menlo-park
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Max Cohen’s case for taking the long way
Before co-founding Sprinter Health, Max Cohen helped put virtual reality into a backpack. His next act began with an old colleague, Wednesday dinners, and a willingness to be a beginner again.
Aizada Marat and the cost of standing still
A Harvard-trained lawyer lost a year and a half to her own immigration case. The experience helped turn Aizada Marat from a client waiting for answers into the co-founder of Alma.
John Pimentel and the business of making the unlikely ordinary
Before co-founding 280 Earth, John Pimentel helped build wind projects and rebuild California freeways. His career keeps returning to the same awkward question: how do you turn a promising idea into something people can actually use?
Jim Labe and the price of buying time
Before venture debt became a familiar line on a startup’s balance sheet, Jim Labe was helping build the business of it. His career runs from equipment leases to public markets, with one question following him: how much time can borrowed money buy?
Larry Cohen and the business of beginning again
Before he ran a venture studio, Larry Cohen spent years turning research into companies. His career offers a close look at the money, people, and patient repetition that an idea needs before it becomes a business.
Mateusz Szeszkowski and the value of a longer clock
From European software deals at KKR to founder-led businesses at Norland Capital, Mati Szeszkowski has made time part of his investment proposition. His work runs through the software that keeps banks, councils, and security teams moving.
Emily Bailard and the arithmetic of showing up
Before she worked on missed school days, Emily Bailard worked on wasted electricity. At EveryDay Labs, she brought the same behavioral lens to a different household habit - and helped build an attendance company that joined Newsela in 2026.
Notion Strategies wants your next big idea to survive the meeting
A message, a messenger, and someone to do the work. This California consulting collective puts all three on the same assignment - with a $5,000 leadership cohort that makes its approach unusually tangible.
Raz Rafaeli Has Spent 30 Years Making Passwords Look Old
Long before passwordless became a category, Raz Rafaeli was building network tools and running infrastructure companies. His latest act is a ten-year campaign against the credential that refuses to retire.
John McLane Is Making the Back Office Impossible to Ignore
The Plooto CEO has spent a career moving between art, private equity, enterprise software and payments. His current bet is that the quiet mechanics of cash flow deserve the same attention as growth.
Norwest Built a 65-Year Venture Firm Around One Unfashionable Idea: Range
In a market built on specialization, Norwest sells breadth: one global fund, checks from $1 million to $200 million, and an operator bench designed to show up only when invited.
The VC Firm That Writes Founders a Check for Staying Sane
Felicis built a $4.1 billion venture platform around an unusual wager: founders perform better when their investors fund the human being, surrender a little control and show up before the outcome looks inevitable.
jo
jo is a voice-first personal AI agent for macOS that runs on your Mac and a private, per-user cloud machine. Rather than waiting to be asked, it proactively summarizes what is on your screen, drafts emails, manages your calendar, clips relevant content, and keeps up with the loose ends of work and life. Built natively in Swift for Apple Silicon and backed by Y Combinator (W24), jo reaches users across Mac, web, iMessage, Telegram, and WhatsApp while keeping personal data local and out of model training.
Vahid Saadat
Vahid Saadat is a serial medical device entrepreneur and co-founder and co-CEO of Inquis Medical, a Menlo Park, California company building the AVENTUS Thrombectomy System for treating venous thromboembolic disease and pulmonary embolism. With more than 25 years in medtech and over 200 issued and pending patents, he has founded or led a string of companies including Voyage Medical, USGI Medical, AngioTrax, Baxano and Arrinex (maker of ClariFix, later acquired by Stryker). He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and runs Inquis alongside co-CEO Mojgan Saadat.
Hatch
Hatch is a Menlo Park sleep-technology company that designs bedside devices and a companion content subscription to help people fall asleep and wake up better. Founded in 2014 by former BabyCenter executives Ann Crady Weiss and Dave Weiss, it started with connected products for babies and toddlers (Hatch Rest) before expanding to adults with the Hatch Restore line of sunrise alarm clocks and sound machines. The company pairs hardware with the Hatch Sleep app and the paid Hatch+ library of sleep sounds, sleep stories, meditations and light-based wind-down routines, reaching more than half a million families.
Apreo Health
Apreo Health is a clinical-stage medical device company in Menlo Park, California developing the BREATHE Airway Scaffold, a bronchoscopically delivered, self-expanding nitinol implant that relieves lung hyperinflation in patients with severe emphysema. Unlike existing valve and surgical treatments that collapse or remove lung tissue, the scaffold gently tents open damaged airways to release trapped air while sparing healthy tissue, aiming to expand who can be treated. The company raised a $130M Series B in August 2025 to run its pivotal BREATHE-3 trial and prepare for early commercialization.
Bedrock Data
Bedrock Data is a Menlo Park, California data security company that builds an AI-native data security posture management (DSPM) platform. Its Metadata Lake technology discovers, classifies and tracks sensitive data across cloud, SaaS and AI systems at petabyte scale, giving enterprises visibility into what data they have, who can access it and how it moves - without copying that data out of a customer's environment.
Inquis Medical, Inc.
Inquis Medical is a Silicon Valley medical device company founded in 2020 by serial medtech entrepreneurs Vahid and Mojgan Saadat. Its flagship AVENTUS Precision Thrombectomy System removes blood clots from patients with pulmonary embolism (PE) and deep vein thrombosis (DVT), using proprietary TrueClot tissue-sensing technology that gives physicians real-time feedback to distinguish blood, clot, and vessel wall while minimizing blood loss through autologous blood reinfusion. Backed by $115M in total funding including a $75M Series C in January 2026, the company is scaling nationwide commercial adoption after winning FDA 510(k) clearance for PE in 2025.
KonaWare
KonaWare was a Menlo Park mobility-software company founded in 1999 that built a platform and development tools for putting mission-critical enterprise applications into the hands of mobile field workers. Its suites covered transportation, logistics and field service - dispatch, proof-of-delivery, electronic driver logs, vehicle inspections and asset tracking - and were engineered to keep data intact whether devices were connected or not, running across laptops, PDAs and early smartphones. Backed by Draper Richards and Western Technology Investment, the company was an early bet on enterprise mobility years before the smartphone made it mainstream; its field-service assets were acquired by ServicePower in 2008.
MyBackHub (NSite Medical)
MyBackHub, built by NSite Medical (legally Nsite, Inc.), is an AI-powered digital health platform for non-operative back and spine care. Spun out of the founders' earlier scoliosis work at the National Scoliosis Clinic, it uses a smartphone-based, radiation-free AI scan (the PostureBackNeck Assessment) to analyze posture and spinal alignment at home, then builds a personalized recovery plan combining adaptive exercises, live Pilates classes, licensed physical therapists, Stanford's Empowered Relief pain program, and a 24/7 AI companion. The company holds FDA 510(k) clearance for its AI-based scoliosis scanning app and delivers care at little to no cost through select Medicare and insurance plans.
Nuvig Therapeutics
Nuvig Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotech in the San Francisco Bay Area developing next-generation immune modulators for chronic autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Founded in 2022 on research from The Rockefeller University, its lead candidate NVG-2089 is a first-in-class recombinant Fc fragment that engages type II Fc receptors to recapitulate the anti-inflammatory benefits of IVIg without immunosuppression or the supply constraints of plasma-derived products. The company raised a $161M Series B in December 2024 to push NVG-2089 into Phase 2 for CIDP and other indications.
OLarry
OLarry is an AI-powered, year-round tax firm built for high-net-worth individuals, founders, and businesses. It pairs certified public accountants with proprietary AI that handles document collection, data classification, and extraction, so its CPAs can focus on proactive, strategic tax planning rather than paperwork. Sold as a flat annual membership, OLarry aims to bring the kind of always-on tax advice once reserved for the ultra-wealthy to thousands of clients across the United States.
Vijil
Vijil is a Menlo Park-based AI company building trust infrastructure for enterprise AI agents. Founded in 2023 by senior AWS leaders, its modular platform tests, defends, and continuously hardens agents so they are verifiably reliable, secure, and safe - cutting the time it takes enterprises to trust an agent from about six months to six weeks. Vijil raised $17 million in 2025 (total $23 million) and was named a Gartner Cool Vendor.
Prat Moghe
Prat Moghe is the CEO of Promethium, a Menlo Park data fabric and self-service analytics startup he took over in October 2024 after founder Kaycee Lai moved to Chief Strategy Officer. A UCLA-trained electrical engineer, Moghe started at Bell Labs, ran product and strategy at Netezza through its $1.7B IBM acquisition, founded cloud data-as-a-service company Cazena (later acquired by Cloudera, where he became EVP), and served as president of TiE Boston.
Xuandai Nguyen
Xuandai Nguyen, Ph.D., MBA, is Vice President, Head of Global Program Strategy and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Beacon Therapeutics, an ophthalmic gene therapy company working to restore sight in people with inherited and prevalent retinal diseases. A scientist-turned-strategist, Nguyen has spent more than two decades moving medicines from bench to market, with senior roles at Genentech, Forma Therapeutics and ACELYRIN spanning immunology, ophthalmology, respiratory and sickle cell disease. Trilingual and Berkeley- and Cornell-trained, Nguyen sits at the intersection of hard science and commercial strategy, translating complicated biology into the plans that decide which therapies reach patients.
SolidCore.ai
SolidCore.ai is a Menlo Park cybersecurity startup building the security and governance layer for enterprise generative AI. Founded in 2024 by HyTrust veteran Eric Chiu and former Microsoft security architect Hemma Prafullchandra, its platform captures an immutable record of every LLM prompt, response, and configuration inside a customer's own cloud, then continuously monitors for misconfigurations, policy violations, and risky usage while generating audit-ready evidence for frameworks like NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, and the EU AI Act. The company emerged from stealth in September 2025 with $4M in seed funding led by Runtime Ventures.
Brittainy Lovett
Brittainy Lovett is a Meta operator who works inside the Office of the CEO, one of the highest-trust seats in a 77,000-person company. A Northwestern-trained mechanical engineer who started in consulting at Deloitte, she has built a career on privacy critical incident response - the unglamorous, high-stakes work of keeping user data safe when something goes wrong. Based in New York, she is the kind of behind-the-scenes operator who makes very large machines run quietly.
Gil Akos
Gil Akos is the co-founder and CEO of Astra, a payments infrastructure company that lets developers move money bank-to-bank in real time. Trained as an architect with graduate work at Columbia, he taught himself programming, then earned a stack of Udacity nanodegrees in machine learning and AI to build the company he imagined. Under his leadership Astra crossed $1 billion in lifetime payments processed and pushed past a $2 billion annualized run rate, positioning the company as connective tissue for instant payouts across vertical SaaS, marketplaces, and earned wage access.
Baris Karadogan
Baris Karadogan is the co-founder and CEO of Jingle, a Menlo Park startup that turns local stores and services into roving mobile vendors that drive through neighborhoods and ping nearby shoppers through an app. An Istanbul-raised, Stanford-trained engineer who spent a decade as a venture capitalist at firms including ComVentures, Fuse Capital and U.S. Venture Partners, he traded the investor's chair for the founder's seat to attack the high fees and long waits of conventional delivery. Jingle raised a $2.9 million seed round in 2023 with Bessemer Venture Partners. Off the clock he is a serious birdwatcher who spent nine years on the board of California Audubon.
Eric Chiu
Eric Chiu is the founder and CEO of SolidCore.ai, a Menlo Park startup that helps enterprises deploy generative AI with real-time monitoring, an immutable record of every LLM interaction, and built-in compliance. A veteran cybersecurity entrepreneur, he previously founded HyTrust, the cloud security company acquired by Entrust, whose technology protected the virtual infrastructure of Bank of America, United Healthcare, Honeywell, and U.S. Central Command. SolidCore emerged from stealth in September 2025 with $4M in seed funding led by Runtime Ventures, reuniting Chiu with his longtime collaborator and CTO Hemma Prafullchandra.