James Reinstein is the President and CEO of Conformal Medical, a New Hampshire medical device company building next-generation left atrial appendage occlusion (LAAO) technology to reduce stroke risk in patients with atrial fibrillation. A three-decade medtech operator, he spent 17 years at Boston Scientific in commercial leadership across Asia, Europe and Latin America before running a string of device companies as CEO, including Cutera, Drawbridge Health, Aptus Endosystems and Saranas. Known for insisting that a device company think commercially from day one, he took the helm at Conformal in 2022 to guide its foam-based CLAAS system through pivotal trials toward market.
Mathias Korder Fort is co-founder and CEO of Baselane, a New York-based fintech that gives independent landlords a single place to bank, collect rent, and keep books. In October 2025 the company closed a $20M Series B led by Thomvest Ventures, and simultaneously disclosed a previously-unannounced $14.4M Series A led by Matrix Partners, bringing total funding to roughly $44M. Before Baselane he spent seven years as a Principal in Boston Consulting Group's financial services practice, and started his career as an analyst at Morgan Stanley. He holds an MBA from INSEAD and a BA in economics from Trinity College.
Michael Mazur is co-founder and CEO of AI Clearing, an Austin-based platform that ingests drone imagery, BIM designs, schedules and ground data to produce autonomous progress tracking and quality control for large infrastructure builds. A former PwC partner who ran the firm's global Drone Powered Solutions unit, Mazur left in 2020 with co-founder Adam Wisniewski to spin the idea out as an independent company; in October 2023 the company closed a $14M Series A led by Prudence, on the back of 15x revenue growth.

Andreas Wallendahl is a co-founder and COO of Tenet, a New York fintech that makes electric-vehicle ownership cheaper by rewiring how EV loans get made. An MIT-trained engineer and former McKinsey consultant who helped build businesses inside Ethereum studio ConsenSys, he now partners with credit unions, green banks and asset managers to originate lower-cost EV financing, and bundles free smart-charging so customers save while they drive. Tenet has raised roughly $73 million in equity plus more than $100 million in committed loan funding.
Aurelian Lis is the Global CEO of Dermalogica, the professional skin-care brand owned by Unilever Prestige. A self-described 'nerdy physicist with a love for cosmetics,' he took the top job in January 2016 after quadrupling Benefit Cosmetics' Americas business to roughly $500 million as its general manager. Trained in physics at Oxford and business at INSEAD, Lis built and sold his own customized skincare company before bringing a science-meets-emotion philosophy and a habit of relentless iteration to one of the world's leading professional skincare houses.
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.
Rustam Sengupta is the founder and CEO of Tuktu Care, a Vancouver-born platform that matches older adults with vetted community helpers for companionship and everyday tasks so they can keep living at home. A serial entrepreneur who previously built solar microgrid companies across rural India, he turned a pandemic-era scramble to care for his aging parents in Singapore into a fast-growing agetech company backed by Techstars and Melinda French Gates' Pivotal Ventures. He holds an MBA from INSEAD, an MS in Electrical Engineering from UC Irvine, and a Chevening Fellowship from Oxford, and teaches social entrepreneurship at the University of Vermont.

Eduardo Fonseca is the CEO of XCath, a Houston- and Pangyo-based medtech company building endovascular robotic systems and steerable guidewires to treat stroke and other cerebrovascular conditions. A former Panamanian ambassador to the UAE and Saudi Arabia turned investor and operator, he joined the XCath board in 2019 and took the helm in 2023, also serving as interim CEO of sister company EndoQuest Robotics. Under his leadership XCath has logged a string of world firsts, including the first public remote mechanical thrombectomy demonstration and, in 2026, the world's first remote robotic intervention in a stroke patient.
Muzafar K. Bazaarwala is the founder and chief executive of ZK Saasto Bazaars (Pvt) Limited, which bills itself as the first company in Pakistan built to organize and modernize weekly bazaars as a branded, repeatable format. Operating out of Karachi, his business turns the country's informal weekly markets, where households buy groceries, fresh produce, meat and clothes, into a structured platform aimed at small traders and everyday shoppers. An INSEAD-trained entrepreneur, marketer and self-described salesperson, he has courted government bodies in Sindh, the Prime Minister's Youth Programme and the US Embassy, and he is a vocal commentator on Pakistan's startup scene, dissecting Shark Tank Pakistan pitches line by line on LinkedIn.
Sandeep Bhadra is a General Partner at Vertex Ventures US, a $150M early-stage fund focused on B2B software, cloud infrastructure, and developer tools. A Ph.D. engineer turned venture capitalist, he joined Vertex in 2017 as a founding team member after stints at Menlo Ventures and Cisco's corporate development. He's known for concentrated, high-conviction bets - typically 1-2 new investments per year - in companies like Hasura, Docker, Tulip Interfaces, and Gitpod. His background spans semiconductor engineering at Texas Instruments, $425M in cloud M&A at Cisco, and founding-team work that contributed to the creation of Barefoot Networks (later acquired by Intel). He grew up in India, where watching mobile telephony disrupt landline bureaucracy first showed him how software could leapfrog legacy systems.

Niraj Dawar is a Professor Emeritus of Marketing at Ivey Business School (University of Western Ontario) and one of the most influential marketing strategists working today. Author of TILT: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013) - a bestseller named Best Business Book of 2014 in Marketing by strategy+business - he built his reputation arguing that competitive advantage has permanently migrated downstream, from products to customer relationships. His 1994 Journal of Marketing paper on 'Marketing Universals' (with Philip Parker) has over 1,000 citations. After retiring to emeritus status, he pivoted to applying brand strategy to nations through GeoStrategix and the Nation Brand Research Initiative, publishing in the South China Morning Post as recently as March 2026 on US-China soft power competition in Southeast Asia.