Brenden Prins-McKinney is the co-founder and CEO of Duranium (YC S25), an Alameda, California company working to bring critical light metal production - titanium, magnesium, aluminum, zirconium and hafnium - back to American soil. A Stanford Law graduate and Knight-Hennessy Scholar with a research background at McKinsey and a stint as a Goldman Sachs banker, he advised the Department of Defense on reshoring critical chemical production before deciding to build the supply chain himself. He pairs a policy-and-finance brain with chemistry borrowed from the 1950s, modernized so the U.S. can make metals it currently buys almost entirely from China and Russia.
Chris Turlica is the CEO and Co-Founder of MaintainX, a San Francisco-based industrial operations platform that has raised $254M and reached a $2.5B valuation. A McGill commerce graduate who previously built and sold a consumer messaging startup, Turlica spotted a striking data point while at Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners — 80% of the global workforce is deskless, yet only 1% of enterprise software spend serves them. That insight became MaintainX, which now helps over 11,000 companies manage 11M+ assets and has transformed maintenance teams at companies including ABInBev, Duracell, Marriott, and McDonald's.
Sandy Thomson is the CEO of World Golf Tour (WGT), the long-running online and mobile golf simulation that, on January 1, 2025, separated from Topgolf to operate as an independent company backed by a games-focused growth investor. A McGill computer science graduate who spent his early career programming at BioWare, Eidos Montreal and EA's Visceral Games, Thomson joined WGT/Topgolf as a lead software engineer in 2016 and rose through engineering leadership to become Studio Head of Topgolf Games before taking the top job at the spun-out WGT.