Maria Szandrach is the co-founder and CEO of Mentalyc, a San Francisco clinical-intelligence platform that turns recorded therapy sessions into insurance-ready notes, treatment plans, and progress insights for psychotherapists. A McKinsey strategy alum with an MSc from London Business School, she has co-founded three startups across the mental health and insurance worlds. She built Mentalyc with engineer Georgi Urumov during the COVID pandemic after the two met through Entrepreneur First, later going through Berkeley SkyDeck. Maria has become a recognizable voice on what AI should and should not do inside the therapy room, arguing for slow, careful building in a field where over-promising is dangerous.
Max Cao is the co-founder and CEO of Jacobi Robotics, an Emeryville, California startup building AI-first software that programs industrial robot arms up to 20x faster. A mechanical engineer trained at Imperial College London and UC Berkeley's BAIR Lab under Ken Goldberg, and a former McKinsey consultant, Cao left academia to attack a problem most people never see: the way robots are programmed has barely changed since the 1980s. Jacobi's motion-planning technology cuts deployment from a month to under a day, claims 1000x less compute, and handles the singularities that freeze robot arms mid-task. The company launched publicly in July 2024 with a $5M seed round led by Moxxie Ventures.
Monica Ashauer is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Birdy Grey, the direct-to-consumer bridal brand that put stylish bridesmaid dresses on the map for under $100. A Wharton-trained, ex-McKinsey strategist, she paired with best friend Grace Lee Chen in 2017 to fix a broken category - the six-month wait, the non-returnable polyester, the $300 dress worn once. The result: a hybrid made-to-order model that built reverse working capital, crossed $100 million in revenue by 2024, and made Birdy Grey a wedding-season staple. In 2025 she stepped from President into the Chief Strategy Officer seat and joined the board as Executive Chairman.
Nick Fleisher is the co-founder and CEO of Sandstone, the first platform built for AI-native in-house legal departments. An engineer who once tried to drop out of college to build apps, he later led McKinsey's legal tech and AI practice in New York before reuniting with his freshman-year roommate and a lawyer-turned-engineer to launch Sandstone in 2025. The company raised a $10M seed round led by Sequoia Capital and runs out of Brooklyn, where Fleisher is betting that institutional legal knowledge can become a company's competitive advantage instead of a bottleneck.
Nick Gulino is the founder and CEO of Recover (letsrecover.com), a Y Combinator-backed telehealth company that delivers evidence-based addiction treatment in partnership with state and local governments, at roughly a tenth of the cost of traditional rehab. A graduate of Yale Law School and UC Berkeley who started at a community college and a 'last chance' high school, he spent a decade in government and addiction services - leading work in McKinsey's government practice, advising governors, and serving in the White House - before building Recover to make recovery accessible to low-income and underserved people.
Phil Krinner is the co-founder and CEO of Arch, a San Francisco company building AI revenue software for home services contractors, starting with HVAC and heat pumps. A Stanford GSB graduate and former McKinsey strategy consultant who once built large-scale solar plants and installed panels himself, Krinner started Arch after asking 15 contractors to quote a heat pump for his apartment and finding that not one could tell him whether it would save money. Arch uses public home data and AI to help contractors find the right homes, size systems in minutes, and run hyper-personalized campaigns. The company raised a $6.2M seed round in 2024 led by Coatue with Floodgate, Gigascale, ReGen and MCJ.
Remen Okoruwa is the co-founder and CEO of Propexo, a Y Combinator-backed Boston startup building a unified API for property management software. Pitched as 'Plaid for commercial real estate,' Propexo lets engineers connect to legacy systems like Yardi, RealPage and Entrata in days instead of months. An Iowa kid who studied engineering at Harvard, Remen took a winding road through McKinsey, a churn-fighting data startup, product leadership at HubSpot, and a rent-payments venture before landing on the unglamorous but enormous problem of moving property data. He now powers integrations behind more than half of the NMHC Top 15 managers.
Samira Daswani is the founder and CEO of Manta Cares, a San Francisco healthtech company building clinically trusted, AI-enabled tools that help cancer patients and caregivers navigate the maze of treatment. A bioengineer trained at MIT and Wellesley with a master's in healthcare design from Stanford, she spent her early career at McKinsey and as VP of Product at diagnostics company Visby Medical before launching Manta Cares in 2022. The company raised an oversubscribed $5.4M seed round led by Pear VC and Sozo Ventures and now serves thousands of users. She also hosts the podcast 'Patient from Hell.'
Sara Dwyer (who also goes by Sara Cordrey) is the co-founder and CEO of Parambil, a New York startup building agentic AI for complex litigation. Parambil reads tens of thousands of pages of medical records, pharmacy data and legal files to tell a law firm what happened medically, why it matters legally, and what a case is worth. A University of Pennsylvania computer scientist who spent nearly four years as a McKinsey engagement manager at the intersection of AI and life sciences, she launched the company in 2023 and raised a $2M pre-seed (Daybreak Ventures, Jan 2025) followed by a $6M seed led by Bling Capital (Jan 2026).
Shiza Shahid is a Pakistani-American entrepreneur, investor, and activist. She co-founded the Malala Fund with Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and served as its founding CEO, then went on to co-found and co-lead Our Place, the cookware brand behind the viral Always Pan. She also founded NOW Ventures, an early-stage fund backing mission-driven founders. Her work braids together social impact, immigrant identity, and the everyday ritual of cooking.
Tara Raffi is the founder and CEO of Almond ObGyn, a venture-backed, tech-enabled women's health practice she co-founded with Carly Allen in 2021. A former McKinsey consultant who built the firm's $50M internal tech incubator and was an early operations and marketing hire at the location-data company Factual, she started Almond after years of frustrating personal experiences trying to book gynecological care. Backed by Y Combinator (S22), True Ventures and others with a $7M seed round, Almond pitches itself as 'One Medical for women's health,' combining in-person LA clinics with telehealth. Raffi and Allen were named to Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders 250 list.
Akash Sharma is the co-founder and CEO of Vellum, a New York-based enterprise AI development platform that helps teams build, evaluate, and ship production-grade LLM applications. A UC Berkeley graduate who spent five years at McKinsey's Silicon Valley office, he started Vellum in 2023 with two MIT engineers he met at the startup Dover. The company went through Y Combinator (W23), raised $25M+ to date including a $20M Series A in July 2025, and works with 150+ companies from Redfin and Drata to Cursor and Headspace. Sharma is known for talking to thousands of teams running LLMs in production and openly sharing what he learns.
Alastair Blake is the Chief Business Officer of Layer Health, an MIT-spinout building an AI layer for clinical chart review backed by Google Ventures, General Catalyst and Define Ventures. A Cambridge-trained physician (MD, MRCP) turned commercial operator, he trained as an internal medicine doctor in the NHS, served a National Medical Director's Clinical Fellowship at the Care Quality Commission, earned an MBA from Wharton, consulted at McKinsey, and led clinical and commercial partnerships at the healthcare data company nference before joining Layer Health in 2024. He sits at the intersection of medicine, data and go-to-market - a doctor who now sells the software meant to give doctors their time back.
Dr. Arne Jeroschewski is the Founder and CEO of Parcel Perform, a Singapore-headquartered AI-powered delivery experience platform serving e-commerce enterprises across 950+ logistics carriers globally. A serial builder with a PhD in Regulatory Economics and McKinsey roots, he co-founded ZALORA — Southeast Asia's leading fashion e-commerce player — before pivoting to solve the data chaos behind every shipped parcel. Since 2016, he has grown Parcel Perform into a data-first SaaS platform processing 100+ million parcel updates daily, backed by Cambridge Capital, SoftBank Ventures Asia, and Wavemaker Partners, and now championing the AI Commerce era where delivery performance data becomes a brand's most powerful competitive asset.
Arnold Engel is the co-founder and CEO of Tundra, a zero-commission wholesale marketplace he started in 2017 with his wife Katie Engel after years running a global supply chain company. A Dartmouth economics graduate and former McKinsey consultant, Engel built Tundra to hand independent retailers the same buying power as big-box giants - no transaction fees, no markups, free shipping. The platform grew to more than two million ready-to-ship products and over 30,000 retailers, raising about $42 million across rounds including a $26M Series B led by Emergence Capital in 2021.
Charlie Newark-French is the CEO of Cascade, an AI-powered strategy execution platform used by roughly 400 enterprises including PepsiCo, Roche, St. Jude and the World Wildlife Fund. A four-time enterprise software CEO who previously ran Hyperscience and Sharpen, he started at McKinsey, holds a BA from Oxford and an MBA from Harvard, and argues that strategy should run like a live operating system rather than a PowerPoint deck. He hosts the executive podcast 'This Way Forward.'
Gokul Mohan is the co-founder and CEO of CareHarmony, a Brentwood, Tennessee health-tech company that pairs machine learning with around-the-clock clinical teams to deliver chronic care management and care coordination at scale. A Wharton finance and entrepreneurship grad with a biomedical engineering degree, he traded a Morgan Stanley and McKinsey track for a bet that the gap between a doctor's visit and a patient's daily life is where healthcare actually breaks. CareHarmony serves dozens of hospitals and health systems across more than 20 states and raised a $15M Series A led by Maverick Ventures in 2022.
Grant Sohn is the co-founder and co-CEO of Spoqa, the Seoul-based company behind Dodo Point, Korea's #1 offline rewards service, which grew past 20 million users and 10,000+ merchant partners. A Stanford economics graduate and former McKinsey analyst, he left consulting in the United States to build loyalty software for brick-and-mortar shops in South Korea. In 2018 he co-founded Carry Protocol, a blockchain venture aiming to give shoppers control of their own transaction data, and after selling Dodo Point to Yanolja in 2022, he refocused Spoqa on restaurants with Kitchenboard.
Jeff Elton, Ph.D., is the founding CEO and now Vice Chairman of ConcertAI, a Cambridge-based company building generative and predictive AI on the world's largest multi-modal oncology dataset. He grew the company from a 2017 startup into a roughly $1.9 billion business with about 1,300 employees, acquiring TeraRecon's imaging technology and ASCO's CancerLinQ network along the way. A former Accenture managing director, Novartis research COO, and McKinsey partner, he co-authored the widely cited book Healthcare Disrupted and chairs the MassBio board.
Vip Andleigh is Head of Strategy & Operations and Office of the CEO at Moloco, the machine-learning advertising company based in Menlo Park. He partners with CEO Ikkjin Ahn and the leadership team on business planning, leadership cadence, and cross-company strategy. Before Moloco he spent over a decade at Google, where he led multiple Strategy & Operations teams, served as Director of Ads Strategy & Operations and Chief of Staff for the App Ads and Display Ads businesses, and founded Google's Ads Incubator. Earlier he was a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company. He holds an MBA from Wharton and a double-major BA from UC Berkeley.
Vivek Shah is the co-founder and CEO of SimplyInsured, a San Francisco company that lets small businesses compare and buy employee health insurance entirely online - billed as 'Kayak for health insurance.' An MIT-trained engineer and former McKinsey healthcare analyst, he started the company in 2012 after a maddening personal experience trying to buy coverage. Backed by Y Combinator (W13), Bessemer, and Polaris, SimplyInsured has served roughly 25,000 small businesses and saved them more than $50 million.
Max Meyer is an American founder and former piano prodigy who built two of Thailand's best-known fintech companies. After winning America's Most Talented Kids at 14, a piano scholarship to Phillips Academy Andover, Harvard, and three years at McKinsey in China, he co-founded the financial-comparison platform Masii in 2016 - the only Thai startup on KPMG's global Fintech100. He is the founder of Siam Digital Lending (SiamDL), a Bank of Thailand-licensed AI lender that raised an oversubscribed $7.8M Series A in 2026 to give working Thais shut out of bank credit fast, fair loans.
Michael Konialian is the founder and CEO of Modern Life, an AI-powered life insurance brokerage built for financial advisors. After a winding path from aerospace structures at NASA to nuclear diplomacy at the U.S. State Department to scaling CoverWallet's advisor business into an Aon acquisition, he was floored by how confusing, invasive, and outdated it was to buy life insurance for his own family. Modern Life is his answer: a single dashboard that lets advisors pull instant quotes from 30-plus carriers and compress a process that once took six months into minutes. In November 2025 the company raised a $20M Series A led by Thrive Capital, bringing total funding to $35M.
Michael Vidne is a Columbia-trained applied mathematician turned biotech founder who has spent the last decade moving cancer medicine from the lab bench to the clinic. He led the diagnostics company NovellusDx as CEO, steered its pivot into the precision-oncology drug developer Fore Biotherapeutics, and now builds at the intersection of AI, data, and healthcare as founder and CEO of the stealth-mode Baobab Therapeutics. His through-line: using rigorous models of complex systems - first neurons firing in the retina, later signaling pathways inside a tumor cell - to make treatment decisions that actually fit the patient in front of you.
Mike Nohaile is the CEO of Prellis Biologics, a Berkeley biotech using two-photon holographic 3D bioprinting to grow lymph node organoids and pull antibody candidates straight from the human immune repertoire. A molecular biologist by training (PhD from UC Berkeley, postdoc at MIT), he spent decades operating at the top of the pharma industry - partner at McKinsey, Global Head of Molecular Diagnostics at Novartis, Senior VP of Strategy, Commercialization & Innovation at Amgen, and Chief Scientific Officer at Generate Biomedicines - before taking the helm at Prellis in 2022 alongside a $35M Series C. He is a vocal skeptic of AI drug-discovery hype, insisting AI optimizes proteins but does not yet invent medicines.
Parker Meeks is the President and CEO of Utility Global, a Houston-based clean-energy company commercializing H2Gen, a system that makes low-cost clean hydrogen on-site from industrial waste gases without electrolysis. A Houston native and electrical engineer turned McKinsey partner, he previously led hydrogen fuel-cell maker Hyzon as CEO. At Utility he is steering the company from demonstration into global commercialization, including a first commercial-scale steel project with ArcelorMittal in Brazil.
Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, the company putting AI data centers into orbit. In November 2025 his team flew an Nvidia H100 GPU to space aboard Starcloud-1, then trained the first large language model off-planet. Five months later the company raised a $170M Series A and became the fastest unicorn in Y Combinator history. A British applied mathematician and ex-McKinsey space-agency consultant, Johnston argues the cheapest place to build a gigawatt-scale data center is no longer Earth - it is low Earth orbit, where sunlight is free and the cold of space does the cooling.
Michael Ulin is a three-time AI founder and engineer who builds machine-learning companies in heavily regulated industries. He was the founding AI engineer and VP of AI at ZestyAI, whose property-risk models help underwrite trillions in U.S. insured assets, then co-founded and served as CTO of Paxton AI, a generative-AI legal research tool used by thousands of attorneys that raised a $6M seed round in 2023. He now builds from Bend, Oregon, where his current work centers on Trarian, applying AI to patent underwriting, alongside ventures spanning AI forecasting and probabilistic reasoning. He also writes the Substack 'And Yet It Moves' on entrepreneurship and the case for building startups outside Silicon Valley.
Ryan Janssen is the Co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic, a New York-based AI-powered business intelligence platform that lets non-technical users query data in plain English. A former McKinsey consultant and 6-year venture capital investor with advanced degrees from Harvard and Oxford, Ryan co-founded Zenlytic in 2020 alongside CTO Paul Blankley after spotting a gap: companies had modern data infrastructure but no accessible way to use it. Zenlytic has raised $15.4M including a $9M Series A in 2024 led by M13, and its AI analyst Zoe can now onboard itself autonomously to any data warehouse.
Shimin Ooi is the CEO of Sleep Reset, a virtual sleep clinic that pairs licensed clinical care with a proprietary CBT-I program to treat insomnia without sleeping pills. A Princeton graduate who built her career across McKinsey, Pilot, and Index Ventures, she now runs a company arguing that a lot of what people call burnout is really untreated bad sleep. In 2025 she took Sleep Reset's pitch to the HLTH stage and walked away with the AARP AgeTech After Dark prize.