platform headquartered in San Francisco. A Virginia Tech-trained chemical engineer and biochemist, she spent 15+ years at Salesforce, where she built Trailhead into a movement and later served as President and Chief Marketing Officer before stepping into Lattice's top job in January 2024 to rewire HR for the AI era.
Scott Helmes is a senior operator on the CEO team at Gusto, the San Francisco payroll, benefits and HR platform used by hundreds of thousands of small businesses. A product and marketing veteran who spent more than a decade scaling CareerBuilder across North America and Europe, he joined Gusto in 2019 and has been part of the leadership group steering its move into embedded payroll, AI-assisted workflows and SMB benefits.
Ashby is an all-in-one recruiting platform that bundles applicant tracking, sourcing, scheduling, CRM, and analytics into a single AI-powered system used by companies like OpenAI, Shopify, Notion, Snowflake, and Ramp.
ChangeEngine is a San Francisco-based AI-powered employee experience platform that helps People teams design, automate and personalize internal communications across the entire employee lifecycle - from onboarding to recognition - across email, Slack, Teams, SMS and SharePoint, without forcing employees to log in to a new tool.
Checkr is a San Francisco-based HR-tech company that uses AI and a modern API to run background checks at internet speed. Founded in 2014 by Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon out of Y Combinator, it processes screenings for Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, OpenAI and thousands of other employers - and lobbies hard for fair-chance hiring along the way.
CodeSignal is a San Francisco-based skills platform that uses AI-driven simulations to assess technical and soft-skills talent and to train workers through Cosmo, its conversational AI tutor. Founded in 2015 as CodeFights and rebranded in 2018, it now powers technical hiring and upskilling at companies like Meta, Netflix, Zoom, Robinhood and Capital One.
Findem is an AI-powered talent intelligence platform built on a proprietary Talent Data Cloud that enriches candidate profiles with 3D data (people, company, time). It automates sourcing, CRM, analytics and executive search for enterprise talent teams, with customers including RingCentral, Nutanix, and Intuitive Surgical.
Hourly is a Palo Alto-based fintech platform that combines payroll, workers' compensation insurance, and time tracking into a single mobile-first system built for small businesses with hourly workers. Its pay-as-you-go workers' comp model calculates premiums against actual wages in real time, eliminating year-end audits and helping employers avoid overpaying. Founded in 2018 by Tom Sagi, Shay Litvak, and Amir Faintuch, the company raised $39M+ and serves 500+ businesses across construction, manufacturing, transportation, and similar industries. In July 2025, Hourly was acquired by Israeli insurtech WeSure in a deal valued at approximately $168M.
Human Interest is a San Francisco-based fintech company on a mission to make retirement savings accessible to every American worker, regardless of where they work. The company provides affordable, full-service 401(k) and 403(b) plans designed for small and medium-sized businesses — the 99% of employers who have historically been priced out of quality retirement plan options. With a platform that handles recordkeeping, compliance, payroll integration, and investment management all in one place, Human Interest has become one of the fastest-growing retirement plan providers in the U.S., serving nearly 50,000 employers and 2 million+ eligible employees.
Humand is a mobile-first, all-in-one HR platform built for the 2.7 billion deskless and frontline workers who have never had a proper digital work home. Founded in 2020 by Nicolas Benenzon and Geronimo Maspero, the platform combines 30+ HR modules - from internal communications and payroll to performance reviews and AI-powered automation - into a single app. With 1.6 million workers across 1,500+ organizations in 51 countries, and a $66M Series A raised in February 2026 co-led by Kaszek and Goodwater Capital, Humand is positioning itself as the operating system for the world's largest workforce segment.
Abhimanyu Choudhary is Co-Founder and Chief Sales Officer of Xoxoday, a B2B SaaS rewards, incentives, and loyalty platform serving 5,000+ enterprise clients across 175+ countries. After a decade-long career at Tata Steel rising to General Manager of Sales, he joined Xoxoday in 2018 to lead its commercial growth engine. Today, Xoxoday processes ~250,000 transactions daily and has raised over $100M in funding, most recently a Series C in January 2026 from Apis Partners and 57 Stars.
Adarsh Hiremath is the Co-Founder and CTO of Mercor, the AI-powered talent marketplace connecting domain experts with AI labs for model training, evaluation, and data creation. At 22, he dropped out of Harvard, received a Thiel Fellowship, and co-built Mercor from a São Paulo hackathon idea into a $10 billion company generating over $500 million in annual revenue - making him one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires alongside co-founders Brendan Foody and Surya Midha.
Alex Bouaziz is the co-founder and CEO of Deel, the $17.3 billion global HR and payroll platform that allows companies to hire anyone, anywhere. Born in Paris in 1993 and raised between France and Israel, Bouaziz studied civil engineering at Technion and MIT before pivoting to entrepreneurship. He co-founded Deel in 2019 with MIT classmate Shuo Wang after observing glaring pay inequities for international talent and experiencing firsthand the pain of paying overseas workers. Under his leadership, Deel surpassed $1 billion ARR in Q1 2025, raised $300 million in Series E funding at a $17.3 billion valuation in October 2025, and became one of the fastest-growing HR technology companies in history.
Anand Prajapati is Co-Founder and CTO of Leena AI, an enterprise agentic AI platform that deploys AI colleagues to automate back-office work across HR, IT, Finance, and Procurement. A graduate of IIT Delhi, Anand built Leena AI's technology from scratch after two earlier startup pivots, guiding the company through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch to a $30M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Today Leena AI's platform serves 400+ enterprise customers across 90+ countries - including Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Sony - resolving millions of employee queries autonomously across 100+ languages.
Andrew Higashi is the Co-founder and CEO of ChangeEngine, a San Francisco-based AI-powered employee experience platform that helps companies communicate with and engage their people the way the best brands engage customers. A three-time company builder, he spent a decade honing enterprise sales and go-to-market strategy at Gigya, WorkSpan, and Sendoso before founding ChangeEngine in 2021 with the same co-founding team he has worked alongside for ten years. ChangeEngine has raised $15.5 million in total funding, including a $10 million Series A led by Threshold Ventures in 2024, and serves 310+ employees globally with operations in the US, UK, and Latin America.
Anil Dharni is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sense, a San Francisco-based AI-powered talent engagement platform that serves over 1,000 organizations. Before reshaping how companies hire, he co-founded Funzio, the mobile gaming studio behind 'Crime City' and 'Modern War,' which sold to GREE for $210 million in 2012. At Sense, backed by SoftBank with $106 million raised and a $500M valuation, he is on a mission to humanize the contingent workforce and make candidates feel genuinely valued through AI, automation, and omnichannel communication.
Aziz Qureshi is one of the four co-founders of Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll), the cloud-based HR, payroll, and benefits platform serving over 500,000 small and medium businesses across the United States. Founded in 2012 as part of Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch, Gusto has grown into one of the most prominent HR SaaS companies in the world, raising over $796 million in funding at a $10 billion valuation. Qureshi, based in Karachi, Pakistan, has maintained a notably private profile compared to his co-founders, contributing to Gusto's mission of bringing simplicity and humanity to workforce management for small businesses.
Brendan Foody is the 22-year-old co-founder and CEO of Mercor, the AI talent and data company that became a $10 billion decacorn in under two years. A Georgetown dropout and former Thiel Fellow from Menlo Park, California, Foody co-founded Mercor with high school debate teammates Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha at a São Paulo hackathon in early 2023. Mercor connects AI labs — including OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic — with domain experts (scientists, doctors, lawyers, bankers) who train frontier AI models through human feedback, growing from $1M to $500M in annual run rate within 17 months and making Foody one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires.
Benjamin Encz is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ashby, a San Francisco-based AI-native recruiting platform used by companies like OpenAI, Shopify, and Snowflake. A German-born software engineer turned recruiting-infrastructure builder, he spent 80% of his time on recruiting operations as Director of Engineering at PlanGrid before co-founding Ashby in 2018. Under his leadership, Ashby has grown to 2,700+ customers, ~$28M ARR, 380 employees, and $142.5M in total funding including a $50M Series D in 2025.
Dhiraj Sharma is the Founder and CEO of Simpplr, the AI-powered employee experience platform that has raised $139M across four funding rounds, including a $70M Series D in 2023. A serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience, he previously founded Simplion Technologies and Lirik Inc. before co-founding Simpplr in 2014. Under his leadership, Simpplr has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Intranet Packaged Solutions, the Forrester Wave for Intranet Platforms, and the IDC MarketScape for Integrated Employee Workspaces, building a platform designed to make work more human for hundreds of enterprise clients.
Heather Conklin is CEO of Torch, a San Francisco-based digital coaching platform that pairs leaders with expert coaches to drive measurable behavior change at scale. A Salesforce veteran who spent nine years there - culminating as SVP & GM of Trailhead - she joined Torch as COO in 2022 before being elevated to CEO in August 2024. Her philosophy blends behavioral science, data-driven measurement, and the radical idea that vulnerability is a leadership strength, not a weakness.
Hariharan Kolam (Hari Kolam) is the co-founder and CEO of Findem, an AI-powered talent data platform headquartered in Redwood City, California. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years building technology companies, he previously co-founded Instart Logic as CTO, accumulating over 50 technology patents. At Findem, Kolam is reimagining recruitment by replacing resume-based hiring with 3D candidate profiles that synthesize data from over 100,000 sources and 1.6 trillion data points - turning talent acquisition from a guessing game into a data science problem. Under his leadership, Findem raised a $51M Series C in October 2025, bringing total funding to $124M.
Jonathan Perichon is the Co-founder and CTO of Checkr, Inc., a San Francisco-based AI-powered background screening platform he co-founded in 2014 with Daniel Yanisse. A French-born software engineer who discovered the gig economy's broken background check infrastructure while working at an LA startup, Perichon turned that frustration into a $4.6 billion company serving over 100,000 clients including DoorDash, Lyft, Coinbase, and Uber. A Y Combinator S14 alumnus who applied three times before getting in, he embodies the principle that persistence and execution beat credentials every time.
Matt Schulman is the Founder and CEO of Pave, the AI-powered compensation platform he built after watching coworkers at Facebook struggle to understand their own stock options. Starting with a cold email to 200 executives in 2019 (59 replied within 24 hours), he grew Pave into a $1.6 billion company with 3,500+ customers and $471M in total funding - making it the largest compensation data provider for private companies in the world after acquiring Option Impact from Morgan Stanley in 2022.
Max Wang is the Co-Founder and CTO of Workstream, a San Francisco-based HR and payroll platform built specifically for America's hourly workforce. He co-founded China's AngelList equivalent (VC.CN) in 2011, built it to a 50-person team, then crossed the Pacific to co-build Workstream with Desmond Lim and Lei Xu after a 100-interview discovery sprint revealed that hiring hourly workers was a massive unsolved problem. Today, Workstream serves 4,000+ businesses across 24,000 locations, has raised $118 million, and is deploying AI tools - including VoiceAI - to compress hiring cycles from weeks to hours for restaurants, franchises, and deskless-workforce employers.
Mayank Goyal is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist (Head of AI) at Leena AI, an enterprise agentic AI platform that automates HR, IT, and Finance support for organizations worldwide. An IIT Delhi alumnus in Production and Industrial Engineering, Mayank co-founded ChatterOn in 2015 with Adit Jain and Anand Prajapati before pivoting to Leena AI in 2017 after noticing large enterprises like Coca-Cola and Vodafone using their chatbot platform for internal support. Leena AI joined Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch, raised $40M+ across multiple rounds including a $30M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, and now serves 500+ enterprise customers across 90+ countries, reaching 3+ million employees. Mayank leads the AI research and product intelligence that powers Leena AI's pre-built AI colleagues - Gavin (HR), Miles (IT), and Harper (Finance).
Nicolas Benenzon is the CEO and co-founder of Humand, an AI-powered HR and internal communication platform built for the world's 2.7 billion deskless workers. Founded in 2020 in Argentina and now headquartered in San Francisco, Humand serves 2+ million employees across 2,000+ organizations in 51 countries. In February 2026, Benenzon led the company's $66 million Series A - described by Nasdaq as the largest in Latin American history for its category - backed by Kaszek, Goodwater Capital, Y Combinator, and notable angels including the founders of Dropbox, Vercel, and MercadoLibre.
Nurasyl Serik is the co-founder and CEO of RemoFirst, a San Francisco-based Employer of Record (EOR) platform that enables companies to hire and manage full-time employees and contractors across 185+ countries. Born in Kazakhstan and educated in the UK, Serik bootstrapped RemoFirst to seven figures before raising $39.4M in venture funding, earning a Forbes 30 Under 30 spot in 2024 and a Fast Company Most Innovative Companies ranking in 2025. His platform undercuts legacy EOR providers with flat-rate pricing starting at $199/month, processing payroll across multiple currencies for clients including Microsoft, Mastercard, and the WHO.