It started as a burger stand under the Santa Barbara sun in 1969. Fifty-five years and one ampersand later, Habit Burger & Grill is Yum! Brands' bet that a chargrilled patty can scale without losing the char.
OluKai is a Hawaiian-inspired premium footwear brand that designs sandals, sneakers, slippers, boots and golf shoes for people who live an active, ocean-oriented lifestyle. Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Irvine, California, the company blends the Hawaiian values of comfort ('olu') and ocean ('kai') with contoured, high-support footbeds and water-friendly, durable construction. A Certified B Corporation, OluKai channels a portion of every sale into its 'Ohana Giveback Program and the Ama OluKai Foundation to preserve Hawaiian culture and communities.
Kantata is a cloud software company that builds a purpose-built Professional Services Automation (PSA) platform for services organizations. Formed in 2021 through the merger of Mavenlink and Kimble Applications and backed by Accel-KKR, Kantata unifies project management, resource planning, time and expense tracking, billing, business intelligence and increasingly agentic AI so that consulting firms, agencies and other services businesses can scope, staff, forecast and deliver client work profitably. The company serves more than 2,000 organizations across 100+ countries, including Deloitte, Sage, Hitachi and NTT Data.
Lantronix is an Irvine, California-based global provider of secure IoT and remote environment management solutions that combine intelligent hardware, connectivity, software-as-a-service and engineering services. Founded in 1989 and publicly traded on Nasdaq as LTRX, the company builds device servers, IoT gateways, cellular routers, console servers and PoE switches, paired with cloud management platforms like Percepxion and ConsoleFlow, to help organizations connect, compute, comprehend and control equipment at the edge across automotive, industrial, smart city, defense and enterprise IT markets.
Vena Vitals is an Irvine, California medical-device startup building a soft, skin-worn sticker sensor that continuously measures blood pressure without a cuff or an arterial line. Spun out of UC Irvine biomedical engineering research, its VeriTrack system uses a patented wrinkled-metal capacitive pressure sensor to capture beat-to-beat data with accuracy validated against arterial lines in operating rooms across the country. Founded in 2019 by Ray Liu, Michelle Khine, and Josh Kim and backed by Y Combinator, the company is pursuing FDA clearance to bring continuous, noninvasive blood pressure monitoring first into hospitals and later into homes.
Anuj Bhalla is the founder and CEO of serviceMob, an Irvine, California enterprise software company that brings order to the chaos of customer service data. A UC Berkeley applied mathematician and MIT Sloan Fellow, he spent over a decade leading Accenture's Service Analytics Strategy practice and filing three patents before building serviceMob around a concept he calls 'Ontolytics' - analytics layered on top of a unifying data ontology to illuminate the 'dark, unexplored data' that hides inside support operations. He was named a 2024 CEO Visionary by the Los Angeles Times and his company earned a spot on MIT's STEX25 startup roster.
Tiffany Pang is the co-founder and CEO of Outreach Grid (Appledore, Inc.), a software platform that helps cities, outreach workers, law enforcement, and nonprofits coordinate the work of reducing homelessness. A San Francisco native and Yale-trained neuroscientist turned software engineer, she left a Silicon Valley job to build tools that connect the people working on the streets with the agencies that can house and help. Her work earned a spot on Forbes' 30 Under 30 for Social Entrepreneurs, and Outreach Grid has expanded to communities across multiple U.S. states.
Chuck Kruger is the President and CEO of Foresight Mental Health, a Berkeley-based outpatient behavioral health provider he took over in April 2025 with a mandate to make the company self-sustaining and profitable. A Stanford-trained operator with more than 25 years building private-equity-backed healthcare services companies, he previously ran Akeso Occupational Health, launched and scaled Dignity Health GoHealth Urgent Care into San Francisco's largest urgent care network, and integrated more than 125 outpatient clinics over a decade at Physical Rehabilitation Network. His brand of leadership is unglamorous on purpose: run the basics well, deliver care from the first visit to the last, and make the math work.
StretchLab is the original and largest one-on-one assisted stretching franchise, built on the simple bet that flexibility deserves its own studio. Trained specialists called Flexologists guide members through customized stretch sessions using techniques like PNF, supported by 3D body-scan technology (MAPS) and recovery tools such as NormaTec compression. Founded in Venice, California in 2015 and now owned by Xponential Fitness, StretchLab became the first assisted stretching brand to surpass 500 studios in North America.