matcha
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Chris Kalani Took the Long Way Back to the Pixels
A first startup taught the product designer what he did not want from a second. At Phantom, Chris Kalani turned that lesson into a founding team, a clearer job, and a wallet built for people who would rather not admire the machinery.
The Coffee Shop That Outgrew Its Own Idea
Blank Street conquered the coffee run by making the cafe smaller, faster and easier to repeat. Then the customers arrived with a different request: somewhere to stay.
Michael Sharon Turned Coffee Into a Product You Can Text
The former Facebook mobile product leader brought software habits to the beverage aisle: ship early, listen closely, fix the strange taste, and put a phone number where the logo usually goes.
Amir Bandeali Built the Pipes for a World of Tokens
A former Chicago trader left the desk, learned to build, and bet that tokenized value would need open markets. Nearly a decade later, 0x is still solving the unglamorous machinery of how assets actually move.
Cuzen Matcha
Cuzen Matcha, made by World Matcha Inc., is a San Mateo food-tech and tea company that builds a countertop Matcha Maker - an award-winning machine that grinds whole, organic, shade-grown Japanese tea leaves into fresh matcha on demand, the way an espresso machine grinds beans. Founded in 2019 by former Suntory tea executive Eijiro Tsukada and Oki Hatta, it pairs a compact ceramic mill with a single-origin leaf subscription to make authentic, freshly-ground matcha an everyday ritual rather than a specialty-cafe indulgence.
UMe Tea
UMe Tea is a California-based bubble tea chain founded in 2019 by former Silicon Valley engineer Jiachun 'Summer' Li. Built around fruit-forward, less-sugary recipes tuned to American palates, the brand pairs handcrafted drinks and snacks with viral marketing - most notably a surprise bunny plushie hidden in the bottom of its cups. Bootstrapped and profitable for its first four years, UMe grew to roughly 30 Bay Area stores before raising a $10M Series A led by Conductive Ventures in 2025 to fund team-building and regional expansion.
Pique
Pique (piquelife.com) is a Los Angeles-based direct-to-consumer wellness brand best known for pioneering crystallized whole-leaf tea. Founded by Simon Cheng, the company turns organic teas and plant compounds into single-serve crystals that dissolve in cold or hot water, and it has expanded into skin, gut, hydration and energy supplements built around its Cold Extraction Technology and Triple Toxin Screening standards.
Simon Cheng
Simon Cheng is the founder and CEO of Pique, a Los Angeles-based wellness company that turned whole-leaf tea into dissolvable crystals using a patented cold extraction process. A Hong Kong native who grew up drinking tea with his grandparents, Cheng abandoned those rituals in his teens, then spent his 20s cycling through surgeries and a decade of health crises. He rebuilt his health on a multi-year study trip across Asia learning from medicinal-plant and breathwork masters, and channeled that obsession into Pique, which launched in Whole Foods in 2016 and scaled to thousands of stores. Harvard and Stanford educated, and the youngest member of Harvard School of Public Health's Nutrition Roundtable, Cheng built Pique on three promises: efficacy, purity, and zero prep.
Magic Mind
Magic Mind makes a 2-ounce 'mental performance shot' built from a blend of around a dozen nootropics, adaptogens, vitamins and antioxidants - think lion's mane, ashwagandha, L-theanine and ceremonial matcha - designed to deliver calm focus without the jitter-and-crash cycle of a big cup of coffee. Founded in 2020 by James Beshara and William Hicks, the brand started in a San Jose commercial kitchen, grew through direct-to-consumer subscriptions, and has since pushed into national retail including Whole Foods, Erewhon, Sprouts and Albertsons. It raised a $12.4M Series A in September 2025.
0x
0x is the open exchange infrastructure powering token swaps for many of crypto's largest apps - Coinbase, Robinhood, Phantom, MetaMask, Matcha and more. Through its Swap API, gasless transactions, and the underlying 0x Protocol, the company aggregates liquidity from hundreds of sources across the major chains so developers can ship trading experiences without building order routing themselves.