Homebase is a San Francisco-based workforce management platform built for small businesses running hourly teams. Founded in 2014, it combines employee scheduling, time tracking, payroll, HR compliance, and team communication in one mobile-first app. As of 2024, the platform serves over 150,000 businesses and 3.8 million hourly workers, having logged 8 billion hours and processed $3 billion in gross payroll. Backed by $198 million in total funding, Homebase competes by bundling tools that small business owners previously paid for separately - and more recently by embedding AI assistants across hiring, scheduling, and payroll.
Daniel Yousefian is a co-founder of Clubhouse, the voice-based social networking platform that captured the world's attention during the pandemic. Built under Alpha Exploration Co. and backed by $112M from Andreessen Horowitz, Clubhouse pioneered drop-in audio rooms before boldly pivoting toward intimate friend-to-friend voice messaging - complete with AI-powered custom voice cloning. Based in Yerevan, Armenia, Yousefian is part of the founding trio alongside CEO Paul Davison and co-founder Rohan Seth.
Melody McCloskey is the founder and CEO of StyleSeat, the largest online marketplace for beauty, grooming, and wellness services, connecting over 350,000 independent beauty professionals with 10 million+ consumers across the United States. She co-founded StyleSeat in 2011 alongside Dan Levine, bootstrapped the company for 18 months before raising $40.7 million in venture funding, and has helped power over 200 million appointments while generating $12+ billion in total revenue for small businesses. A San Francisco native who studied French and International Relations at UC Davis, McCloskey built StyleSeat out of her own frustration with booking beauty appointments, turning a personal pain point into a platform that fundamentally reshaped how independent beauty professionals run their businesses. She is also an angel investor and Cleo Capital scout, focused on backing female-led startups at the pre-seed through Series A stages.
Vishal Joshi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Joy, a modern wedding and celebration platform that has helped millions of couples plan their weddings with beautifully designed websites, all-in-one registries, and guest management tools. A former Microsoft Azure product manager who spent nearly a decade helping build cloud infrastructure, Joshi left to co-found Joy in 2014 through Y Combinator's S16 cohort. Joy has raised over $44M in funding from investors including General Catalyst, Sierra Ventures, and celebrity angels Joe Montana and Marc Pincus, and has grown to nearly 500 employees.
Brightwheel is the all-in-one operating platform for early education centers, combining billing, attendance, family communication, enrollment, lesson planning, and compliance reporting into a single product. Founded in 2014 by Dave Vasen and backed by $88.8M in funding, it serves 150,000+ childcare programs and 2.2 million monthly active users across 50+ countries, holding over 53% market share in childcare management software.
Dresma is an AI-powered visual content platform that turns smartphones into pop-up product studios. Its flagship app, DoMyShoot, lets ecommerce sellers shoot, edit, and publish marketplace-ready product imagery, video, and A+ content in minutes - not weeks - with a human-in-the-loop QC layer that keeps brands compliant across Amazon, Shopify, Walmart and beyond.
Polycam is a cross-platform 3D scanning and spatial AI company that turns iPhones, Android phones, and drones into professional reality-capture tools. Used by architects, game studios, forensics teams, and millions of hobbyists, it combines LiDAR, photogrammetry, and Gaussian splatting to make 3D capture as easy as taking a photo.
Speak is an AI-powered language learning app that gets users speaking out loud from day one. Backed by OpenAI's Startup Fund, Accel, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, the San Francisco company reached unicorn status in December 2024 after raising a $78M Series C at a $1B valuation. Its AI tutor offers unlimited conversational practice and instant feedback to over 10 million learners.
Vivoo is a San Francisco-based health tech company that makes at-home urine test strips analyzed via smartphone camera. Founded in 2017, the company offers a wellness platform that measures 8+ biomarkers — including hydration, vitamins, minerals, pH, ketones, and oxidative stress — and delivers personalized nutrition and lifestyle recommendations through a free mobile app. Backed by $19.4M in funding led by Tim Draper, Vivoo is sold at Target, Walmart, and Sam's Club, and has expanded to 100+ countries with a focus on making lab-grade health insights accessible to everyday consumers.
Andrea Johnston is a seasoned revenue and operations executive with over 30 years of building high-growth businesses across SaaS, consumer tech, and marketplace platforms. After a decade at OpenTable — rising from VP of Western Region Sales to Chief Operating Officer — she led global revenue at Corel/Alludo, joined Truckstop as Chief Revenue Officer in 2024, and is now CEO at Franki, the video-led restaurant discovery and rewards app that is rewriting how 25,000+ monthly users find their next great meal. Johnston is a go-to-market architect, board advisor to multiple tech startups, and speaker at the 2025 Khosla Ventures CEO Summit.
Fred Helou is the founder and CEO of Vagaro, a cloud-based business management platform used by over 75,000 beauty, fitness, and wellness businesses across four countries. Born in Beirut in 1969, he escaped the Lebanese Civil War at 18, arrived in the United States penniless after being pickpocketed in France, and worked his way up from a $5-an-hour pickup boy to director of software development before being laid off in the 2008 recession — the catalyst that led him to build what is now a billion-dollar company. Vagaro has processed over $15 billion in payments, booked over 600 million appointments, and achieved unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation following a 2021 reinvestment by FTV Capital.
Lihua Zhu is the CEO of WiFi Master Key at LinkSure Network, a Singapore-headquartered mobile internet company serving hundreds of millions of users globally with free, secure Wi-Fi connectivity. With a career spanning Princeton research labs, Microsoft engineering, Alibaba's DingTalk, and Momo Technology, Zhu brings a rare combination of deep academic research and large-scale operational execution to one of the world's most widely used connectivity apps.
Michael Buckley is the Chairman and CEO of Be My Eyes, the world's largest digital volunteer organization connecting blind and low-vision users with sighted volunteers via live video calls. A communications veteran who spent 12 years at Brunswick Group and three years as Facebook's VP of Global Business Communications, Buckley pivoted to mission-driven tech when he joined Be My Eyes in December 2022. Under his leadership, Be My Eyes launched Be My AI (powered by GPT-4), which TIME named one of the Best Inventions of 2023, and scaled the platform to over 1 million blind and low-vision users supported by 6.7 million volunteers worldwide. He is also co-founder and chairman of Ocean's Halo, a seaweed-based natural foods company, and an active angel investor.
Shelby Rhodes is the Senior Director of Product Operations and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Strava, the world's leading fitness social network with 180+ million athletes across 190+ countries. She brings 11+ years of experience from Google and YouTube, where she oversaw products used by billions of people including YouTube Shorts, Gaming, Live, and Comments. Now at Strava during one of its most pivotal chapters - a confidential IPO filing and a surge past $500M in annual revenue - she sits at the intersection of product strategy and executive leadership at a company betting that movement beats doomscrolling.
Brian Park is the CEO of Skillest, the world's leading remote sports coaching marketplace that connects athletes with elite coaches through asynchronous video analysis. A Silicon Valley veteran who was the 95th employee at Yahoo and co-founder of Yahoo! Messenger, Park pivoted to sports tech to democratize access to elite coaching - putting a world-class coach in every athlete's pocket. Under his leadership, Skillest has grown to 600+ coaches, 200,000+ golfers, and secured partnerships with Stephen Curry's UNDERRATED Golf and Arccos Golf, becoming the digital coaching standard in golf and expanding across multiple sports.
Elliott Spelman is the co-founder and CEO of Polycam, the world's most-used 3D imaging app with over 10 million downloads and nearly 100,000 paying customers. A Stanford-trained designer and creative technologist, Spelman built Polycam to make 3D capture as accessible as photography - describing it as the Kodak Brownie of spatial computing. After meeting co-founder Chris Heinrich at Ubiquity6, they launched Polycam in 2020, raising an $18M Series A in early 2024 backed by Left Lane Capital, Adobe Ventures, and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. Today Polycam serves individuals across more than half the Fortune 500 and is pushing hard into AI-powered floor plans, generative 3D, and enterprise spatial workflows.
Miray Tayfun is the co-founder and CEO of Vivoo, a San Francisco-based health technology company that turns urine test strips into personalized wellness insights via a mobile app. A bioengineering graduate and serial founder, she built Vivoo from a personal frustration with expensive and slow health testing into a platform serving 300,000+ users across 50+ countries. Backed by Tim Draper and $19.4M in total funding, Vivoo expanded from subscription test strips to a $99 smart toilet unveiled at CES 2026, named Best of CES by Gadget Flow. Tayfun is a 2019 Australian Financial Review Top 100 Women of Influence honoree and 2018 Laureate Here for Good Award winner.
Siddharth Sinha is the Co-founder and CEO of Dresma, an AI-powered visual content platform that helps ecommerce sellers create studio-quality product images and marketing content at scale. A fourth-generation entrepreneur from Bihar, India, with a Cornell BS and INSEAD MBA, he co-founded Dresma in 2019 alongside his wife Nishka and partner Abhishek Kirti. Dresma's flagship product DoMyShoot has processed over 9 million ecommerce photos for 50,000+ online brands - reducing content creation costs by 85% and cutting time-to-market by 90%. The company raised a $3M seed round in 2021 from SVQuad, Inventus Capital Partners, and Thinkuvate.
Sara Mauskopf is the CEO and co-founder of Winnie, a marketplace helping millions of parents find daycare, preschool, and childcare across the United States. A MIT computer science graduate and former product leader at YouTube, Twitter, and Postmates, she co-founded Winnie in 2016 after struggling to find childcare for her first child. Under her leadership, Winnie has raised $15.5M in funding, serves over 4 million parents, covers 250K+ licensed providers across 7,000+ U.S. cities, and ranked #177 on the 2023 Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies - earning the #1 Consumer Services Company spot.
Nathan Sharp is the Co-Founder and CEO of Retro, a friends-only photo journal app built on the belief that social media can be better - more intimate, more honest, more for the people you actually care about. A Harvard grad and Dartmouth Tuck MBA, Sharp spent six years at Meta where he helped launch Instagram Stories in 2016 before leaving to build Retro with his co-founder Ryan Olson. Backed by Thrive Capital, Dylan Field, and a constellation of top-tier VCs, Retro hit #1 photo app in Canada and broke into the US top charts in 2025, proving that people still want a social app that actually feels like talking to friends.
Whitney Wolfe Herd co-founded Tinder, sued it for sexual harassment, and turned that lawsuit into Bumble - the dating app where women make the first move. By 31, she became the world's youngest female self-made billionaire and the youngest woman to take a self-founded company public in U.S. history. After stepping down as CEO in 2023 and experiencing what she calls an 'ego death,' she returned to lead Bumble in 2025 with a new vision: rebuilding it as 'The Love Company.'
YouShift is building the operating system for hospital workforce management - an AI-powered platform that automates shift scheduling, swap management, and compliance tracking for healthcare teams. Founded by three Harvard alumni, the company targets the massive inefficiency in hospital staffing: full-time administrators juggling spreadsheets, chaotic last-minute coverage, and staff burnout from unfair schedules. With 1,000+ doctors already on the platform across Europe and the US, YouShift is turning hospital scheduling from a daily fire-fight into a background process - so clinicians can focus on patients, not paperwork.