Tagged: northwestern
17 results
Ben Hernandez
Ben Hernandez is the founder and CEO of Numat, a Chicago deep-tech company that treats chemistry like software. Numat designs metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), nanoscale materials that capture, hold, and even destroy specific molecules with atomic precision. Trained as an engineer with a law degree and an MBA, and a former private equity investor, Hernandez turned a Northwestern lab idea into the world's first industrial-scale MOF manufacturing campus, powering safer hazardous-gas storage for the semiconductor industry through its ION-X product and pushing toward industrial decarbonization.
Danish Qureshi
Danish Qureshi is the founder and CEO of Zarminali Pediatrics, a nationwide pediatric multispecialty group he started in 2024 to fix the fragmented way American children get care. Before Zarminali, he co-founded LifeStance Health, scaling it into the country's largest outpatient mental health provider with thousands of clinicians across dozens of states before it went public. A former Bain consultant and private equity operator who cut his teeth in wound care, Qureshi has raised roughly $150M for Zarminali and grown it to nearly 30 clinics across eight states in under two years.
James Kubik
James Kubik is the co-founder and CEO of Somewear Labs, a San Francisco company building satellite-and-mesh communications hardware and software for teams that operate where cell towers end. A Northwestern product-design engineer and former Intuit product leader, he launched Somewear in 2017 after a childhood friend drowned in a Lake Michigan sailing accident with no way to call for help. Somewear's pocket-sized devices - Relay and the hybrid mesh/satcom Node - now serve every U.S. Department of Defense service, federal agencies, wildland firefighters, and backcountry explorers. The company raised a $13.7M Series A in 2022 backed by a roster of Fortune 500 CEOs.
James Rebesco
James (Jim) Rebesco is the co-founder and CEO of Striveworks, an Austin-based AI company that helps the U.S. defense and national-security community build, deploy, and monitor machine-learning models at scale through its Chariot platform. A physicist by training (Caltech) and a computational neuroscientist by doctorate (Northwestern), he spent seven years as a partner at high-frequency trading firm Virtu Financial before turning to operational AI. Under his leadership Striveworks has landed a $70M enterprise government agreement, raised a Series B led by Washington Harbour Partners, and become the first company to bridge the U.S. Army's two largest battlefield AI efforts.
Jeff Kahn
Jeff Kahn is the co-founder and CEO of Rise Science, the company behind the RISE energy-management app. A Northwestern-trained engineer who turned his own student exhaustion into a research program, Kahn co-published early work on how technology can improve sleep behavior and ran what the company calls the largest study of sleep's impact on real-world job performance across the NFL and Fortune 500 sales teams. He and co-founder Leon Sasson were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and RISE has surpassed 1 million downloads.
Mathew Elenjickal
Mathew (Matt) Elenjickal is the founder and CEO of FourKites, the Chicago-based supply chain visibility company he started in 2014 after realizing he could track a pair of Amazon shoes to the doorstep but not a $100,000 shipment of industrial equipment. A mechanical engineer from Kerala turned logistics-software operator, he spent seven years at i2 Technologies and Oracle before building FourKites into a platform that now tracks more than 3.2 million supply chain events a day for 1,600+ global brands. He has raised roughly $247 million across four rounds and is now pushing the company past dashboards into AI-native orchestration with products like the Intelligent Control Tower and Loft.
Noel Greenberger
Noel Greenberger is the CEO of Nob Hill Therapeutics, an Albuquerque-based respiratory company building DryNeb, a dry powder nebulizer that pushes high therapeutic doses deep into the lungs regardless of a patient's breathing capacity. A Wharton MBA and Northwestern-trained industrial engineer, he spent years commercializing respiratory medicines at Sandoz, ran commercial strategy at Vertice Pharma, and consulted at McKinsey and ZS Associates before taking the helm of Nob Hill in 2022. Under his watch the company won a $1.73M HHS Phase II grant and closed a $3M Series A in 2024.
Justin Benjamin
Justin Benjamin is the co-founder and COO of Normal, a Chicago-based crypto savings and index investing platform built on Stellar. He is also a beach wrestling world champion - the first U.S. man to win a Senior Beach World Series gold medal - and serves as Head of Strategy for USA Wrestling. He was a Big Ten wrestler at Northwestern University and earlier built products at CoinFlip and Bitcoin of America before co-founding Normal through the Antler Boulder accelerator in 2022.
David Bild
David Bild is a technical co-founder and engineering leader at Resourcely, the cloud-security startup acquired by Anysphere (maker of Cursor) in July 2025. A Ph.D. computer engineer who once designed censorship-resistant networks, he has spent his career turning gnarly security problems into guardrails developers actually want to use - from overlay networking for IoT at Xaptum to secure-by-design Terraform blueprints at Resourcely. Post-acquisition he works on Fraim, an open-source, genAI-based application- and cloud-security tool. He builds from a cabin-adjacent base in Southwest Harbor, Maine, on the doorstep of Acadia.
Eric Tsai
Eric Tsai is the co-founder and CEO of Asteroom, a proptech company that turns an ordinary smartphone into a professional 3D virtual tour studio. A former Facebook data scientist, he left big tech in 2019 to chase a stubborn problem in real estate: high-quality property visualization was too expensive and too complicated for the average agent. Under his lead, Asteroom grew to serve tens of thousands of agents and built a nationwide network of certified data collectors, becoming the first 3D tour platform to power property data collection for Freddie Mac's ACE+ PDR and Fannie Mae's value-acceptance programs.
Michael Xing
Michael Xing is the co-founder and CEO of Pingo AI (YC S25), a language-learning app that builds fluency by letting people talk with an AI tutor in real-life conversations. The idea grew out of weekly Chinese practice sessions with his freshman-year college roommate Morrie Schonfeld. After launching in January 2025, Pingo scaled from zero to hundreds of thousands of users and millions in ARR in under a year, becoming one of Y Combinator's fastest-growing consumer companies and a Google Play Best of 2025 winner. Before Pingo, Xing spent roughly three years at AI startups and built a Chrome extension with 150,000+ downloads.
Ahsan Arozullah
Ahsan Arozullah, MD, MPH is Executive Vice President of Research and Development and Chief Medical Officer at TerSera Therapeutics, a Deerfield, Illinois specialty pharmaceutical company focused on oncology, CNS disorders and rare disease. A Northwestern-trained physician with a Harvard MPH, he spent over 15 years at Astellas, rising to Senior Vice President and Head of Oncology Development, where he helped validate claudin 18.2 as a cancer target through the pivotal SPOTLIGHT trial of zolbetuximab. He pairs two decades of clinical research with academic roots in health literacy at the University of Illinois and serves on the board of Darul Qasim College, working at the intersection of medicine and Islamic bioethics.
Vadim Vladimirskiy
Vadim Vladimirskiy is the co-founder and CEO of Nerdio, a Chicago software company that automates and cuts the cost of running Microsoft cloud desktops for thousands of organizations across more than 50 countries. He emigrated from Ukraine at 13, started his first IT consultancy in high school, and spent fifteen years running an MSP before turning his internal tooling into a product. In March 2025 Nerdio raised a $500 million Series C from General Atlantic at a valuation above $1 billion, and the company crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue by mid-2025.
Chelsea Stoner
Chelsea Stoner is a General Partner at Battery Ventures who hunts down vertically focused software companies and healthcare-IT operators across North America. She joined Battery in 2006 and has helped scale Avalara, Glassdoor, Guidewire, Marketo, RealPage and WebPT, among others. Recognized on Forbes Midas Hot Prospects and GrowthCap's Top 25 Healthcare Investors.
Matt Cain
Matt Cain is a technology executive who served as Chair, President, and CEO of Couchbase from April 2017 through September 2025, guiding the company from a growth-stage NoSQL database startup through a 2021 NASDAQ IPO and ultimately a $1.5 billion acquisition by Haveli Investments. With an engineering degree from Northwestern and an MBA from Stanford, Cain built his career across a decade at Cisco Systems, senior roles at Symantec, and the presidency of Veritas Technologies' worldwide field operations before joining Couchbase. Under his leadership, Couchbase expanded from pure NoSQL into a multi-model developer data platform powering AI-enabled applications for global enterprises.
Anya Cheng
Anya Cheng is the Founder & CEO of Taelor, an AI-powered men's clothing rental and styling subscription service that raised $5M+ and ranked #1 in U.S. menswear rentals by GQ. A Taiwanese-American first-generation immigrant who spent 15+ years at Target, McDonald's, eBay, and Meta (where she helped launch Facebook Shopping), she pivoted to entrepreneurship to solve a problem she saw everywhere: busy professional men who needed to look sharp but hated shopping. Taelor combines AI trend forecasting with human stylists to deliver curated wardrobes to subscribers, tackling fashion's 30% waste problem along the way. Cheng also teaches at Northwestern's Medill School and mentors at 500 Startups.
Teresa Torres
Teresa Torres is the founder of Product Talk and the author of 'Continuous Discovery Habits' (2021), the definitive book on modern product discovery. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who transitioned from front-end engineering to product management to coaching, she pioneered the Opportunity Solution Tree framework and has trained more than 18,000 product professionals through Product Talk Academy. She coaches product teams at companies like Spotify, Tesco, CarMax, and Snagajob, and is widely recognized as one of the most influential people in global product management.