Emilė Radytė is a Harvard- and Oxford-trained neuroscientist and the co-founder and CEO of Samphire Neuroscience, a London-based neurotech company building drug-free, hormone-free wearable devices for menstrual health. Her flagship product, Nettle, is a head-worn device using non-invasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to target the neurological drivers of menstrual pain and mood symptoms. Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare list in 2024, she came up through emergency medicine at Harvard and a PhD in psychiatry and engineering at Oxford, and reframes conditions like PMS and PMDD as questions of brain circuitry rather than hormones alone.
J. Eduardo Rame is a Philadelphia cardiologist who treats the sickest hearts in medicine - patients in the final stage of heart failure who depend on pumps, transplants and the chance their own muscle can be coaxed back to life. As the Louis R. Dinon MD Professor and enterprise chief of Advanced Cardiac and Pulmonary Vascular Disease at Jefferson Health, he runs an integrated division built around recovery rather than replacement. Yale-trained in biophysics, Oxford-trained in health economics and Harvard-trained in medicine, he spent a decade founding Penn's mechanical circulatory support program before bringing that work to Jefferson. His research on left ventricular assist devices, including the landmark MOMENTUM 3 trial, has been cited more than 12,000 times.
Jenny von Podewils is the co-CEO and co-founder of Leapsome, the people enablement platform she launched in Berlin in 2016 with Kajetan von Armansperg. After bootstrapping the company to roughly $10 million in annual recurring revenue, the pair raised a $60 million Series A in March 2022 led by Insight Partners - their first outside money in six years. Trained at St. Gallen, Oxford, and Singularity University, she relocated from Berlin to New York in early 2023 to scale Leapsome's U.S. business, and was named Female Founder of the Year at the 2023 German Startup Awards.
Johannes Jaeckle is the co-founder and CEO of Heron Data, a New York fintech that uses large language models to automate document-heavy workflows in financial services. Heron reads emails, classifies submissions, extracts data, and syncs it into CRMs and loan platforms for more than 150 customers - from small lenders to FDIC-insured banks - processing over 350,000 documents a week. Jaeckle started building with LLMs in 2020, two years before ChatGPT went public, after a fintech operating career that included running the remittance company Taptap Send and serving as UK Managing Director of Segovia Technology. In July 2025 Heron raised a $16.6M Series A led by Insight Partners.
Larry Berger is the co-founder and CEO of Amplify, the Brooklyn-based education company he started in 2000 as Wireless Generation. A Yale-trained English major, Rhodes Scholar, and former White House Fellow at NASA, he built mobile assessment tools that put data in teachers' hands, then steered the company through a $360M News Corp acquisition and a 2015 spinout backed by Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective. Today Amplify's curricula reach millions of students across all 50 states. Berger is also a published poet and the rare edtech CEO who wrote a public 'confession' questioning the hype around the very personalized-learning future he once championed.
Luca Springer is the co-founder and CEO of Numen (formerly Cleancard), a San Francisco synthetic-biology company building rapid at-home diagnostic tests that read biomarkers from a urine sample in about 30 minutes. A 2016 German Rhodes Scholar who once planned a career in European politics, he traded the policy track for the lab bench, pairing degrees in computer science and global governance from Oxford with a dual BA from Columbia and Sciences Po. He started the company in 2021 with fellow Rhodes Scholar Thomas Carroll, went through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch, and has raised roughly $5.1M to make lab-grade screening as simple as a pregnancy test.
Neha Banerjee is a CEO Associate at Titanbay, the London-based private markets infrastructure platform, where she works alongside leadership at one of Europe's fastest-growing wealthtech companies. An Oxford mathematics and statistics graduate, she came up through operations consulting at Newton Europe, delivering data-driven change across retail, FMCG, aerospace and public services. As President of Raise Oxford she led a team of 65-plus students in a charity movement that has raised over £280k for the Against Malaria Foundation.
Paul Bennett is the co-founder and CEO of PerchPeek, a London-based, AI-powered relocation platform that helps companies move employees across borders. He started his first venture at 17 selling hand sanitiser outside supermarkets, studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, then spent three years at Amazon launching its Treasure Trucks in the UK before founding PerchPeek in 2018. What began as a 'Tinder for renting' property app pivoted during the 2020 pandemic into an end-to-end relocation service now operating in 150-plus countries, backed by roughly $17-18m in funding.
Phil Chamberlain is the co-founder, president and CEO of Neomorph, a San Diego biotech building molecular glue degraders to drug proteins long written off as untouchable. An Oxford-trained structural biologist, he spent a decade at Celgene and Bristol Myers Squibb decoding how thalidomide works at the atomic level, then turned that science into a company that has signed partnerships with AbbVie, Biogen and Novo Nordisk worth billions and pushed its lead degrader into the clinic.
Reza Javan is the CEO and co-founder of Telescope, a London-based AI prospecting platform that automates B2B outbound across email and LinkedIn. Before he sold software to salespeople, he was Dr. Reza Rezaei Javan, an Oxford DPhil microbiologist who sequenced thousands of pneumococcal genomes and discovered new families of antimicrobial peptides. He swapped the lab bench for a startup at Entrepreneur First's LD17 cohort, where Telescope was born in 2021. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Soma Capital and Entrepreneur First.
Richard Law is the Chief Business Officer of HAYA Therapeutics, the Lausanne- and San Diego-based biotech decoding the 'dark genome' to build RNA-guided medicines that reprogram disease-driving cell states. A computational chemist turned dealmaker with a Oxford PhD in molecular biophysics and an Imperial MBA, he spent over a decade at Evotec, then steered Exscientia through its 2021 Nasdaq IPO, marquee pharma partnerships, and 2024 merger with Recursion before joining HAYA in March 2025 to drive its partnering strategy and growth.
Ryan Janssen is the Co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic, a New York-based AI-powered business intelligence platform that lets non-technical users query data in plain English. A former McKinsey consultant and 6-year venture capital investor with advanced degrees from Harvard and Oxford, Ryan co-founded Zenlytic in 2020 alongside CTO Paul Blankley after spotting a gap: companies had modern data infrastructure but no accessible way to use it. Zenlytic has raised $15.4M including a $9M Series A in 2024 led by M13, and its AI analyst Zoe can now onboard itself autonomously to any data warehouse.
Yasir Al-Wakeel is a physician turned biotech operator who in September 2025 became CEO of Vesalius Therapeutics and a CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering. Trained as a doctor at Oxford with a theology degree from Cambridge, he spent a decade structuring more than $30 billion in life-science deals before running finance and strategy at companies like Merrimack, Neon Therapeutics and Kronos Bio. At Vesalius he is betting that many common diseases are actually clusters of genetically distinct conditions waiting to be redefined.
Jamie Beaton is the New Zealand-born co-founder and CEO of Crimson Education, the global university-admissions consultancy he started at 18 from a Harvard dorm room. After getting into all 25 elite universities he applied to, he built Crimson into a roughly billion-dollar company spanning 25+ countries, while personally collecting degrees from Harvard, Stanford, Yale Law, Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar) and more. He is the author of the bestselling admissions guide ACCEPTED!
Roxanne Bras Petraeus is the co-founder and CEO of Ethena, a New York compliance-training startup that turns the most ignored hour at work, the annual harassment course, into something people actually finish. A Rhodes Scholar, Harvard ROTC graduate, and U.S. Army combat veteran who deployed to Afghanistan before consulting at McKinsey, she launched Ethena in 2019 with engineer Anne Solmssen and has raised roughly $50 million, including a $30 million Series B in 2022, to make compliance modern, funny, and forgiving rather than fear-based.
Natalie Gibralter is a New York-based product executive currently serving as VP of Product, AI Innovation for Microsoft Experience and Devices. She built her reputation as the first Product Manager at Squarespace, scaling the company's commerce platform through a decade of 10x growth to IPO. Before tech, she founded TrailTalks, a nonprofit bridging young Israeli backpackers with international peers, and helped launch KIND's social mission. An Oxford-trained philosopher turned product leader, she was named to Crain's New York Business 40 Under 40 in 2022 and is known for building empowered, outcome-focused teams at the intersection of people and technology.
David Hsu is the founder and CEO of Retool, a San Francisco-based developer tools company that lets engineers build internal software through a drag-and-drop interface. He founded Retool in 2017 at age 25 after pivoting from a failed fintech startup (Cashew/Oatpay) where he kept having to build internal tools from scratch. A Computer Science and Philosophy graduate from Oxford, Hsu grew Retool to $2M ARR before public launch, achieved a $3.2B valuation by 2022 with $140M in total funding from Sequoia Capital and notable angels including the Stripe founders, and now serves over 10,000 companies including Amazon, Netflix, OpenAI, and the US Army.
Vadim Ogievetsky is the Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer of Imply, the commercial company behind Apache Druid - the real-time analytics database powering data infrastructure at Netflix, Salesforce, Reddit, and 150+ enterprises. One of the original four co-authors of Apache Druid (launched 2011), he also co-created D3.js at Stanford's Visualization Group - the JavaScript charting library that became the foundation of modern data visualization on the web. Before Imply, he was UI Lead at Metamarkets (acquired by Snap). He built Plywood and Pivot, open-source tools for querying and exploring Druid data, and created KoalasToTheMax, a beloved interactive D3 visualization. Imply raised $215M total and reached unicorn status with a $100M Series D in May 2022.
Yigit Ihlamur is the co-founder and General Partner of Vela Partners, an AI-native quantitative venture capital firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. A former Google Senior Program Manager and Oxford-trained AI researcher, he has pioneered the concept of 'Ventech' — using proprietary AI systems to evaluate and fund seed-stage AI founders at speed. Vela Partners issues $100K–$500K checks with commitments in 2–7 days, has backed 40+ AI startups, and earned a NeurIPS 2025 Best Poster award for its startup success forecasting research. Raised in Turkey by an entrepreneur father and mathematician mother, Yigit started coding at age four and competed as a top-10 national chess player before bringing that same obsessive discipline to venture capital.
Dr. Pavan K. Cheruvu is the President and CEO of Bitterroot Bio, a Palo Alto-based biotech pioneering the field of cardio-immunology — the intersection of the immune system and cardiovascular disease. A Rhodes Scholar, board-certified cardiologist, and physician-scientist who trained at Duke, Oxford, Harvard/MIT, Johns Hopkins, and UCSF, Cheruvu is guiding Bitterroot Bio's lead program BRB-002 — a first-in-class CD47-targeting therapy for atherosclerosis — through clinical development after a landmark $145M Series A in 2023 and positive Phase 1 results in 2025.
Harj Taggar is a Managing Partner at Y Combinator and serial founder who went from Oxford law to Silicon Valley startup culture. He co-founded Auctomatic with the Collison brothers (Patrick and John, later of Stripe fame) in 2007, sold it for $5M in under a year, then became YC's first non-founder partner in 2010. He co-founded Initialized Capital with Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian, co-founded technical hiring platform Triplebyte in 2015 (acquired by Karat in 2023), and returned to YC in 2020 as a Group Partner before becoming Managing Partner. He has advised over 1,000 companies across 17 YC batches and worked with more than 20 unicorns including Coinbase, Instacart, and Gusto.
Erin Price-Wright is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads the firm's American Dynamism practice alongside Katherine Boyle. Focused on AI for the physical world, she backs early-stage companies in robotics, energy, defense, manufacturing, and critical minerals. A Stanford and Oxford-trained mathematician who grew up on a reservation in Arizona, she spent most of her pre-investing career at Palantir - starting as a Forward Deployed Engineer and rising to Head of Product for its data analytics platform - before becoming a partner at Index Ventures. She joined a16z in April 2024 to focus on the energy and industrial AI side of America's technological renaissance.
Sir Michael Moritz is a Welsh-born billionaire venture capitalist who spent nearly four decades at Sequoia Capital turning early bets on Google, Yahoo, PayPal, YouTube, Stripe, and Klarna into some of the greatest returns in VC history. A former Time journalist who wrote one of the first books on Apple, he arrived at Sequoia in 1986 and never looked back - topping the Forbes Midas List in 2006 and 2007. Knighted in 2013, he departed Sequoia in July 2023 and remains chairman of Klarna. His Crankstart Foundation has donated hundreds of millions to Oxford, the National Gallery, the ACLU, and the Booker Prize. In 2026, the son of Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany applied for German citizenship - protesting the rise of antisemitism in Britain.
Pete Flint is a British-born serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded Trulia, the real estate search platform that sold to Zillow for $3.5 billion in 2015. Before that, he was part of the founding team at lastminute.com, which IPO'd in London and sold for $1.1 billion. He is now General Partner at NFX, a seed-stage VC firm built around the thesis that network effects drive 70% of all technology value creation. He was awarded an OBE in 2021 for services to entrepreneurship.
Kevin Hartz is a Silicon Valley serial founder and venture investor who co-founded Eventbrite (NYSE: EB) and Xoom (acquired by PayPal for $1.1B), made seed-stage bets on PayPal, Airbnb, Uber, Pinterest, Palantir, Square, Stripe, and Slack, and now runs A* Capital — a $300M early-stage fund that bets heavily on teenage founders. His career spans 30+ years of building and backing transformative tech companies from Berkeley to the world stage.
Matt Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, is a British science writer, journalist, and hereditary peer whose books - from Genome to The Rational Optimist to How Innovation Works - have sold nearly two million copies in 31 languages. A zoologist by training (Oxford DPhil on pheasant mating systems), he argues that human progress is driven by the bottom-up exchange of ideas rather than top-down planning. Co-founder of the Rational Optimist Society newsletter, he writes a weekly column for The Times and is known for being simultaneously Britain's most prominent optimist about civilization and the chairman who presided over Northern Rock's catastrophic 2007 bank run.
Azeem Azhar is the founder of Exponential View, a weekly newsletter and podcast read by 150,000+ subscribers that maps the collision of technology and society. A former Guardian and Economist journalist who helped launch BBC Online in the 1990s, he went on to build and sell PeerIndex (acquired by Brandwatch in 2014), write the Financial Times Best Book of the Year 'The Exponential Age' (2021), and host a Bloomberg Originals series. He is an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, a Visiting Fellow at Oxford's Martin School, and a Digital Fellow at Stanford's Digital Economy Lab - spending his time translating the logic of exponential technologies for executives, policymakers, and curious minds worldwide.
Claire Diaz-Ortiz is a venture capitalist, angel investor, bestselling author of 10 books, executive coach, and former Twitter Corporate Social Innovation Director - the early employee Wired dubbed 'The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter.' A Stanford and Oxford-educated polymath who co-founded a nonprofit in Kenya, live-tweeted the birth of her child, holds the prized @claire Twitter handle, and now runs The Angel Collective to fund female founders across Latin America while coaching Fortune 500 executives through 100 Coaches Agency.
Mehdi Hasan is a British-American journalist, broadcaster, and media entrepreneur best known as the founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Zeteo - an independent digital news company he launched in 2024 after departing MSNBC. A relentless interviewer and master debater who studied PPE at Oxford, Hasan has built a formidable track record at Al Jazeera, The Intercept, and MSNBC before going independent. His 2023 book 'Win Every Argument' became a New York Times bestseller, and Zeteo has rapidly grown to over 1.8 million YouTube subscribers and 450,000 newsletter subscribers within its first year.