Monica Desai Weiss is the Chief Business Officer of Manifest OS, the New York startup building an AI-native law firm model that raised a $60M Series A in April 2026 at a $750M valuation. A former bond trader at JPMorgan, she ran Operations & Strategy at Blockchain.com, then spent years as a Principal at Kleiner Perkins backing fintech, crypto and consumer companies including Settle, Propel and Nova Credit. She is also a writer whose 'Bits' essays dissected the early DeFi and NFT waves.
Nico Simko is the co-founder and CEO of Clair, a New York fintech that lets hourly workers tap their earned wages the moment a shift ends, with no interest and no mandatory fees. A former Swiss national-team fencer who captained the U17 squad before fencing at Harvard, he studied economics, worked an hourly campus job, then ran M&A due diligence on payments fintechs at J.P. Morgan. He founded Clair in 2019 after becoming obsessed with the idea that any employer should be able to pay people instantly. Clair embeds inside HR and payroll platforms and earns most of its money from debit-card interchange rather than worker fees. The company has raised hundreds of millions in equity and debt, including a $23.2M Series B in 2025 led by Upfront Ventures with Thrive Capital. Simko is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
Nihad Rahman is the CEO of ezCater, the Boston-founded online marketplace that turns office lunch into logistics across 100,000+ restaurants. He joined in 2022 as CFO after two decades in finance at JPMorgan Chase and General Electric, stepped in as interim chief in January 2025, and was handed the permanent job that May - succeeding 16-year co-founder Stefania Mallett. He runs a roughly 850-person company from Bronxville, New York, commuting to the downtown Boston headquarters rather than the other way around.
Larry Katz is CEO and President of MeridianLink, a leading SaaS platform for digital lending and account opening used by banks and credit unions across the United States. A Harvard MBA and Yale graduate, Katz spent 15 years at JPMorgan Chase before leading finance and operations at Genesys and StubHub, then pivoting to private equity advisory before joining MeridianLink as CFO in 2024. Within 18 months he rose to President and then CEO, steering the company through a $2 billion acquisition by Centerbridge Partners in October 2025 and launching an AI-powered lending agent called Millie. His platform ethos — 'Lending Made Human' — sits at the intersection of algorithmic decisioning and community financial relationships.