Tagged: immigrant-founder
17 results
Adrian Ridner
Adrian Ridner is the CEO and Co-Founder of Study.com, one of the world's most visited online education platforms serving 34+ million monthly users. An Argentine-Jewish immigrant who navigated multiple countries before settling in California, Ridner built Study.com from a bootstrapped startup in 2002 into a 4,100-person company offering 20,000+ micro-video lessons and 200+ transferable college courses. His Working Scholars program has saved graduates $20 million in tuition and is particularly focused on first-generation college students and students of color. Ridner is a recipient of the ASU+GSV 2022 Innovator of Color Award and Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40.
Alexander Gallego
Alexander Gallego is the founder and CEO of Redpanda Data, a San Francisco-based streaming data platform that reached unicorn status in April 2025 after raising $100M in Series D funding led by GV. A Colombian immigrant who moved to the US at 14, Gallego built a storage engine at Akamai that outperformed Kafka by 34x, then left to found Redpanda in 2019 with a singular mission: make real-time data infrastructure simple enough to deploy in 60 seconds. Today Redpanda powers mission-critical systems for Fortune 1000 companies, government contractors, and telecom firms, processing up to 14GB/second sustained throughput, and is pivoting toward enterprise agentic AI infrastructure as autonomous agents reshape how applications are built.
Larry Liu
Larry Liu is the Founder and CEO of Weee!, North America's largest and fastest-growing Asian online grocery platform. Born in Wuhan, China, he came to the US via an Intel engineering role in 2003, earned an MBA from UC Davis in 2008, and launched Weee! in 2015 after noticing Chinese immigrants using WeChat to organize group grocery buys. He built the company from a Bay Area WeChat group into a $4.1 billion unicorn with $1 billion in annual revenue, delivering 1 million orders per month across 40+ states and serving seven ethnic cuisines including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian, and Hispanic communities.
Maxim Serebryakov
Maxim Serebryakov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sanas, a Palo Alto-based AI company building the world's first real-time Speech Understanding Platform. Born in New York and raised in Russia, Serebryakov co-founded Sanas at Stanford with two fellow international students after witnessing a friend face accent discrimination in a contact center. The company's AI modulates accents in real time while preserving a speaker's voice, tone, and emotion - serving 150,000+ live agents across 39 countries. Sanas has raised $149.2M in total funding, including a $65M Series B led by Quadrille Capital in February 2025.
Max Wang
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.
Moawia Eldeeb
Moawia Eldeeb is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tempo, a San Francisco-based AI-powered home fitness company that raised $316M and uses 3D sensors and computer vision to deliver real-time form correction and personalized training. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, he immigrated to the US at age 9, dropped out of school in 6th grade to work 12-hour shifts at a pizza restaurant, survived homelessness in a Harlem shelter, and put himself through Columbia University by working as a personal trainer - before building one of the most-funded fitness tech startups in history.
Wei Deng
Wei Deng is the CEO and founder of Clipboard Health, a San Francisco-based healthcare labor marketplace that connects nurses and other healthcare professionals with open shifts at facilities like nursing homes and hospitals. Founded in 2016 and backed by Sequoia Capital and IVP, the company achieved unicorn status at a $1.3B valuation after raising $94M in total funding. A Yale College and Yale Law School graduate, Deng pivoted through six to eight business models before discovering that flexible, on-demand shift matching was the key to solving healthcare staffing shortages. Known for her relentless persistence — she pitched facilities seven months pregnant — Deng built Clipboard Health into a platform serving over 5,000 facilities across the United States.
Suman Kanuganti
Suman Kanuganti is the Co-Founder and CEO of Personal AI, a San Francisco-based platform building memory-first AI for enterprise workforce transformation. A two-time venture-backed immigrant founder, he previously built Aira - an AI-powered accessibility company serving the blind and low-vision community that was recognized by TIME Magazine and Fast Company - before turning his attention to giving everyone a permanent, personalized AI trained on their own knowledge. He holds 10 patents in emerging technologies and has raised $16M for Personal AI, with customers including Microsoft, NVIDIA, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile.
Dror Liebenthal
Dror Liebenthal is the Israeli-born cofounder and CEO of Bold.org, a San Francisco-based platform that enables anyone — individual or company — to create and manage scholarships, fellowships, and grants at no cost. A Princeton Chemical Engineering graduate (magna cum laude, Class of 2015) who was the first in his family to navigate the US education system, Liebenthal built Bold.org after personally experiencing how a single scholarship changed his trajectory. The platform operates the Bold Foundation (501c3), has distributed millions in student scholarships, and pairs its philanthropy product with the Bold Debit Card, a fintech tool designed to help students manage their money and reduce debt.
Mehak Aggarwal
Mehak Aggarwal is the Co-Founder, CPO, and Head of AI at Sybill, an AI-powered sales assistant platform that analyzes sales calls, writes follow-up emails, and updates CRMs automatically. A product of IIT Delhi's dual-degree program in Mathematics and Computing, she went on to conduct research at Harvard's biomedical imaging center (where she developed a patented CT scan fracture-detection algorithm), Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Singapore University of Technology and Design. She and her co-founders - including her brother Gorish Aggarwal - built Sybill into a 700+ customer platform with $14.6M in total funding. In 2025, she was named a fully funded Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford Graduate School of Business, continuing to lead Sybill while studying.
Babak Pahlavan
Babak Pahlavan is the Founder, CEO & CPO of NinjaTech AI, the company behind MyNinja.ai — an autonomous AI executive assistant designed to handle real work on behalf of professionals. A serial entrepreneur who immigrated from Iran, earned dual honors degrees from UC Berkeley and Stanford, and sold his first AI startup CleverSense to Google in 2011, Babak spent 11 years as Senior Director of Product Management at Google leading 20+ teams before leaving in 2022 to build what he calls 'TaskGPT' — AI that doesn't just advise but actually does the work.
Diana Hu
Diana Hu is a General Partner at Y Combinator, where she has conducted over 1,700 office hours advising portfolio companies now worth a combined $1.7 billion. A Chilean-born engineer of Chinese descent, she co-founded Escher Reality in 2016, built the infrastructure for cross-platform multi-user AR experiences through YC's S17 batch, and sold the company to Niantic (makers of Pokemon GO) in 2018. She then led Niantic's AR Platform engineering before transitioning to investing, becoming one of the rare founders-turned-top-tier-VCs with deep technical chops in augmented reality, computer vision, and machine learning.
Mamoon Hamid
Mamoon Hamid is a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins, the legendary Silicon Valley VC firm he helped resurrect from near-irrelevance after joining in 2017. A Pakistani-born, Frankfurt-raised engineer turned investor, he was the first outside investor in Slack, wrote the first Kleiner check into Figma (his first deal at the firm, before it had revenue), and led the Series A into Rippling - the largest early-stage check KP had ever written. His quiet, measured style belies an extraordinary track record: under his tenure, Kleiner has returned approximately $13 billion to LPs and raised over $6 billion in fresh capital, including a $3.5B fund announced in March 2026.
Pejman Nozad
Pejman Nozad is the Founding Managing Partner of Pear VC, a $800M+ AUM seed-stage venture firm he co-founded in 2013. Born in Tehran, he arrived in Silicon Valley in 1992 with $700 and no English, worked as a car washer, lived in a yogurt shop attic, then became the top Persian rug salesman on University Avenue in Palo Alto — selling $8M in a single year to the Valley's most powerful VCs and founders. Those relationships became deal flow. He backed Dropbox, DoorDash ($1.9M seed → $440M), AppLovin, and Andy Rubin's pre-Android company Danger. Forbes ranked him #1 on its Midas Seed List three consecutive years (2023, 2024, 2025). He has no CS degree, no MBA, and never worked in tech — yet built one of the highest-performing seed funds ever and joined the board of Sheffield United FC in 2025.
Sheel Mohnot
Sheel Mohnot is a San Francisco-based fintech investor and co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV), a $300M+ seed-stage fund backing fintech companies globally. A two-time fintech founder himself - having built and exited FeeFighters (acquired by Groupon, 2012) and Innovative Auctions - Sheel brings rare operator credibility to early-stage investing. He co-founded The Pitch podcast, co-leads BTV's The Mint accelerator, and is one of fintech's most-followed voices on Twitter/X with 150K+ followers. Known for his fintech-only thesis, global portfolio (33% outside US), and a Taco Bell metaverse wedding officiated by Kal Penn.
Ankur Nagpal
Ankur Nagpal is an Indian-American entrepreneur, investor, and capital-efficient founder who built Teachable from a dorm-room frustration into a $250M exit, then reinvented himself as a solo-GP venture investor (Vibe Capital, $70M+ raised), fintech builder (Carry, acquired by AngelList in 2026), and prolific financial educator (Silly Money newsletter, 86K+ subscribers). In April 2026 he joined AngelList full-time as GP of USVC, a public venture fund co-chaired by Naval Ravikant with stakes in xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Vercel.
Nakul Mandan
Nakul Mandan is the founder and managing partner of Audacious Ventures, a $250M pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. A graduate of IIT Kanpur and IIM Lucknow, he arrived in the US in 2009 on an H-1B visa and spent a decade investing at Battery Ventures and Lightspeed before launching Audacious in April 2020 — during COVID lockdowns. His firm's unconventional edge: embedding a full recruiting operation inside a VC fund, with technical recruiters actively running executive and engineering searches for portfolio companies. He has backed companies including WorkOS, Tome, FalconX, and Multiverse, and is known for his framework of five founder traits: high IQ, outsized ambition, the ability to make people believe, grit, and velocity.