Gregory Mark is a three-time founder and MIT-trained aerospace engineer who is rebuilding how physical things get made. After inventing continuous carbon fiber 3D printing and taking Markforged from a garage idea to a $2.1B public company, he launched Backflip AI in 2024, a generative AI tool that turns text, sketches, and scans into 3D-printable, manufacturable models. Backflip raised a $30M Series A co-led by NEA and Andreessen Horowitz, with angels including Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott and 'Attention Is All You Need' co-author Ashish Vaswani.
Peggy Chang is the co-founder and CEO of ActivityHero, the online marketplace where parents discover, compare and book summer camps, after-school classes and workshops for their kids. An MIT-trained engineer with a Stanford MBA, she spent more than 15 years building consumer software at Intuit's QuickBooks, Charles Schwab, Excite@Home, the Los Angeles Times new-media division and Walt Disney Imagineering before turning a personal frustration - it took her three months to enroll her daughter in gymnastics - into a company. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Palo Alto, ActivityHero now connects more than 4 million families with over 10,000 activity providers, and Chang frames its mission as both helping kids find their passions faster and helping parents (often mothers) stay in the workforce.
Yermie Cohen is the founder and CEO of Memorang, an AI stack for education that lets organizations build, launch, and scale custom learning and assessment content. A med student who arrived at UCLA from MIT with biology and mechanical-engineering degrees, he was buried in flashcards and frustrated by tools that were either too simple or too expensive, so he built his own. Memorang began as a free spaced-repetition study app in 2013 and has since become a platform pitched at publishers, institutions, and professional organizations who want to turn expertise into AI-driven courses, quizzes, and exams with humans kept in the loop.