irvine
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Andrew Abraham Built Orgain by Listening to the Shelf
Before Orgain reached more than 100,000 stores, its founder answered the phones, improvised an org chart with family names and watched an early batch turn stubbornly solid. His useful talent was never pretending the first plan was sacred.
Michael Speranza
Michael Speranza is the CEO of Kantata, the professional services automation software company formed in 2022 from the merger of Mavenlink and Kimble Applications. A Rensselaer-trained electrical engineer who began his career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory before pivoting to Deloitte Consulting and then a two-decade run inside private equity backed software companies, Speranza has specialized in scaling mid-market B2B software firms from roughly $100 million toward $1 billion in revenue.
Ray Liu
Ray Liu is the CEO and co-founder of Vena Vitals, an Irvine, California medtech startup building a soft, skin-like sticker that tracks blood pressure continuously, beat by beat, without cuffs or invasive arterial lines. A National Science Foundation fellow turned operator, Liu spent two decades inside GE Healthcare, Siemens, and Vizient, and racked up two health-tech exits before reuniting with a former Berkeley labmate, UC Irvine professor Michelle Khine, and PhD scientist Josh Kim to turn a material-science breakthrough into a clinical product. Backed by Y Combinator, MedTech Innovator, and EvoNexus, Vena Vitals has tested its sensor on 600-plus patients in operating rooms and is targeting FDA clearance in 2026.
Jessica Toh
Jessica Toh is the co-founder and CEO of Huckleberry Labs, the AI-powered children's sleep and parenting app she built with her husband Seng Toh after their own son woke every two to three hours for 20 months. A UC Berkeley triple major in electrical engineering, computer science, and math & statistics with a Cambridge MBA, she turned a personal sleep crisis into data science, then into a company that now reaches more than 5 million families across 150+ countries - including roughly 15% of U.S. babies. Her mission is to make expert-grade parenting guidance affordable for everyone, not just families who can pay a sleep consultant thousands a year.
Todd Watts
Todd Watts is the co-founder and CEO of PatientFi, an Irvine, California fintech that lets patients pay for elective and out-of-pocket healthcare in monthly installments at the point of care. Since starting the company in 2017, he has built a platform that has helped roughly 320,000 patients qualify for more than $3 billion in care across aesthetics, fertility, dentistry, ophthalmology and audiology, reaching a $140 million annual revenue run rate and 130 employees. A former J.P. Morgan investment banker with a Yale MBA, Watts was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 Pacific Southwest winner.
Darrin Chen
Darrin Chen is the VP of Global Partners (NPN) GTM & Operations at NVIDIA, where he leads go-to-market strategy and operations for the NVIDIA Partner Network - the company's global partner ecosystem spanning solution providers, systems integrators, and channel partners. With 30+ years in technology from storage to networking to AI infrastructure, Chen joined NVIDIA through the 2020 acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, where he had spent over a decade building worldwide channel programs. In mid-2023, NVIDIA expanded his mandate as it split its global channel chief role in two, tapping Chen to oversee its entire NPN program as the company transformed into a full-stack AI computing company.
Saleel Awsare
Saleel Awsare is President and CEO of Lantronix, the Irvine, California-based provider of compute, connect and management solutions for the intelligent edge. He took the top job in November 2023 after a quarter-century run that included senior leadership posts at Synaptics, Conexant Systems and Nuvoton Technology Corporation America. Under his watch, Lantronix has been repositioning from a networking-hardware vendor into a full-stack edge-AI and 'Physical AI' systems player, with drone, smart-city and industrial IoT deployments leading the pivot.
Adam Wegel
Adam Wegel is the Chief Executive Officer of Ease.io, the Irvine-based manufacturing audit and plant-floor platform used by Dana, Tenneco, Eaton and other manufacturers in 50+ countries. Appointed in October 2025, he succeeded Eric Stoop after more than a decade of Stoop's leadership. Wegel previously ran AI Application Development product at Salesforce, where his teams shipped the Agentforce Chat Client, and earlier worked as a manufacturing engineer at Delphi Automotive.