
He spent his nights doing food deliveries and his days reading equity research. Then he built the software his mother-in-law never had - so every restaurant could remember its regulars.

She has spent more than twenty years teaching legacy retailers to fall in love with data - and consumers to fall in love with brands. At Rebel Athletic, the marketing chief is aiming both talents at the world of crystals, sparkle and competitive cheer.
Daragh Murphy is the Irish-born co-founder and CEO of Imprint, a New York fintech that builds co-branded credit card and loyalty programs for consumer brands like Rakuten, Booking.com, Turkish Airlines and H-E-B. A former corporate lawyer and WeWork operator, he started Imprint in 2020 and grew it to unicorn status, reaching a $1.2 billion valuation in a $150 million Series D in December 2025.

Dylan Robbins is the founder and CEO of Lucra, a New York-based company that gives brands a white-label software kit for running peer-to-peer, real-money gaming and competitions inside their own apps. A former Goldman Sachs and AQR analyst with a Stanford MBA and a Duke undergraduate degree, Robbins started Lucra in 2019 with co-founder Michael Madding after the two spent years informally tracking sports wagers with friends. He pivoted the company from a consumer app to a B2B2C SDK in 2023, and in 2026 raised a $20M Series B led by ARK Invest - the fund's first lead investment in a non-AI startup.
Matt Smolin is co-founder and CEO of Hang, a New York-based customer engagement and loyalty platform now positioning itself as an AI marketing system for restaurants, beauty and apparel brands. Hang originally launched in 2021 as an NFT-powered membership platform and raised a $16M Series A led by Paradigm in 2022, with backing from Tiger Global, Kevin Durant's Thirty Five Ventures and MrBeast's Night Ventures. Under Smolin, the company has moved past its web3 branding into AI-driven segmentation, campaign automation and loyalty for brands like Just Salad, Jeni's, Boba Guys and Taziki's.
Michael Hershfield is the founder and CEO of Accrue, a New York fintech that lets retailers embed FDIC-insured, brand-customized savings wallets inside their shopping experience. He built the company around a simple flip of buy-now-pay-later: save first, then spend. Before Accrue, he was SVP of Sales at WeWork and COO at Nucleus, with earlier operating stints across Kitchensurfing, Sailthru, Howcast, and his own ticketing startup LiveStub.
Nick Anastasiades is the co-founder and CEO of Benji, a New York-based startup building a universal API for loyalty partnerships - what the industry calls the 'Plaid for loyalty.' Benji lets airlines, hotels, retailers and consumer brands link their rewards systems so members can earn and redeem points across companies, collapsing integrations that once took a year into a matter of days. In May 2026 the company raised a $6.25M seed round and counts JetBlue, CookUnity, 1-800-Flowers and Chip City among a network representing more than 50 million members. Benji is the third company Nick has built with co-founders Jon Elron and Arik Gaisler, following 2ndKitchen, the B2B virtual-kitchen platform acquired by REEF Technology in 2021. Raised in Beirut and trained at UC Berkeley and Northwestern, he is a Forbes Next 1000 entrepreneur and a Chicago Innovation Award winner.
Israel L'Heureux is the founder and CEO of Touchpoint Restaurant Solutions (touchpoint.io), a bootstrapped Palo Alto company that unifies the messy technology stacks of large quick-service restaurant chains under one platform built around OmniFusion and OmniLoyalty. Before restaurants, he co-founded Redline Networks, a high-performance application-acceleration company acquired by Juniper Networks in 2005 for roughly $132 million. A Stanford-trained product design engineer, he has moved from kicking off BMW's X5 program to building load balancers used by hundreds of enterprises to figuring out why a drive-thru line moves slowly.
Kushal Agrawal is a co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Xoxoday, a B2B SaaS platform that powers rewards, recognition, and loyalty programs for 5,000+ businesses globally. He co-founded the company in 2012 at age 22, helping transform it from a consumer gifting startup called Giftxoxo into a global enterprise platform processing nearly 250,000 daily transactions across 75+ countries. An adventurer who has traveled to 70+ countries, Kushal brings an unconventional, storytelling-driven approach to building enterprise growth - serving simultaneously as angel investor and co-founder of multiple Xoxoday sub-brands including Empuls and Compass AI.
Sumit Khandelwal is Co-Founder and CEO of Xoxoday, a global rewards, incentives, and loyalty technology platform he built from a borrowed desk in Bengaluru in 2012 into a profitable enterprise serving 5,000+ clients across 175+ countries, processing 250,000 transactions daily and surpassing $1 billion in cumulative GMV. A software engineer turned FMCG product manager turned SaaS founder, Sumit embodies the rare combination of technical grounding and brand-building instinct, steering Xoxoday through a Series C raise in January 2026 and eyeing a potential IPO by late 2027 or early 2028.