nutrition
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Ian Pinner Has Spent 26 Years Learning How Food Moves
Seventeen roles, every region, one company. Ian Pinner's route from wheat trading to ADM's nutrition business shows what happens when a career is built by learning the whole system.
Laura Katz
Laura Katz is the founder and CEO of Helaina, a New York biotech company that uses precision fermentation to produce human-identical bioactive proteins. Its first product, effera, is the world's first commercially available human lactoferrin made through yeast fermentation. A food scientist by training and once NYU's youngest adjunct professor in Food Science, Katz started the company in 2019 from her Lower East Side kitchen after hearing a podcast about the black market for breast milk. She has raised more than $80 million to move Helaina from research into a commercial ingredient business.
Noah Kotlove
Noah Kotlove is the co-founder and CEO of Berry Street, a New York-based telehealth platform that connects patients with insurance-covered registered dietitians and gives independent RDs the software to run their practices. He launched Berry Street in 2023 with Jesse Rose after his own experience with a dietitian led to sustained results where fad diets had not. Before Berry Street, Kotlove built Sobrietysoft, an addiction recovery app that grew to more than six million users, and worked as a senior innovation consultant at Accenture after graduating from Wharton. In February 2025 Berry Street raised a $50M Series B led by Northzone, with Sofina, FJ Labs, the founder of Revolut, the co-founders of Spring Health and Grow Therapy, and the CEO of Found also participating.
Rony Sellam
Rony Sellam is the CEO of InsideTracker, a Cambridge, Massachusetts based personalized-health company that uses blood biomarkers, DNA and lifestyle data to give consumers actionable recommendations for extending healthspan. A former Deloitte consultant from France by way of Geneva and a longtime healthcare IT executive, he has run InsideTracker for over a decade and helped push the company past 100,000 members and into partnerships with Oura and Fitness SF.
Vanessa Rissetto
Vanessa Rissetto is a registered dietitian nutritionist and the co-founder and CEO of Culina Health, a virtual, insurance-covered nutrition care company she started with fellow dietitian Tamar Samuels in 2020. A Fordham history major turned NYU marketing grad turned Mount Sinai senior dietitian, she ran the dietetic internship program at NYU before building Culina Health into a network of about 90 dietitians that has served more than 10,000 patients. In December 2024 she raised a $7.9 million Series A led by Healthworx, the venture arm of CareFirst. She is a frequent nutrition voice on the Today Show and in Vogue, The New York Times and Bon Appetit, and has been recognized by Goldman Sachs, Inc., Essence and NPR.
Matt Barnard
Matt Barnard is the cofounder and CEO of one.bio, a Sacramento biotechnology company turning plant fiber into odorless, tasteless nutrients that can be dosed into everyday food to reshape the gut microbiome. A seventh-generation Wisconsin farmer turned technology operator, he first became known as the cofounder and CEO of Plenty, the SoftBank-backed indoor vertical farming unicorn. He now applies the same obsession - control what people eat, control their health - to fiber science spun out of UC Davis.
Sara Cullen
Sara Cullen is the founder and CEO of GEM, a Los Angeles wellness company that reinvented the daily multivitamin as a bite-sized chew made from real, whole-food ingredients. After a personal health slump in her late twenties left her disillusioned with the synthetic-filler vitamin aisle, the Oregon farm kid and Cornell graduate built the product she could not find. She validated it inside a private Facebook group of women before raising venture capital, selling more than 20 million bites, and turning 'food is medicine' into a real business.
Sami Inkinen
Sami Inkinen is a Finnish-born, Stanford-trained entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Virta Health, a company on a mission to reverse metabolic disease in one billion people through nutrition, technology, and AI. He earlier co-founded the real estate marketplace Trulia, taking it public in 2012 before its merger with Zillow. A self-described 'incurable data geek' and world-class endurance athlete, he is a triathlon age-group world champion and, in 2014, rowed 2,750 miles unsupported across the Pacific from California to Hawaii with his wife in a record-setting 45 days to raise awareness about sugar and metabolic disease.
Kendra Brassfield
Kendra Brassfield is the Chief Executive Officer of NeoLife International, the Santa Clara-based global nutrition and wellness company founded by her father Jerry Brassfield in 1958. She joined in 2011 as a Market Research Strategist, rose through marketing leadership, drove the rebrand from GNLD to NeoLife, and took the top job in August 2016. A Saint Mary's College of California graduate and Milken Institute Associate, she is also a Certified Personal Trainer, distance runner, and early-morning surfer who insists on a NeoLifeBar before paddling out.
Kurt Knight
Kurt Knight is the CEO of Foodsmart, the largest digital food-as-medicine platform in the United States, appointed in March 2025 after 13 years at Amwell where he rose to COO and helped scale virtual care nationally. With an MBA from Harvard, an MPH from Columbia, and field experience everywhere from UNICEF to the Gates Foundation to the Boston Consulting Group, Knight brings an unusually wide lens to the intersection of food, nutrition, and healthcare delivery.
Dr. Kholod Shafi
Dr. Kholod Shafi is a Karachi-based MBBS doctor, practicing Family Physician, and elite fitness trainer who built AeroFitness - a health platform that fuses medical expertise with physical training. Holding three certifications from the International Sports Sciences Association, she manages clients across the full health spectrum, from managing chronic conditions like diabetes and autoimmune diseases to supporting pregnant women and aspiring athletes recovering from injury. Her mission: bridge the gap between the clinic and the gym.