
The eJOOV co-founder spent two decades learning how goods move. His sharper insight was that the awkward trip home - the return - could become a second sale, a better process and the start of a broader logistics company.
James Crean is the co-founder and Chief Visionary Officer (also serving as President/CTO) of CREAN Inc, an Austin, Texas aerospace engineering and smart factory firm he started in 2002 with his wife Jennifer. A former satellite systems engineer and program manager at Hughes Space & Communications and Boeing - where he worked on DirecTV, NASA's TDRSS and other communications and weather satellites, and built the Lean Six Sigma group for Boeing Satellites - Crean now leads a team of 600-plus aerospace and defense engineers and champions CREAN's AI-enabled Smart Factory Operating System (SFOS), which aims to make American high-mix manufacturing fast, flexible and competitive enough to bring production home from overseas.
Alessio Alionco is the Brazilian-born founder and CEO of Pipefy, a San Francisco-based AI-driven process automation platform he built from scratch in 2015. A Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Harvard OPM alumnus, and Endeavor Entrepreneur, he turned a front-row view of chaotic enterprise workflows into a company with 4,700+ deployed AI agents, partnerships with Accenture, and over $225M in total funding. His prior venture, Acessozero, grew to 1 million users before being acquired by Brazilian local-search giant Apontador in 2012 - a deal that planted the seeds for Pipefy.