morgan-stanley
(31)
EquityZen Built a Waiting Room for the IPO - Then Morgan Stanley Bought the Door
For 13 years, EquityZen has turned startup stock - awkward, restricted and stubbornly illiquid - into something more people can transact. Its new owner, Morgan Stanley, is betting that the private market needs plumbing as much as it needs picks.
The Brand Builder Behind Mizuho's American Rise
She joined a bank few Americans could name and spent a decade making its brand impossible to ignore - one campaign, one hire, one employee network at a time.
Jess Schnurr Dreams Big for a Living
She trained for a trading desk, took one advertising class, and ended up building the brand voice of a Wall Street giant - ring that says 'Dream' still on her right hand.
How Megan Goett Made Options Mean More Than a Contract
The Cboe chief marketing officer learned her craft by building from scratch. Now she is turning a house of financial brands into one story, with customer service as the operating system.
Chris Yu
Chris Yu is the co-founder and CEO of SignalPlus, a Hong Kong-based software firm building institutional-grade trading and risk-management infrastructure for crypto options and derivatives. A former macro trader at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, he spotted that crypto options represented less than half a percent of perpetual-contract volume and set out to close that gap. Since founding SignalPlus with James Shan in 2021, Yu has grown the platform into a tool used by firms including Cumberland, FalconX, Galaxy, and Goldman Sachs, and helped expand the crypto options market several times over.
Jonathan Birnbaum
Jonathan Birnbaum is the founder and CEO of OpenYield, a New York-based fixed income marketplace that brings an equity-like, fully automated trading experience to bonds. A former US credit trading COO at Morgan Stanley and fixed income execution lead at Bridgewater Associates, he later helped build consumer investing platforms as general manager of SoFi Invest and founding COO of Domain Money. He founded OpenYield in 2023 to make bonds cheap and easy to trade for retail investors, backed by a 2026 Series A of more than $6 million from investors including LeveL Markets, Draper Associates, Canapi Ventures and Clocktower Ventures.
Karl Kipke
Karl Kipke is the founder and CEO of HealthGrowth Pharmacy Solutions, an Austin, Texas company that gives independent and community pharmacies a single ecosystem of lending, advisory, group purchasing, and transition services. A former Wall Street banker who spent 11 years at Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns before turning to venture investing, Kipke built HealthGrowth Capital into a direct lender for pharmacies and closed a $16.8 million debt-and-equity financing package in April 2020 to expand its reach to independent pharmacy owners across the United States.
Mathias Fort
Mathias Korder Fort is co-founder and CEO of Baselane, a New York-based fintech that gives independent landlords a single place to bank, collect rent, and keep books. In October 2025 the company closed a $20M Series B led by Thomvest Ventures, and simultaneously disclosed a previously-unannounced $14.4M Series A led by Matrix Partners, bringing total funding to roughly $44M. Before Baselane he spent seven years as a Principal in Boston Consulting Group's financial services practice, and started his career as an analyst at Morgan Stanley. He holds an MBA from INSEAD and a BA in economics from Trinity College.
Shawn Melamed
Shawn Melamed is the co-founder and CEO of Spiral, a New York fintech that plugs charitable giving into the banking apps of credit unions and community banks. Before Spiral he ran Morgan Stanley's Technology Business Development and Innovation Offices and built two prior fintech companies, StrikeNET (sold to TMX Group) and Correlix. He was named one of The Financial Technology Report's Top 50 Fintech CEOs of 2024.
Stefan Bauer
Stefan Bauer is the co-founder and CEO of Marker Learning, a New York City telehealth company that connects families and schools with licensed psychologists for learning disability evaluations, cutting the traditional cost and turnaround time of assessments. A Yale School of Management MBA and former McKinsey and Morgan Stanley professional, Bauer co-founded the company with Emily Yudofsky in 2021; it has since raised $19.7 million in total funding, including a $15 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2023.
Vishal Kapadia
Vishal Kapadia is the Chief Executive Officer of LineVision, a Boston-based company that bolts non-contact sensors to high-voltage power lines and, through dynamic line rating, squeezes as much as 40% more capacity out of wires already in the ground. He took the top job in June 2025 after co-founder Hudson Gilmer moved to chairman. Before LineVision he ran energy transformation at Walmart, where he built a coast-to-coast EV fast-charging plan and oversaw more than 2 GW of clean energy; earlier he was CFO and CCO of Orsted's onshore renewables business and led renewable-energy investing at Morgan Stanley. Across his career he has financed or developed over 15 GW of energy and mobility infrastructure.
Eirini Schlosser
Eirini Schlosser is the founder and CEO of Dyania Health, a clinical research AI company building Synapsis AI, a natural language understanding platform that reads unstructured electronic medical records to pre-screen patients for clinical trials and automate chart abstraction. The only non-physician in a family of doctors, she spent childhood summers digitizing her father's patient records, then worked on more than $60 billion of deals at Morgan Stanley before leaving finance to build technology. She founded the NLP startup Chuz, then launched Dyania Health in 2019, raising $17.55M and earning a spot on Inc.'s 2025 Female Founders 500.
Conor Murray
Conor Murray is the cofounder and CEO of OpenInvest, the values-based investing platform acquired by J.P. Morgan in 2021. An MIT-trained mathematician and computer scientist, he built portfolio-optimization technology at Bridgewater Associates managing more than $150 billion before starting OpenInvest in 2015 to let everyday investors align their money with their ethics. He now guides ESG innovation inside J.P. Morgan Wealth Management.
Dan Piemont
Dan Piemont is the co-founder and CEO of Long Wall, the Long Beach defense company formerly known as ABL Space Systems. An MIT physics and economics graduate who came to rocketry through Wall Street trading and venture capital rather than an engineering bench, he spent seven years building low-cost, containerized launch vehicles before pivoting the company in 2024-2025 toward mass-producible missile defense. Long Wall now develops the Cyclops exoatmospheric interceptor, RSX liquid boosters for threat replication, and Ironwood mobile ground systems, repurposing the hard-won technology of a launch startup that survived two failed orbital attempts into a bet on American homeland defense.
Eric Chang
Eric Chang is the co-founder and CEO of Claira, a New York fintech building domain-native, agentic AI for private credit and capital markets deal teams. A CFA charterholder with a Cornell engineering degree, he spent nearly two decades inside Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, AQR, and Morgan Stanley before deciding the real problem in finance was not faster analysts but firms that forget what they already know. Claira turns dense legal and credit documents into structured, queryable data and aims to become a firm's permanent decision-making memory. In June 2025 the company raised a $7M seed co-led by Barclays and Citi.
Brock Arnason
Brock Arnason is the founder and CEO of Droit, a New York regtech firm that turns the live text of financial regulation into auditable, machine-readable logic - a discipline it calls computational law. A Cornell-trained engineering physicist and former Morgan Stanley fixed-income e-commerce executive, he started Droit in 2012 to solve the Dodd-Frank derivatives mess from the inside. Droit's Adept platform now answers 'can I trade this?' and reports trades for clients including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and UBS, and in 2025 the company was acquired by capital-markets technology giant FIS.
Elan Greenberg
Elan Greenberg is the CEO of Augury, the Industrial AI company that listens to factory machines and predicts their failures before they happen. A former US Marine Corps captain who went from Morgan Stanley M&A to launching DoorDash's non-restaurant business to running operations at Flock Safety, he took the top job at the roughly $1 billion-valued Augury in October 2025 after a year as its COO. His through-line is operations at scale: taking proven technology and putting it in front of every customer who needs it.
Gokul Mohan
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.
Louisa Schneider
Louisa Serene Schneider is the founder and CEO of Rowan, the ear-piercing company that hires registered nurses to do the piercing and runs its own medical advisory board. She started it from her attic in 2017 after a career in M&A and retail trading at Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan, and built it into a chain doing roughly $70-100 million a year with dozens of studios and hundreds of employees, more than half of them nurses.
Michael Topol
Michael Topol is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of MGT Insurance, a San Francisco-based company he runs with his brother Graham and describes as the world's first vertically AI-native neo-insurer for commercial property and casualty risk. After helping scale the insurtech Collective Health from 30 to more than 500 employees and a stint in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, he set out to rebuild a commercial insurance carrier from the ground up on a modern AI stack. Two years in, MGT has reached profitability, signed roughly 30,000 customers, posted about $3 million of recurring revenue per employee, and closed an oversubscribed $21.6M Series B led by Mubadala Capital in October 2025.
Vanessa Barboni Hallik
Vanessa Barboni Hallik spent fifteen years trading foreign exchange and emerging markets at Morgan Stanley, rose to Managing Director, then walked away to build Another Tomorrow, a B Corp certified luxury label that treats clothing as an asset. Every garment carries a digital ID tracing it from farm to closet and back into an authenticated resale program. She launched the brand six weeks before COVID-19 shut down the world and kept building.
James Rosenthal
James (Jim) Rosenthal co-founded BlueVoyant in 2017 and built it from a startup into a global cybersecurity company with more than 650 employees across five continents. A former Chief Operating Officer of Morgan Stanley, where he answered to the CEO and board for cybersecurity, he turned a Wall Street obsession with protecting the financial system into a company that defends businesses and governments against internal and supply-chain threats. In May 2026 he handed the CEO role to John Hernandez and became Chairman of the Board.
Arup Banerjee
Arup Banerjee is the CEO and Co-founder of Windfall, a San Francisco-based people intelligence platform that uses AI to estimate the net worth of every American and deliver actionable consumer financial data to over 1,500 organizations. With a background spanning investment banking at Citi, venture capital at Updata Partners, and product leadership at Radius Intelligence and GoodData, Banerjee founded Windfall in 2016 after identifying critical inaccuracies in consumer wealth data. In April 2025, Windfall raised a $65 million Series B led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, bringing total funding to over $95 million.
Casey Woo
Casey Woo is the founder and General Partner of FOG Ventures and founder/CEO of Operators Guild, the invite-only community of more than 1,000 strategic finance and operations leaders. A seven-time high-growth CFO/COO whose resume runs through Morgan Stanley, Maverick Capital, Pantheon, Zozi, WeWork and Landing, he now backs founders building the modern operator toolbox alongside a syndicate of the world's top CEOs, COOs and CFOs.
Jason Kong
Jason Kong is a General Partner at Base10 Partners, a San Francisco-based Black-led venture capital firm that backs founders automating the 'real economy' - the large, often overlooked industries that make the world run. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital in 2021 while at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Kong backed breakout companies including Attentive, Brex, Datadog, Discord, Figma, and UiPath. A Summa Cum Laude graduate of Penn's elite M&T program who qualified twice for USAMO and won the We the People national civics competition, he joined Base10 in 2023 to lead Series B+ investments, bringing a singular blend of investment banking, late-stage VC, and hedge fund analysis discipline to growth-stage bets on vertical SaaS, cybersecurity, and fintech.
Patrick Yang
Patrick Yang is the Founding General Partner of Amity Ventures, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm he co-founded in 2016 with CJ Reim after the two crossed paths at Highland Capital Partners. Betting on obsessive, high-agency founders at Seed and Series A, Yang has helped build a portfolio with a 20% unicorn hit rate - 7 of 35 companies reached $1B+ valuations, including CaptivateIQ, Evisort (acquired by Workday), Talkdesk, and Socure. A Bay Area native who studied business at UC Berkeley, he cut his teeth at Morgan Stanley's Menlo Park tech investment banking group before moving to Highland, where he spotted and backed nuTonomy - the autonomous vehicle startup Delphi snapped up for $450 million.
Mike Fitzgibbons
Mike Fitzgibbons is the CEO and Founder of Claritas Rx, a South San Francisco-based healthtech company that uses AI and real-world patient-level data to help biopharmaceutical companies track, understand, and support patients across the specialty drug treatment journey. Founded in 2011, Claritas Rx serves 20+ rare and specialty therapeutic areas and has appeared on Inc.'s 2025 list of America's Fastest-Growing Private Companies. Before founding Claritas Rx, Fitzgibbons spent seven years at Morgan Stanley as an equity research analyst covering pharma services and drug distribution, then joined Genentech where he worked on pricing strategy and led the Avastin marketing team - experiences that directly shaped his conviction that patient-level data, not aggregated reports, is what biopharma companies actually need.
Cole Pergament
Cole Pergament is a Partner on Sequoia Capital's growth team, one of the most storied venture platforms in Silicon Valley. A Wharton summa cum laude graduate who founded his university's undergraduate fintech group, Cole cut his teeth at Morgan Stanley's Global Technology Group before spending four years at BOND Capital, where he backed companies that became household names in AI and enterprise software - including OpenAI, Decagon, AlphaSense, Weights & Biases, and Wiz. He joined Sequoia in July 2025, bringing a reputation for seeking founders who embrace discomfort, question convention, and are fully committed to their vision.
Corinne Riley
Corinne Riley is a Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where she focuses on early-stage B2B enterprise software, data infrastructure, and AI companies. Before joining Greylock, she worked at Morgan Stanley on IPOs for Uber, Zoom, and Palantir. At Greylock she launched both the Scout Program - growing it to 35 scouts investing in 100+ startups - and the Edge Program, a founder-support initiative that provides pre-idea and pre-seed founders with resources and mentorship without taking upfront equity. She is known for her go-to-market expertise and her hands-on approach to helping founders land their first enterprise customers.
Nicole Quinn
Nicole Quinn is a Managing Partner at Connect Ventures and former General Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where she spent a decade building one of Silicon Valley's most distinctive consumer investing portfolios. A former British 100-meter sprinter who traded the track for Wall Street, Quinn worked on the Facebook and Groupon IPOs at Morgan Stanley before pivoting to venture capital. Known as the 'Celebrity Whisperer,' she's backed Lady Gaga's Haus Labs, Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, and companies like Calm, Cameo, and Rothy's. With a mathematics degree from York University and an MBA from Stanford, Quinn combines analytical rigor with an athlete's competitive drive and a certified coach's empathy for founders navigating the long game of company building.