Donny Salazar is the founder and CEO of MasonHub, a software-led fulfillment and logistics company he started in 2018 to give fast-scaling beauty, wellness, and fashion brands the kind of order management and warehousing technology he wished he had earlier in his career. Before MasonHub he spent roughly two decades inside high-growth retail operations - COO of sneaker marketplace Flight Club, SVP of Operations at jewelry brand Chloe+Isabel, and a four-year run at Gilt Groupe where his supply-chain team helped scale revenue from $10M to over $500M. A Stanford MBA who once ran marketing at Revlon, Salazar built MasonHub around a headless, API-driven architecture and a bicoastal warehouse footprint, raising seed funding led by Canvas Ventures.
Alloy.ai is a San Francisco-based software company that gives consumer goods brands a real-time, end-to-end view of demand and inventory across every retail and e-commerce channel. Its platform automatically ingests and harmonizes point-of-sale, inventory, and ERP data from hundreds of trading partners, then layers analytics, forecasting, and AI agents on top so brands can sense demand shifts, catch stockouts and phantom inventory, and respond in seconds rather than days. Customers like Crayola, BIC, Valvoline, Melissa & Doug, and Anker use it to cut out-of-stocks and protect revenue with their retail partners.
Attentive is an AI-powered marketing platform that helps consumer brands talk to customers the way customers actually want to be reached - over text, email, RCS, and push. Founded in 2016 by Brian Long and Andrew Jones, the company pioneered compliant, personalized SMS marketing and now serves more than 8,000 brands, powering tens of billions of dollars in customer revenue and crossing $500M in annual recurring revenue in 2024.
Crstl is a San Francisco-based, AI-native EDI and agentic B2B commerce network that connects brands, retailers, and logistics providers from order to payment. Its platform replaces the legacy, error-prone world of electronic data interchange with no-code integrations and an always-on AI agent named Edison that processes purchase orders, generates ASNs and invoices, and keeps merchants compliant with big-box retailers like Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods - so direct-to-consumer brands can scale into wholesale, marketplaces, and omnichannel retail without an EDI team.
Sanity is a content platform that treats content as structured data rather than pages, giving developers an API-first backend (the real-time Content Lake), a query language (GROQ), a rich-text spec (Portable Text), and a fully customizable React editor (Sanity Studio). Founded in Norway in 2016, it now positions itself as the 'Content Operating System for the AI era,' powering web, mobile, and agentic applications for teams like Nike, Puma, Figma, Cloudflare and National Geographic.
Dipti Desai is the co-founder and CEO of Crstl, a San Francisco startup rebuilding B2B commerce around the decades-old EDI standard that quietly governs how brands sell to retailers. A Virginia Tech electrical engineer and Uber data-platform veteran, she stumbled into the problem while volunteering to sell PPE online during the pandemic and discovering that the plumbing of wholesale was stuck in the 1980s. She has raised over $10 million from Target, Shopify Ventures, Cohen Circle, and Village Global to make EDI usable by people who are not developers.
Israel L'Heureux is the founder and CEO of Touchpoint Restaurant Solutions (touchpoint.io), a bootstrapped Palo Alto company that unifies the messy technology stacks of large quick-service restaurant chains under one platform built around OmniFusion and OmniLoyalty. Before restaurants, he co-founded Redline Networks, a high-performance application-acceleration company acquired by Juniper Networks in 2005 for roughly $132 million. A Stanford-trained product design engineer, he has moved from kicking off BMW's X5 program to building load balancers used by hundreds of enterprises to figuring out why a drive-thru line moves slowly.
Touchpoint Restaurant Solutions (touchpoint.io) is a Palo Alto-based restaurant technology company that bundles point of sale, kitchen display, drive-thru line-busting, online ordering, loyalty, and AI-driven marketing into one unified platform branded OmniFusion and OmniLoyalty. Founded by Stanford-trained entrepreneurs led by CEO Israel L'Heureux, the company targets enterprise quick-service and pizza chains that want to consolidate a sprawling tech stack, own their guest data, and run loyalty programs that actually get used - it claims chain-wide participation rates of 80-90% versus a single-digit industry norm.
WTHN is a modern wellness brand rooted in Traditional Chinese Medicine, built to make acupuncture, cupping, herbal remedies and acupressure tools accessible to everyday people. Founded in New York in 2019 by Michelle Larivee and Dr. Shari Auth, it pairs design-forward studios across NYC with an at-home product line sold through 200+ retailers and e-commerce, aiming to take centuries-old healing out of the back room and into modern life.
Monica Belsito is the CEO of Function of Beauty, the made-to-order personal care company that turns an online quiz into a custom bottle of shampoo. She took the top job in July 2025 after a career spent building consumer brands that get acquired: founding CMO at feminine-care brand LOLA, CMO at hummus maker Sabra (bought by PepsiCo in 2024), and senior brand manager at Dollar Shave Club before its $1 billion sale to Unilever. A Georgetown grad and Harvard MBA who started in crisis PR and Colgate's management program, she now steers Function of Beauty's push from DTC into shelves at Target, Sephora, Walmart, and Amazon.
Tiffin is the founder and CEO of Aisle, a New York retail growth platform that turns real-world shopping into measurable in-store sales: a customer photographs a receipt, texts it in, and gets Venmo'd within minutes. He built the whole thing through text because, in his words, no one has room on their iPhone for another app. Before Aisle he talked his way into an internship at Super Coffee in 2017, dropped out of school, slept on the founders' couch, and helped scale the brand from $700K to $5M in a year - then realized brands had no idea who was buying them off the shelf. Aisle, now trusted by hundreds of CPG brands, is his answer to that blind spot.
Contentful is an API-first, cloud-native content platform - the company that popularized the 'headless CMS.' Founded in Berlin in 2013, it separates content from presentation so teams can store structured content once and deliver it anywhere: websites, mobile apps, kiosks, smart watches, or AI agents. It serves more than 4,800 brands, including roughly 30% of the Fortune 500, and in June 2026 entered an agreement to be acquired by Salesforce to power the content layer behind Agentforce.
Flywheel is a Baltimore-born digital commerce company that helps brands grow on Amazon, Walmart, Instacart and 400-plus other online marketplaces. Born in 2014 as one of the first specialists in the messy mechanics of selling through Amazon, it pairs cloud software (the Flywheel Commerce Cloud) with managed services across retail media, retail operations and market intelligence. After being bought by Ascential and then by Omnicom for roughly $835 million in 2024, Flywheel now serves more than 4,500 brands - including over half of 2022's top 100 publicly listed CPG companies - with about 2,600 colleagues across the Americas, Europe, APAC and China.
MoEngage is an insights-led customer engagement platform that helps consumer brands unify customer data, surface AI-driven insights, and orchestrate personalized cross-channel campaigns across push, email, SMS, in-app, web, and WhatsApp. Used by more than 1,350 global brands, it combines analytics, segmentation, and journey automation in a single dashboard powered by its Sherpa and Merlin AI engines.
Amanda Richman is VP of Global Media Sales at Microsoft Advertising, leading a 700+ person omnichannel sales team from New York. A 30-year veteran of media and advertising, she has run agencies including Wavemaker US and Mindshare North America, winning Adweek's U.S. Media Agency of the Year at Wavemaker in 2020. She joined Microsoft in March 2024 to help brands navigate the convergence of generative AI, search, and connected TV advertising.
Janell Fischer is VP of Global Retail Marketing and Customer Experience at Google, where she has spent over a decade architecting how the world's most valuable tech company shows up in physical spaces. She pioneered Google Shops — the immersive store-within-a-store concept launched inside Best Buy Canada in 2016 — and has since expanded Google's retail footprint through partnerships with b8ta and other retailers. Before Google, she held Director-level retail marketing roles at Apple and Sony Electronics, making her one of the few executives who has shaped the physical retail presence of all three consumer electronics giants.
Julie Poutre is Vice President of Americas Field Marketing at Twilio, the cloud communications platform behind a significant portion of the world's digital interactions. Based in San Francisco, she leads the regional field marketing operation that drives pipeline and revenue across the Americas. Over nearly a decade at Twilio, she has risen from Senior Manager through Director and Senior Director roles to her current VP position, building one of the most sophisticated field marketing engines in enterprise SaaS. Before Twilio, she spent nearly a decade at Infoblox — moving from global events coordinator to Sr. Channel Programs Manager — where she honed the craft of building partner programs and generating qualified sales leads at scale.
Nicholas Kontopoulos is the Vice President of Marketing for Asia Pacific & Japan at Twilio, the cloud communications platform. Based in Singapore, he brings over 30 years of marketing and business leadership experience across APAC, with prior senior roles at Adobe (DX), SAP, Magento, and Capita. A recognized thought leader in customer experience and AI-driven marketing, he is a frequent speaker, published author, and LinkedIn Power Profile holder known for challenging marketing orthodoxy across the region.
Andy Ballard is the CEO and co-founder of Wiser Solutions, Inc., the San Mateo-based omnichannel retail intelligence platform he built through the 2017 merger of Quad Analytix and Mobee. A Harvard undergrad and Stanford MBA, Ballard spent nearly a decade at Hellman & Friedman where he sat on the boards of DoubleClick, Getty Images, Internet Brands, and Catalina Marketing before launching Quad Analytix in 2012. Today he leads a 510-person company that tracks billions of online and in-store data points for over 750 global brands and retailers, while also serving on the boards of Domino's Pizza and Etsy, and running Figtree Partners, his software-focused investment firm.
Ciaran Long is the CEO of a.k.a. Brands Holding Corp. (NYSE: AKA), a portfolio of next-generation fashion brands targeting Gen Z and millennial consumers. A qualified Irish Chartered Accountant with 25-plus years of financial and strategic leadership, Long joined a.k.a. Brands as CFO in 2021, stepped into an interim CEO role in 2023, and was named permanent CEO in January 2025. Under his leadership the company returned to net sales growth with three consecutive quarters of double-digit U.S. sales expansion, repositioning the portfolio around a demand-driven 'test-and-learn' merchandising model and a major bet on physical retail expansion. He previously served as CFO of Samsclub.com and held senior roles across Walmart's e-commerce division, and earlier in his career he co-founded CleanGrow, a water quality sensor technology startup.
Deren Baker is the CEO of Flywheel Ventures, the innovation arm of Flywheel Commerce Network - now part of Omnicom Group after a landmark $835 million acquisition in 2023. A serial operator with deep roots in digital commerce analytics, Baker has led transformative companies including Jumpshot (which tracked 160 billion monthly clicks) and Edge by Ascential. He is a recognized thought leader in ecommerce strategy, retail media, and data-driven advertising, with bylines in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Entrepreneur Magazine.
Assembled is a San Francisco-based software company building the workforce management and AI agent platform for modern customer support teams. Founded in 2018 by three Stripe veterans, it now helps companies like Stripe, Robinhood, GoFundMe, Etsy, and Intercom forecast demand, schedule agents, and resolve a growing share of tickets with AI across chat, voice, and email.
Front is a customer service platform that unifies email, chat, SMS, social and voice into one collaborative workspace. It looks like an inbox, behaves like a help desk, and adds AI on top so teams can answer faster without losing the human voice their customers hired them for.
Gorgias is a conversational AI and helpdesk platform built for ecommerce brands. It unifies email, chat, SMS, voice and social into one inbox, then layers an AI Agent that resolves a majority of tickets automatically while turning support into a revenue channel.
Hightouch is a San Francisco-based B2B SaaS company that pioneered Reverse ETL and built the leading Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP). Founded in 2018 by Tejas Manohar, Josh Curl, and Kashish Gupta - all alumni of Segment - Hightouch lets companies activate their warehouse data directly into 250+ business tools like Salesforce, Braze, and Google Ads without copying data to a separate CDP. Since launching AI Decisioning in 2024, Hightouch has evolved into an agentic marketing platform, helping brands like Warner Music Group, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify orchestrate personalized customer journeys using live warehouse data. The company reached $100M ARR and a $2.75B valuation in April 2026, backed by Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital Ventures, and Sapphire Ventures.
Advith Chelikani is the co-founder and CTO of Pylon, an AI-powered B2B customer support platform based in San Francisco. A Caltech computer science graduate and former Samsara engineer, Advith co-founded Pylon in November 2022 alongside Marty Kausas and Robert Eng. In under three years, the company raised $51.2M in total funding - including a $17M Series A from a16z in 2024 and a $31M Series B in 2025 - scaled to 750+ customers, and grew revenue 5x year-over-year for two consecutive years. Pylon replaces legacy platforms like Zendesk by meeting enterprise support teams where their customers already are: Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord.
Dustin Yoder is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sureify, a San Jose-based insurtech SaaS company that builds a low-code, cloud-native platform helping life insurance and annuity carriers digitize their sales, service, and engagement operations. With roots in the insurance industry through his family's Silicon Valley brokerage, Yoder entered insurtech in 2012, making him one of the earliest pioneers in the space. Under his leadership, Sureify has grown to serve marquee carriers including State Farm, Allstate, Nationwide, and Principal, reaching $38.9M in annual revenue by 2024 after raising $25M+ in total funding including a $15M Series C from Aspen Capital Group in 2021.
Lars Birkholm Petersen is the CEO and co-founder of Uniform, the composable Digital Experience Platform (DXP) he built to solve the age-old tension between marketers and developers. Born in Denmark, Lars spent two decades in the digital experience trenches - running a digital agency for 8 years (later acquired by Visma), then nearly a decade at Sitecore where he created the Sitecore Business Optimization Strategies (SBOS) team - before co-founding Uniform in 2019. The company raised a $28M Series A led by Insight Partners in December 2021, was named a Gartner Visionary in 2025, and counts Procter & Gamble, Triumph Motorcycles, and Cirque du Soleil among its clients. Lars is also co-author of the Wiley business book 'Connect: How to Use Data and Experience Marketing to Create Lifetime Customers' (2014).
Marty Kausas is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pylon, the AI-native B2B customer support platform he built after leaving Airbnb and spending 18 months failing at other ideas. Founded in November 2022 alongside Advith Chelikani and Robert Eng, Pylon has raised $51 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator - reaching 1,500+ customers and positioning itself as the definitive alternative to Zendesk for complex, multi-stakeholder B2B environments. Kausas is known for his systematic founder-led sales approach, LinkedIn content dominance, and the bold ambition to build a $10 billion+ public company.
Nehal Shaikh is the Chief Executive Officer (India) at Front, the customer operations platform headquartered in San Francisco. Front helps more than 8,000 companies manage customer communication across email, SMS, live chat, and other channels through shared inboxes, AI-powered automation, and real-time analytics. Backed by $338M in total funding and valued at $1.7B since its 2022 Series D, Front crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue in 2025. Based in Maharashtra, India, Shaikh leads Front's India operations as the company scales its AI-driven customer service platform globally.