BookNook is a K-8 high-impact tutoring company that pairs a synchronous virtual classroom with research-based reading and math curriculum, delivered by vetted tutors to schools and districts across the United States. Its platform earned an ESSA Tier 1 evidence rating and has served more than 250,000 students.
Course Hero is an online learning platform that gives students access to crowd-sourced study materials, AI-powered explanations, expert tutors and practice problems. Founded in 2006 at Cornell, it grew into an edtech unicorn and now anchors Learneo, the parent company that also owns QuillBot, CliffsNotes, Symbolab, LitCharts, Scribbr and LanguageTool.
Daniel Villegas is Co-Founder and COO of Domestika, the world's fastest-growing online learning community for creative professionals. Starting from a scrappy Spanish-language forum in 2002, Daniel helped steer Domestika into a $1.3 billion unicorn with over 10 million members worldwide. Based in New York, he brings over two decades of experience across e-commerce, digital marketing, SEO, and startup operations — including earlier ventures as co-founder of Webpop and founder of Infohostal.com — making him one of the key architects of a platform that has trained millions of designers, illustrators, photographers, and creators globally.
Julio G. Cotorruelo is the co-founder and CEO of Domestika, the global online learning community for creative professionals. Starting in 2002 as a modest Spanish-language forum for designers in Madrid, Domestika grew under his leadership into a unicorn valued at $1.3 billion, with over 8 million members, 2,000+ courses, and a presence in six languages. A notoriously press-shy entrepreneur, Cotorruelo built one of the world's largest creative education platforms by championing affordable, pay-per-course learning and the belief that creativity is best learned through doing - not just reading.
Kaushik Arakalgud is a technology entrepreneur and builder based in Bengaluru, India, currently working in AI at Domestika - the global creative learning platform that reached unicorn status with a $1.3B valuation in 2022. As Co-Founder and CTO of Aimwiser, an AI and neuroscience-powered people and wellness intelligence SaaS platform, he brings together his passion for education technology, artificial intelligence, and human development. Trained as a computer science engineer at PES College of Engineering, Kaushik has spent his career at the intersection of technology and meaningful societal impact.
Sue Khim is the CEO and co-founder of Brilliant.org, an interactive STEM learning platform serving over 10 million users in 150+ countries. Born in South Korea and raised in Chicago, she studied mathematics at the University of Chicago before leaving to found Alltuition, a student financial aid startup, in 2009. That team pivoted in 2012 to build Brilliant, which has since raised over $90 million in venture funding and become one of the most widely used platforms for self-paced math and science education. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education and recognized by Apple as an AAPI leader in tech, Khim is focused on replacing rote memorization with genuine conceptual understanding at global scale.
Elizabeth Douglas is the CEO of wikiHow, the world's leading how-to platform visited by more than 150 million people monthly across 230 countries. A Stanford-trained computer scientist and Stanford MBA, she joined wikiHow in 2009 as COO and rose to CEO, overseeing more than 1,500% growth in traffic. Under her leadership, wikiHow has become a trusted, judgment-free resource with 100,000+ guides in English and 300,000+ across 18+ languages, earning a reputation as one of the nicest places on the internet.
Jim Garrison is the Founder and President of Ubiquity University, a next-generation global learning platform blending academic rigor with consciousness development, social innovation, and transformative education. Born in 1951 in Szechuan Province, China, to Baptist missionary parents, Garrison holds a PhD in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge and has spent five decades at the intersection of education, diplomacy, and civilizational transformation - co-founding the Gorbachev Foundation/USA with Mikhail Gorbachev after the Cold War, launching the State of the World Forum, and more recently convening Humanity Rising, a global summit initiative launched in 2020 that has engaged hundreds of thousands of activists worldwide.
Gagan Biyani is a three-time startup founder and serial entrepreneur best known for co-founding Udemy (now a multi-billion dollar public edtech company) and Maven, a cohort-based online learning platform backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Born and raised in Fremont, California, Biyani studied Economics at UC Berkeley before co-founding Udemy in 2009, which he built to 400,000 students before being fired as president in 2012. He then founded Sprig, a food-delivery startup that raised $57M before shutting down in 2017. He co-founded Maven in 2020 with Wes Kao and Shreyans Bhansali, raising $30M to build the leading platform for live cohort-based expert courses. Biyani is widely known for his radical transparency about startup failures, his viral 2020 Twitter thread about being fired from Udemy, and his philosophy that most startup ideas come from living normally rather than deliberate analysis.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a French neuroscientist, author, and entrepreneur who burned out at Google, taught herself to code, and built Ness Labs into a 100,000+ reader science-based learning community - all while completing a PhD at King's College London. Her 2025 book 'Tiny Experiments' (Penguin Random House) distills her philosophy: life is a series of experiments and you are the lead scientist. She is now a UKRI-funded postdoctoral researcher studying curiosity and ADHD at KCL, while publishing to 124,000+ Substack subscribers at Hypercurious.
Pooja Nath Sankar is an Indian-American tech entrepreneur best known as the founder and former CEO of Piazza, an online Q&A and collaborative learning platform used by millions of students across 1,500+ universities. Born in a rural village in northern India with no electricity, she became the first girl from her hometown to attend an IIT, went on to work at Facebook, and left pre-IPO stock options on the table to attend Stanford GSB and build Piazza. She stepped down as CEO in 2022 to focus on family and teaching.