jersey-city
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Proximo Spirits
Proximo Spirits is only 19 years old, but it carries a 268-year inheritance. Its real product is the system that turns agave fields, old stills and sharply drawn brands into bottles people can find almost anywhere.
Siva Surendira
Siva Surendira is the founder and CEO of Lyzr AI, a Jersey City-based enterprise agent infrastructure platform building what he calls an Agentic Operating System for Fortune 500 companies in finance, retail, and government. A two-time founder, he previously built PowerUpCloud (acquired by L&T in 2019) and started Lyzr in 2023. Lyzr raised an $8M Series A in 2025 followed by a $14.5M Series A+ in March 2026 led by Accenture Ventures, pushing valuation to about $250M.
Hiroki Koga
Hiroki Koga is the co-founder and CEO of Oishii, the New Jersey company that grows the Omakase Berry inside the world's largest indoor vertical strawberry farm. A Tokyo native who watched Japan's vertical-farming boom collapse a decade before he built his own, Koga bet on a fruit nobody else would touch - strawberries - because they were the hardest crop to grow at scale and the only one with the economics to matter. By recreating the climate of the Japanese Alps indoors and getting bees to pollinate at over 90% success, Oishii became the only player to produce pollinated fruit commercially, pesticide-free and year-round.
Fork & Good, Inc.
Fork & Good is a Jersey City-based cellular agriculture company growing real meat from animal cells instead of whole animals. Founded by urban-farming entrepreneur Niya Gupta and cultivated-meat pioneer Gabor Forgacs, the company built a pilot factory that produces cultivated pork using a patented bioprocess centered on muscle cells and high-density bioreactors. Its goal is to reach price parity with commodity meat - targeting roughly $2 per pound - while using a fraction of the land and water of conventional farming. In 2025 it acquired California's Orbillion Bio to combine cultivated pork and beef under one global platform spanning North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Niyati Gupta
Niyati Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Fork & Good, a Jersey City cultivated-meat startup betting against the rest of its industry. While competitors chase ever-bigger bioreactors, Gupta builds small ones, arguing that the way to make cell-grown pork as cheap as the real thing is to copy the efficiency of a pig, not the scale of a brewery. A Yale economist and Harvard MBA who advised Nigeria's agriculture ministry and ran a rooftop farm in Singapore before being 'bullied' into starting Fork & Good, she has raised roughly $30M, earned the industry's first cultivated red-meat revenue via a deal with an $8B food manufacturer, and held a public tasting at Davos where half the tasters could not tell her blend from conventional pork.