minority-business-enterprise
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August Chen
August Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Hazel, a Y Combinator-backed startup building AI-native procurement software for U.S. federal, state, and local government. A Harvard mechanical engineering and computer science graduate who built wildfire-prevention software at Palantir, Chen now aims his company at the $2.7 trillion public procurement market, helping overworked civil servants draft compliant solicitations in five minutes instead of five months. Hazel counts customers from K-12 school districts to the U.S. Navy and, in 2025, signed the City of Dallas as the first major Texas city to adopt AI for procurement.
Priya Paul
Priya Paul (Bhutani) is the founder and CEO of RegDesk, an AI-powered regulatory intelligence and management platform for medical device and pharmaceutical companies. A biomedical engineer turned regulatory strategist, she spent years watching life-changing devices stall in regulatory limbo - up to 80% of applications get rejected for reasons unrelated to safety - and built RegDesk in 2014 to compress submissions that once took months into days. She leads the company's product vision and global growth, and RegDesk is a certified Minority Business Enterprise.