Simon Song (Yachen Song) is the founder and CEO of Tripo AI (registered as VAST), a company building large-scale, general-purpose 3D foundation models. Born in 1997 in Hangzhou, he studied philosophy and Middle East politics at Johns Hopkins, worked in the CEO's office at SenseTime, and co-founded the Chinese AI unicorn MiniMax before starting VAST in 2023 shortly after Google's DreamFusion showed text-to-3D was possible. A self-described gamer and anime fan, Song wants to let anyone create 3D content with zero barriers and zero cost, and has grown Tripo Studio past 6.5 million users with clients including Tencent, Sony, Microsoft and Pop Mart.

Dave Feldman is the co-founder and CEO of Greenboard, a New York-based company building an AI-native operating system for financial compliance. A Johns Hopkins-trained engineer who previously led product work at Guideline and a Hive AI joint venture with Bain & Company, Feldman started Greenboard in 2023 with college friend Ed Schembor after seeing how badly financial firms struggled with fragmented, dated compliance tools. Greenboard went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch and has raised $20 million total, including a $15.5M Series A led by Base10 Partners, with more than 500 financial institutions running their compliance programs on the platform.
Rapafusyn Pharmaceuticals is a Baltimore-based, clinical-stage drug discovery company spun out of Johns Hopkins University. Its RapaGlue platform designs non-degrading, cell-permeable macrocyclic molecular glues that modulate hard-to-drug intracellular and transmembrane targets - drawing on a proprietary DNA-encoded library of more than 8 billion compounds and machine learning for target selection. The lead program, RAP-0001, is a selective ENT1 inhibitor advancing toward IND-enabling studies for the prevention of acute kidney injury in cardiac surgery patients, with a broader pipeline spanning oncology, immunology, and pain.
Gaurav Sharma is the founder and CEO of Hook, a New York-based AI music platform that lets fans legally remix and mash up licensed songs and share them to social feeds while artists and rights holders keep control and get paid. A Johns Hopkins and Peabody Conservatory-trained musician turned operator, he previously helped scale India's JioSaavn to hundreds of millions of listeners and built and sold two consumer-tech startups. In 2026 Hook closed a $10 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $16 million.
Gregory Fischer is the co-founder and CEO of AiM Medical Robotics, a Worcester, Massachusetts company building a portable, MRI-compatible surgical robot for neurosurgery. A robotics engineer with a PhD from Johns Hopkins, Fischer spent nearly two decades as a professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he directed the Automation and Interventional Medicine (AIM) Robotics Lab and founded the PracticePoint medtech R&D center. He turned his NIH-funded research into a company aiming to bring real-time image guidance and submillimeter robotic precision into the operating room, with a first-in-human clinical study on the horizon after a $8.1 million Series A in 2025.
Shrenik Jain is the founder and CEO of Marigold Health, a Boston-based company that pairs certified peer specialists with 24/7 text-based support groups, supported by natural language processing that surfaces needs inside conversations. A Johns Hopkins graduate and former EMT, he raised an $11M Series A in June 2024 led by Rock Health and Innospark Ventures, and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare.

William Sun is the co-founder and CEO of Auctor, a New York AI company building the 'system of action' for enterprise software implementation. He dropped out of Johns Hopkins - where he studied biomedical engineering and computer science - and left a job at Meta to start the company, which he built with three co-founders drawn from Google, AWS, Apple, ServiceNow and NASA. In April 2026 Auctor emerged from stealth with a $20M Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with backers including Microsoft's M12, HubSpot Ventures, Workday Ventures, OneStream, Tercera and Y Combinator. Auctor's AI agents capture discovery calls and workshops, turn them into structured requirements, and generate the artifacts - SOWs, proposals, architecture docs, user stories - that consultants used to hand-build over weeks.

Akira Robinson is a biotech and pharmaceutical commercialization leader with roughly two decades of experience turning early-stage science into market-ready medicine. He is a Partner and Chief Experience Officer at the life-sciences consultancy Scimitar Inc. and serves as interim Chief Commercial Officer at Nucleus RadioPharma. He built and scaled the launch practice at EVERSANA to more than 20 consultants, and has stepped into interim CCO and COO seats across the industry. With a Harvard biochemistry degree, a Johns Hopkins biotech master's, and a stint as a Wall Street biotech equity analyst, he blends scientific fluency with commercial operating chops, lately focused on radiopharmaceutical therapies and AI-driven commercialization.
Neil Cohen is a Manhattan-trained investment banker who co-founded American Rock Salt Company, the largest-producing salt mine in the United States, after the historic Retsof mine collapsed and flooded in the 1990s. As Founder, Co-CEO and Vice Chairman, he helped assemble the financing for the first successful new U.S. salt mine in over four decades, in Mount Morris, New York. In parallel he runs Emerald Development Managers LP, an early-stage venture capital firm he founded in 1994, backing science-heavy startups in diagnostics, digital pathology, nanotechnology and fuel cells. His career spans the deeply physical (20,000 tons of rock salt a day, mined 1,200 feet underground) and the deeply speculative (frontier-tech venture bets).
Bernard Ravina is a Johns Hopkins-trained neurologist who spent two decades treating people with dystonia before deciding the field needed a drug that did not yet exist. In 2025 he founded Vima Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is its CEO, advancing VIM0423, a once-daily oral therapy aimed at the dopamine-acetylcholine imbalance behind movement disorders. The company emerged from stealth with a $60 million Series A, later extended to $100 million, and dosed its first Phase 2 dystonia patient in March 2026.
Mohan Purushothaman is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Progentec Diagnostics, an Oklahoma City company building blood tests and digital tools that aim to predict autoimmune disease flares before they happen. He came to diagnostics by an unusual route: a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. focused on pharmaceutical pricing, a Harvard research fellowship, five years inside Roche, and a pricing-software practice he built and sold to Alliance Life Sciences. In 2014 he turned that commercial instinct toward lupus, partnering with the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, and in 2020 raised a $5M Series A led by Plains Venture Partners to bring the aiSLE DX flare-prediction platform and the LupusCorner patient community to market.
Mohamed Shoura is the founder and CEO of PaxeraHealth, a Boston-based medical imaging AI company he launched in 2009 after spending 12 years inside Siemens and Toshiba Medical Systems. He holds a Ph.D. in Medical Imaging, has served as an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and pursued a business degree at Harvard. Under his leadership PaxeraHealth has reached more than 2,500 PACS installations across 50+ countries, won Best in KLAS for Global PACS three years running, and closed a Series A round in late 2022. He also founded CarePassport, an award-winning patient engagement platform.
Marc Goldwein is the Senior Vice President and Senior Policy Director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), where he has become Washington's most-quoted referee of how much the federal government can afford. A two-degree Johns Hopkins economist who once ran track for the Blue Jays, he helped staff the Simpson-Bowles Fiscal Commission and the 2011 'Super Committee,' teaches economics on the side, and now spends his days scoring the price tag of nearly every major bill and campaign promise. He talks fast, deploys statistics faster, and has made a career of telling both parties the same unwelcome thing: the math does not add up.
Eran Steinberg is a serial entrepreneur, prolific inventor, and IP strategist who co-founded FotoNation in 1997 - selling it, buying it back, and doing it again a third time. Best known for pioneering the automatic red-eye removal technology now standard in virtually every digital camera and smartphone on earth, he holds 300+ patents across imaging, medical devices, and drug development. A licensed USPTO patent agent with four graduate and undergraduate degrees - including both a B.F.A. in Fine Art Photography and an M.S. in Imaging Science - he bridges the worlds of deep technology and creative vision. Currently CEO and Chairman of Vaica Medical and Chairman of FotoNation following a third management buyout, he also lectures at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Robert Mittendorff is General Partner and Global Head of Healthcare at B Capital, one of the world's leading multi-stage global investment firms with over $6 billion in assets under management. An MD, MBA, and biomedical engineer rolled into one, he brings the rare combination of clinical credibility, operating experience, and investment acumen to healthcare venture capital. He led B Capital's inaugural $500M+ Healthcare Fund I, backing category-defining companies across digital health, medtech, biotech, and AI-driven healthcare from seed to IPO.
Dr. Alok Aggarwal is the CEO and Chief Data Scientist of Scry AI, a San Jose-based enterprise AI company he founded in 2014. A Johns Hopkins PhD with deep roots at IBM Research and as co-founder of Evalueserve - where he coined the term 'Knowledge Process Outsourcing' - Aggarwal has spent four decades building AI systems that actually work in regulated industries. His 2023 book 'The Fourth Industrial Revolution & 100 Years of AI (1950-2050)' topped Amazon bestseller charts in multiple categories. Scry AI serves banking, insurance, manufacturing, and government clients with explainable, audit-ready AI deployed on 60+ proprietary models.
Daniel Lewis is the Global CEO of LegalOn Technologies, the most well-funded AI platform for in-house contract review, having raised over $200 million. A Stanford Law grad who co-founded Ravel Law from a Stanford dorm, partnered with Harvard to digitize 360 years of U.S. case law, and then led LexisNexis's Practical Guidance division before taking the helm at LegalOn in 2022. Under his leadership, LegalOn's US and UK business quadrupled, secured a $50M Series E led by Goldman Sachs, and struck a strategic partnership with OpenAI - all while building attorney-curated AI playbooks that help legal teams cut contract review time by up to 85%.
Steven Basta is the President and CEO of Phathom Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: PHAT), a commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on gastrointestinal disorders. He joined in April 2025 to lead the commercialization of VOQUEZNA (vonoprazan), a next-generation potassium-competitive acid blocker for GERD and H. pylori. With more than 25 years of biopharma and medical device leadership spanning BioForm Medical, Merz Aesthetics, AlterG, Menlo Therapeutics, Mahana Therapeutics, and SaNOtize, Basta brings a track record of building and launching products in highly competitive markets. He trained as a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins and later earned his MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School.
Yongwei Zhang is the CEO of Complete Genomics and MGI Americas, leading one of the most ambitious efforts to make whole-genome sequencing fast, accurate, and affordable at scale. With a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins and dual bachelor's degrees from Tsinghua University, Zhang brings a rare blend of optics precision, software fluency, and entrepreneurial grit to the genomics frontier. He architected the DNBSEQ sequencing platform series now used by over 2,600 researchers in 100 countries, and has positioned Complete Genomics as a formidable challenger to Illumina's market dominance - at a fraction of the cost.
Jorge Conde is a General Partner on the Bio + Health team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he invests at the intersection of biology, computer science, and engineering. Born in Miami to Cuban and Peruvian parents, Conde co-founded Knome — the first company to offer whole-genome sequencing directly to consumers — alongside Harvard geneticist George Church, then spent years as CSO, CFO, and CPO at Syros Pharmaceuticals before joining a16z in 2017. An MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 and Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, he is one of the most prominent voices arguing that the 21st century belongs to biology the way the 20th belonged to physics.