marketplace
(105)
Pranav Goel and the business of the empty truck
Before Porter, Pranav Goel spent his spare time listening to truck owners in Mumbai. Their idle vehicles became the starting point for a company - and a question about how to make a working day pay.
Amit Kumar Agarwal and the cost of an introduction
A broker wanted to be paid again for a landlord Amit Kumar Agarwal already knew. The former banker’s answer became NoBroker - and a much longer education in what it takes to make a simple idea work.
Binu Girija and the price of a parking space
A $39 parking bill sent Binu Girija looking for a fairer way to compare prices. Building Way.com would ask him to rethink something else: his own job.
Abdulkader Almkinzy and the journey before the journey
Before a rental car could take you anywhere, you had to go and find it. Telgani co-founder Abdulkader Almkinzy built a business around bringing it to you.
Doc Shufelt and the Small Question Behind a Long Queue
At Republic Wireless, a troublesome SIM card offered Doc Shufelt a lesson in paying attention. With ArenaCX, he helped turn the everyday problem of customer support into a marketplace.
Jeremy Hodara and the problem behind the buy button
Building Jumia meant teaching a marketplace to deliver, collect payment and earn trust. After a decade in African e-commerce, Jeremy Hodara has taken those questions into a new life of gardens, boardrooms and teaching.
Andriy Logvyn and the business that keeps changing its mind
He began with discounted clothes and kept rebuilding the machinery behind them. For Kasta co-founder and CEO Andriy Logvyn, the next version of the business now puts shopping and banking in the same app.
Adi Tatarko Wanted a Better House. She Built Houzz.
A frustrating Palo Alto renovation sent Adi Tatarko back into technology. The company she built with her husband began among school families and grew by listening to the people trying to make a home.
Nicolas le Jeune and the card that never leaves the vault
He left Google and YouTube to build Courtyard with Paulin Andurand. His wager: a collectible could change hands around the world while staying exactly where it was.
Daniel Scandian and the race to build a hundred-year company
A Formula 3 Light champion helped turn the remains of his family’s flooring business into MadeiraMadeira. Now Daniel Scandian is working on a different measure of success: a company that outlasts its founders.
The Trader Who Put Marble on a Midnight Deadline
Farshid Tafazzoli learned markets before he learned patience. Decades later, he is applying the same appetite for speed to a stubbornly physical corner of design - one sample, one box and one midnight deadline at a time.
Lasse-Mathias Nyberg Is Teaching AI to Do the Paperwork of Buying a Car
The Stanford MBA and former BCG consultant is betting that the future of used-car retail will be won in the unglamorous space between a customer’s click and a clean title.
Ben Edmond Put the Telecom Industry’s Spreadsheets on Notice
At 41, with two sons and a comfortable telecom career, Ben Edmond traded a salary for a stubborn idea: the internet’s commercial plumbing should run on location truth, not emailed spreadsheets. A decade later, Connectbase is still pursuing the same thesis - only the map has become much larger.
Alon Cohen Built Houzz by Treating Friction as a Blueprint
A frustrating ranch-house remodel gave the engineer a problem worth coding. Fifteen years later, he is leading Houzz into its software-and-AI chapter with the same operating idea: make the complicated feel simple.
Thomas Rivas
Thomas Rivas is the founder and CEO of Vendoo, a software platform that helps online resellers list and manage inventory across marketplaces like eBay, Poshmark, Etsy, Mercari and Facebook. He started selling online as a high schooler in 2007, kept selling through college at the University of Maryland, and turned the tedium of posting the same item to a dozen sites into a company that went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. Vendoo has grown to roughly 50-60 employees, reached profitability, and has been used to create tens of millions of listings.
Maksim Kondratjuks
Maksim Kondratjuks is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Tagvenue, an online marketplace for booking event venues that he started in London in 2015 with Artur Stepaniak. The idea grew out of his own frustration finding conference and wedding spaces while working in equity capital markets at the London Stock Exchange. What began as a UK venue search engine now spans six countries with more than 20,000 verified venues and around 700,000 monthly event organizers.
Artur Stepaniak
Artur Stepaniak is the co-founder and CEO of Tagvenue, a London-based online marketplace for booking event venues. He and university friend Maksim Kondratjuks started the company in March 2015 after struggling to find spaces for events, and grew it - largely by word of mouth - into one of the world's leading venue-hire platforms, now covering six countries and used by more than a million event planners each month. Before startups, Stepaniak spent his early career as a derivatives and proprietary trader.
Don Spear
Don Spear is the co-founder and CEO of OpenSesame, the Portland-based marketplace that lets companies find, buy, and manage elearning courses the way people buy songs on iTunes. A Rice University engineer and Harvard MBA, he spent decades scaling companies - from PetSmart through its IPO to Banfield Pet Hospital's expansion from 4 to 250 locations - before founding BlueVolt and then OpenSesame in 2010. Today he leads a catalog of tens of thousands of courses and an AI-driven push to make workplace learning easier to find and use.
Jack Groetzinger
Jack Groetzinger is the co-founder and CEO of SeatGeek, the mobile-first ticketing platform he started in 2009 to make buying and selling tickets for sports, concerts and theater simpler and more transparent. Under his leadership SeatGeek has raised roughly $400 million, reached a valuation above $1 billion, and won primary-ticketing deals with Major League Soccer, the Dallas Cowboys, the Brooklyn Nets and dozens of Broadway theaters. A Dartmouth economics graduate and serial entrepreneur, Groetzinger has become one of the most vocal challengers to Ticketmaster's dominance, testifying before the U.S. Senate on competition in live-event ticketing.
Joe Ariel
Joe Ariel is the founder and CEO of Goldbelly, the e-commerce marketplace that ships iconic regional dishes from more than 1,000 restaurants and food makers to doorsteps across the United States. A serial entrepreneur who previously led Eats.com and Delivery.com, Ariel built Goldbelly out of a simple frustration - the best food in America rarely leaves the town where it is made. In 2026 he was named Official Food Curator of America's 250th anniversary, leading the 'Taste of America250' program and a national storytelling project to define the canon of American cuisine.
Kim Lalande
Kim Lalande is the founder and CEO of KEY.co, an Austin-based hospitality marketplace that pairs vetted luxury vacation homes with in-home concierge services such as private chefs, grocery stocking, and in-home massage. Drawing on years of business-heavy travel and hotel stays, she built KEY to close the gap between the space of a private home and the service of a five-star hotel. Since founding the company in 2014, she has grown it to thousands of curated homes across dozens of destinations in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean, raising roughly $16-18M in venture funding along the way.
Matt Wetrich
Matt Wetrich is the CEO of Stellar, a Dallas-based technology marketplace connecting large property owners with vetted tradespeople across single-family rental homes. He arrived as VP of Operations in May 2023, was handed the CEO seat during a liquidity crisis, and within 24 hours cut 70% of the company. Before Stellar he scaled Veho's US operations 15x, incubated Uber Eats' advertising and alcohol businesses, and started his career in investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Peter Lehrman
Peter Lehrman is the founder and CEO of Axial, a New York based online platform where owners of small and lower middle market private companies meet buyers, lenders and financial sponsors. He also hosts the Masters in Small Business M&A podcast. Before Axial, he was on the founding team of Gerson Lehrman Group and worked in private equity at SFW Capital Partners.
Elizabeth Liu
Elizabeth Liu is the CEO of Crowd Cow, the Seattle-based online marketplace that connects independent farms and fisheries directly with people who want to know where their meat and seafood comes from. She has been with the company since its earliest days, rising from category and operations roles to VP of Marketing before taking the top job in February 2023 when co-founder Joe Heitzeberg stepped down. Before Crowd Cow she spent roughly 15 years in direct-to-consumer and marketplace commerce, including marketing director at Wayfair, payments product manager at Amazon, and business development at Zulily. She holds an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and mentors early-stage founders through Techstars.
Guillermo Cornejo
Guillermo Cornejo is the co-founder and CEO of Riders Share, the largest peer-to-peer motorcycle rental platform in the U.S. A Peruvian immigrant who never drove a car before he learned to ride, he crashed a Kawasaki Ninja 250 at 80 mph at age 23 and walked away with a hand full of pins and an obsession. After years analyzing high-risk auto loans at Nissan, GM and Hyundai, he built a marketplace that lets motorcycle owners rent out idle bikes to vetted riders, using credit and driving data to price crash risk. He started it during a full-scholarship MBA at UCLA Anderson, moved the company to Austin, and grew it to thousands of listings and hundreds of thousands of registered riders.
Joe Colangelo
Joe Colangelo is the Founder and CEO of Boxcar Transit, a luxury commuter bus and parking marketplace company he started in 2016 by renting out his own Cranford, NJ driveway for $2/day. A U.S. Navy veteran, UC Berkeley political science graduate, and former President of Consumers' Research, Colangelo built Boxcar into a profitable suburban mobility platform serving 21 New Jersey towns with named luxury bus routes to Midtown Manhattan, nearly 600,000 reservations across 7 years, and a parking network of 1,500+ spaces across 4+ states - positioning the company as the answer to every NJ commuter's prayer during rail strikes, mass transit disruptions, and the general indignities of commuting by train.
Fatima Husain
Fatima Husain is the Chief Business Officer at Numeral, a San Francisco-based AI-powered sales tax automation platform that raised $35M in Series B funding (led by Mayfield) at a $350M valuation in September 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $57M. By that round Numeral had processed $5B+ in transaction volume, filed 150,000 returns, tripled revenue year over year, and served 2,000+ ecommerce and SaaS brands across 11,000+ jurisdictions - and has since expanded into international VAT/GST compliance across 70+ countries. A Yale-educated operator-turned-investor originally from India, she spent six years leading growth and product at Airbnb - achieving 20x+ YoY growth on the supply side - before co-founding Mosaic General Partnership (formerly Mastry Ventures) with NBA champion Andre Iguodala. She was an early angel investor in Numeral and joined as CBO to build again, bringing two decades of operational instincts and venture capital pattern recognition to one of fintech's most unsexy yet massive problems.
Amar Amte
Amar Amte is the founder and CEO of Pegbo, a Menlo Park construction-tech company that helps general contractors and public agencies find, vet, and track small, local, and diverse trade partners. After roughly a decade at Google and five years at Yahoo in engineering and program-management roles, he left big tech in 2023 to attack one of construction's oldest headaches: the 'spray and pray' bid invitation. Pegbo runs a searchable directory of more than a million verified trade partners and automates outreach, bid coverage, and Good Faith Effort compliance reporting. The company raised $1.4 million in a 2024 pre-seed round led by Nirman Ventures and is a pre-qualified supplier to contractors including Skanska, Webcor, Swinerton, and Hathaway Dinwiddie.
Bimohit Bawa
Bimohit Bawa is the co-founder and CEO of TrueCare24, a San Francisco-based health and wellness marketplace that connects families and employers with vetted nurses, caregivers, and clinicians for in-home care, telehealth, and on-site COVID-19 testing and vaccination. A software engineer by training - IIT Roorkee, a master's from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from Berkeley Haas - Bawa spent nearly a decade building systems at Cisco and ServiceSource before joining TrueCare24 as its founding technical lead in 2015. He has since steered the company through 500 Startups' accelerator, a pivot into pandemic-era testing logistics, and a current chapter rebuilding senior care around AI and automation.
Casandra Stewart
Casandra Espinoza Stewart is the CEO and co-founder of Homeroom, a San Francisco software platform that brings the messy, paper-bound world of after-school enrichment, summer camps and extended care online. A Stanford public-policy grad and former Greylock Partners analyst, she traded venture capital for venture building, teaming up with former teacher Christina Walker to give PTAs, parents and class vendors one place to schedule, book and get paid. Homeroom hit a $1M GMV run rate in month one and raised $3.5M in seed funding led by Forerunner Ventures in 2019.