Tagged: oakland
30 results
Tolga Tezel
Tolga Tezel is the founder and CEO of Canopy Connect, an insurance data infrastructure company that lets consumers securely share their insurance information with agents and businesses in seconds. A University of Waterloo electrical engineering graduate and former early engineer at Dropbox and Nova Credit, he prototyped Canopy Connect over a weekend after a dinner conversation with a friend's mother who ran an insurance agency. Since founding the company in February 2020, he has grown it to serve thousands of agencies and raised a $6.5M Series A, building what he describes as trusted, consumer-permissioned infrastructure for property and casualty insurance data.
Tomás Campos
Tomás Campos is the co-founder and CEO of Spinwheel, an Oakland-based fintech building agentic AI-powered credit data and payments infrastructure for the consumer debt market. A UC Berkeley and Haas School of Business graduate, he spent two decades in payments and commerce - growing Blackhawk Network's digital payments division into a $1.5 billion business and co-founding the conversational commerce startup FluidM, which was acquired by Westfield. He launched Spinwheel in 2019 after the consumer debt crisis touched his own family, aiming to make the fragmented world of loans and liabilities as accessible as open banking made bank accounts. In June 2025 the company raised a $30 million Series A led by F-Prime Capital.
Firebrand Artisan Breads
Firebrand Artisan Breads is an Oakland-founded, Alameda-based wood-fired bakery that describes itself as a jobs program that happens to sell bread. Founded in 2008 by Matt Kreutz, it wholesales artisan breads and pastries to hundreds of Bay Area retailers - including Whole Foods - and runs a direct retail cafe. Its defining feature is an Open Hiring model that prioritizes people with high barriers to employment (formerly incarcerated, formerly homeless), paired with a perpetual purpose trust that locks the mission in permanently and shares profits with workers.
Cirrus Identity
Cirrus Identity is an Oakland-based software company that runs managed, cloud-hosted identity and access management for higher education, research institutions, non-profits and healthcare. Founded in 2013 by former UC Berkeley identity staff, it acts as a proxy and bridge between commercial identity providers (Entra ID, Okta, Duo, Google) and the multilateral research-and-education federations - InCommon, eduGAIN, the Canadian Access Federation and GakuNin - that campuses depend on but that most commercial IdPs do not support. More than 200 universities use it to retire aging Shibboleth deployments, let alumni and applicants log in with social accounts, and standardize authentication without rebuilding every application.
Tezza Foods
Tezza Foods makes the first dairy-free yogurt that goes spoon-for-spoon with Greek yogurt. By culturing and straining organic American-grown soymilk, the Oakland-based company turns whole soybeans into a thick, high-protein yogurt with the protein and probiotics of dairy Greek yogurt - plus fiber and omega-3s - using about 90% less land, water and emissions than dairy. Founded in 2019 by MIT-trained microbiome scientist Nathaniel Chu and Josh Moser, Tezza is a public benefit corporation built on the idea that the world's most nutritious and sustainable protein should be the one we all eat.
Dedra Chamberlin
Dedra Chamberlin is the founder and CEO of Cirrus Identity, an Oakland-based cloud identity company that helps more than 200 universities run single sign-on and federated login without the friction. She arrived at identity management sideways - a UC Berkeley psychology major with master's degrees in city planning and Latin American studies who volunteered for a one-year networking internship and never left. After two decades inside UC Berkeley and UCSF IT, where she rose to Deputy Director of Identity and Access Management and chaired the University of California's system-wide identity strategy workgroup, she founded Cirrus in 2013 to build the education-specific identity tools she wished vendors had made. She is a board member of SimpleSAMLphp and a founder of IAM-HER, a community advancing women in the identity field.
TEECOM
TEECOM is a technology planning, design, and engineering firm that makes technology work in buildings. Founded in 1997 and led by founder David Marks, the remote-first company partners with architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) teams to design the unseen layer of modern buildings - structured cabling, networks, audiovisual, acoustics, security, wireless, distributed antenna systems, and emergency responder radio. With 150-plus engineers, designers, and subject-matter experts, TEECOM has delivered integrated technology systems across more than 28 countries for clients like Salesforce.
Molten Industries
Molten Industries is an Oakland, California climate-hardware startup that uses methane pyrolysis to crack natural gas into clean hydrogen and high-value synthetic graphite, with no carbon dioxide emitted in the process. Founded in 2021 by Dr. Caleb Boyd and Dr. Kevin Bush, the company aims to onshore battery supply chains and decarbonize heavy industry by producing battery-grade graphite for lithium-ion cells and low-cost clean hydrogen for fuels, ammonia, plastics, and green steel. It raised a $25M Series A in June 2024 led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures to build its first modular commercial reactor.
Jenni Ellis
Jenni Ellis is the Executive Assistant to the CEO at CompScience, a San Francisco insurtech building AI control systems that aim to prevent one million workplace injuries by 2035. The right hand to founder Josh Butler, she runs the day-to-day machinery behind a fast-scaling, Series B startup. Before CompScience she logged operations and office-management time across some of the Bay Area's best-known tech names - Replicate, DoorDash, Instacart, and Dropbox - building a reputation as the steady operator who keeps founders and offices moving. Colleagues describe her as vivacious and enthusiastic, a natural leader who keeps tabs on the day-to-day flow of a business.
Kevin Bush
Kevin Bush is the co-founder and CEO of Molten Industries, an Oakland-based deep tech company using methane pyrolysis to crack natural gas into clean hydrogen and battery-grade synthetic graphite. A Stanford-trained materials scientist who set perovskite solar efficiency records before co-founding Swift Solar, Bush is a Breakthrough Energy Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree. He started Molten in a Stanford garage in 2021 and raised a $25M Series A in 2024 to build its first modular commercial reactor.
Blue Bottle Coffee
Blue Bottle Coffee is an Oakland-born specialty roaster and cafe chain that helped define the third-wave coffee movement. Founded in 2002 by clarinetist James Freeman, it built a reputation on freshly roasted single-origin beans, an obsessive 48-hour freshness rule, and a spare, Japanese-influenced cafe aesthetic. It now runs roughly 140 cafes across the US and Asia plus a sizable e-commerce and subscription business, and changed hands in 2026 when Centurium Capital agreed to buy its retail operations from Nestle.
La Clínica de La Raza
La Clínica de La Raza is one of the largest community-based primary health care providers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founded in 1971 in Oakland's Fruitvale district by UC Berkeley students and community activists, it is a federally qualified health center (FQHC) delivering culturally appropriate medical, dental, behavioral health, vision, and pharmacy services to roughly 90,000 patients a year across more than 35 sites in Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano Counties - regardless of a patient's ability to pay.
Jamie Almanza
Jamie Almanza is the CEO of Bay Area Community Services (BACS), a 70-year-old Oakland nonprofit she has led since 2010 - scaling it from a small mental-health agency into a 500+ person, $100M+ social impact operation that houses, supports, and prevents homelessness for more than 20,000 Northern Californians a year.
Jane Garcia
Jane Garcia has run La Clínica de La Raza since 1982, growing a scrappy storefront clinic in Oakland's Fruitvale into a $150M federally qualified health center serving more than 86,000 patients across Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano counties. She walked in as a Berkeley public health intern in 1978 and never left, building a Bay Area institution while suing two federal administrations over immigrant care.
Karl Strovink
Karl Strovink is the CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee, the Oakland-born specialty roaster now owned by Nestlé. A Berkeley native with an MBA from MIT Sloan, he arrived in 2019 from a twelve-year run at Converse and has spent his tenure pushing Blue Bottle toward oat milk by default, instant espresso, zero-waste cafés, and aggressive expansion across Asia, all while protecting the brand's small-batch identity inside a thirty-billion-dollar coffee parent.
Ken Berrick
Ken Berrick founded Seneca Family of Agencies in 1985 in Oakland and spent four decades turning a single home for boys into a 1,900-person nonprofit serving children across California and Washington through a model he calls Unconditional Care. Now CEO Emeritus of Seneca and President and CEO of Just Advocates, he keeps arguing the same line: kids aren't failing the system, the system is failing kids.
Leticia Galyean Sturtevant
Leticia Galyean Sturtevant, LCSW, is the CEO of Seneca Family of Agencies, an Oakland-based nonprofit serving more than 18,000 youth and families a year across California and Washington. She started as a counselor in 2001 and has spent more than two decades inside the same organization, climbing from direct service to running it.
Babylist
Babylist is the operating system for new parenthood — a universal baby registry that grew into an ecommerce destination, a content engine, a healthcare brand, and now a chain of experiential showrooms. Founded in 2011 by ex-Amazon engineer Natalie Gordon, the company hit $750M in 2025 revenue while staying founder-led, profitable, and unapologetically focused on the parent.
LaunchDarkly
LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform that lets software teams release, target, and measure code changes behind feature flags. Founded in 2014 in Oakland by Edith Harbaugh and John Kodumal, the company turned the homegrown 'if/else' toggle into an enterprise control plane used by more than 2,000 customers including Atlassian, IBM, Square, NBC, and Ryanair.
Lilac Solutions
Lilac Solutions is an Oakland-based cleantech company commercializing a patented ion-exchange technology that pulls lithium directly out of brine - using ceramic beads instead of evaporation ponds. The process is faster, uses up to 90% less freshwater, and is designed to unlock low-grade brine resources around the world to feed the electric-vehicle battery supply chain.
NUG
NUG is a vertically integrated California cannabis company founded in 2014 that operates the state's highest-volume extraction facility, multiple retail dispensaries, and one of California's largest wholesale distribution networks. Known for their premium flower, vapes, and edibles, NUG has pioneered Oakland's first equity-owned consumption lounge and is deeply committed to social equity programs that support entrepreneurs affected by prior cannabis criminalization.
Andy Ruff
Andy Ruff is the co-founder and Chief Product & Tech officer at Numa, an AI communication platform purpose-built for automotive dealerships. A lifelong product builder who started writing software at 13, Ruff led the 100-person team that created the first Microsoft Outlook for Mac client, then scaled Location Labs to over 3 million monthly subscribers before its $220M acquisition. At Numa, he is building the AI stack that converts missed dealership calls into revenue - helping the $1.2 trillion retail automotive sector catch up to the digital age.
Clint Sharp
Clint Sharp is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cribl, a data infrastructure company valued at $3.5 billion that helps Fortune 500 enterprises route, filter, and control their telemetry data at scale. Before building Cribl, he spent five years as Senior Director of Product Management at Splunk, where he and his co-founders identified the problem that would become Cribl's founding mission: data volumes were exploding, budgets were not, and enterprises needed a vendor-agnostic way to manage what goes where. Under Sharp's leadership, Cribl grew from a 2017 idea to more than $200M in ARR, serving 43 Fortune 100 companies - all while he also briefly served as interim Chief Revenue Officer during a pivotal growth moment.
Dan Adler
Dan Adler is the CEO of Sourcegraph, the code intelligence platform powering search and AI across 54 billion lines of code for companies like Uber, Stripe, and Atlassian. A Rice computer science graduate and Stanford MBA, Adler joined Sourcegraph in 2016 as an early employee - writing infrastructure code, selling the first contracts, and building every major business function from scratch - before being elevated to CEO in December 2025 when co-founder Quinn Slack spun out Amp Inc. He has shepherded the company from zero revenue to $50M ARR and a $2.6B valuation, and believes agentic AI will only amplify the need for enterprise-grade code context.
Diana Frappier
Diana Frappier is the co-founder of Promise, an Oakland-based AI-powered government payment platform that helps municipalities and utilities distribute relief, recover revenue, and automate eligibility checks at scale. A UC Hastings-trained lawyer turned social entrepreneur, she co-founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights with Van Jones in 1996, helped launch the first Green Jobs Corps in Oakland, and then pivoted to fintech after years running operations at Green For All and Honor. At Promise, she and CEO Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins have raised over $48M and built a platform that has distributed $150M+ in government relief to hundreds of thousands of residents.
Edith Harbaugh
Edith Harbaugh is the CEO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly, the leading feature management platform trusted by over 5,500 organizations including 25% of Fortune 500 companies. She helped pioneer the feature flag category in 2014, scaling the company to $100M ARR, raising over $330M in venture capital, and building infrastructure that evaluates 45 trillion feature flags daily. A Harvey Mudd engineering alumna, patent holder, ultramarathoner, and co-host of the 'To Be Continuous' podcast, Harbaugh returned as CEO in 2025 to lead LaunchDarkly into the generative AI era.
Eric Faurot
Eric Faurot is the long-serving CEO of Trellis Group (formerly GreenBiz Group), a B2B media company headquartered in Oakland, California that runs flagship sustainability conferences including VERGE, BLOOM, GreenFin, and Circularity. Over 14 years at the helm, he built GreenBiz into a leading platform for sustainability professionals - combining editorial media, peer networks, and live events - before transitioning to a Growth Leader role in July 2024 when Hana Kajimura succeeded him as CEO. His career traces an arc from tech media event production (COMDEX, INTEROP, Black Hat) to climate and sustainability, making him a rare figure who bridged Silicon Valley-era conference culture with the emerging sustainability economy.
Garrett Dodge
Garrett Dodge is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rockbot, the business media platform that powers music, TV, digital signage, and advertising for nearly 50,000 brick-and-mortar locations across North America. Founded in 2010, Rockbot has grown into a $9.2M revenue company serving major brands including Planet Fitness, Walmart, Shake Shack, and JetBlue, backed by Google Ventures, Universal Music Group, and others. Dodge holds a B.A. from Middlebury College and an MBA from MIT Sloan, and previously helped build Caesars Entertainment's Innovation Team before channeling that experience into reimagining how physical spaces use media to engage customers.
Krzysztof Marzec
Krzysztof Marzec is Co-Founder of Trove, the branded recommerce platform powering more than 75% of the U.S. branded resale market. Originally founded as Yerdle in 2012 and rebranded to Trove in 2016, the company has raised over $153 million in funding and serves clients including Patagonia, Levi's, Lululemon, Canada Goose, and Carhartt. With a background spanning commodity futures trading at Geneva Trading USA and early-career roles at Northern Trust and Morningstar, Marzec brings a rare blend of financial markets discipline and entrepreneurial technology vision to the fast-growing recommerce sector.
Nick Talken
Nick Talken is the Co-Founder and CEO of Albert Invent, an Oakland-based AI platform that is transforming how chemists and materials scientists do research and development. A chemical engineer by training who learned to code, Talken spent years inside Henkel's global R&D organization before spinning out Albert Invent in 2022 with a team of co-founders who built the product from within. The company's platform - used by over 3,000 scientists across 142+ labs in 30+ countries at companies like Kenvue, Henkel, and Chemours - has raised over $52 million from top-tier investors including Coatue, Index Ventures, TCV, and J.P. Morgan Private Capital.