David Renteln is the co-founder and CEO of Lucy, a Los Angeles consumer brand making tobacco-free nicotine gum and pouches built around a stated mission of reducing tobacco-related harm to zero. A Harvard human evolutionary biology graduate and former Harvard Rugby president, he deferred a Caltech bioengineering PhD to help build Soylent, where he served as co-founder and chief marketing officer. In 2016 he started Lucy with Soylent alumni John Coogan and Samy Hamdouche, raised a $10M Series A in 2020 from RRE Ventures, Vice Ventures, Greycroft and Y Combinator, and has since pushed nicotine into the productivity-and-wellness conversation.
Dean Leitersdorf is the 27-year-old Co-Founder and CEO of Decart, an AI research lab building real-time world models and ultra-fast inference infrastructure. A Technion PhD graduate at 23 and veteran of Israel's elite Unit 8200, he co-founded Decart in late 2023 with Moshe Shalev. The company went from stealth to unicorn status in under a year, raising over $453M total including a $300M Series C in May 2026 backed by NVIDIA, Radical Ventures, Adobe, Toyota, and angel investors including Andrej Karpathy. Decart's products - DOS (inference stack), Lucy (real-time video transformation), and Oasis (the viral AI-generated Minecraft-like game) - position it as a vertically integrated AI company targeting a billion-user consumer app.