Radiate Hospitality is a Palo Alto-based hotel and real-estate management company that develops, renovates, and operates a portfolio of boutique and branded hotels across the West Coast. Formerly known as BPR Properties, the firm runs 11 hotels with roughly 988 rooms - from the Autograph Collection Hi-Lo Hotel in Portland to the Crowne Plaza Cabana in Palo Alto - guided by a mission of 'passionately creating a sense of belonging.'
Akbar JM is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of BJIT Group, Bangladesh's largest IT consulting firm. He built BJIT from a 10-person startup in 2001 into a global technology company with 800+ engineers, offices across 8 countries, and clients including Google, Sony, Panasonic, and Qualcomm. Based in Palo Alto, CA, Akbar JM has bridged Bangladesh and Japan's technology ecosystems for over two decades, combining Japanese quality standards with Bangladeshi engineering talent to deliver software development, AI, IoT, and cloud services to Fortune 500 companies worldwide.
Arun Kumar Ramchandran - known as 'Rak' - is the Chief Executive Officer of QBurst, a global product development and consulting firm backed by Multiples Private Equity. Appointed in April 2025 following a $200M investment, Rak brings 25 years of leadership experience spanning Infosys, Virtusa, Capgemini, and Hexaware Technologies. An IIT Bombay and IIM Calcutta alumnus based in Palo Alto, he is driving QBurst's transformation into an AI-first engineering services company with his 'High AI-Q' framework - embedding generative and agentic AI into every layer of software delivery.
Perry Patel is President and CEO of Radiate Hospitality (formerly BPR Properties), the Palo Alto-based hotel management and development company his father founded with a single motel in 1973. Under Perry's leadership, the firm now operates a portfolio of branded and lifestyle hotels across the West Coast - from the Crowne Plaza Cabana in Palo Alto to the Hi-Lo Autograph Collection in Portland - with 500+ employees and a reputation for restoring historic properties.
Hourly is a Palo Alto-based fintech platform that combines payroll, workers' compensation insurance, and time tracking into a single mobile-first system built for small businesses with hourly workers. Its pay-as-you-go workers' comp model calculates premiums against actual wages in real time, eliminating year-end audits and helping employers avoid overpaying. Founded in 2018 by Tom Sagi, Shay Litvak, and Amir Faintuch, the company raised $39M+ and serves 500+ businesses across construction, manufacturing, transportation, and similar industries. In July 2025, Hourly was acquired by Israeli insurtech WeSure in a deal valued at approximately $168M.
Incognia is a location identity and fraud prevention company that uses device intelligence, location behavioral analytics, and AI to help platform businesses — from food delivery to financial services — detect fraud without compromising the user experience. By processing signals from GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth without capturing PII, Incognia identifies legitimate users from fraudsters across multiple devices with 99.999999% accuracy, a 0.0001% false-positive rate, and no friction for genuine users. Deployed on over 200 million smartphones and protecting nearly 1 billion devices, Incognia has become the go-to fraud layer for platforms like Grubhub, Delivery Hero, and Upwork.
Amit Jain is the Co-Founder and CEO of Luma AI, the Palo Alto-based AI company behind Dream Machine - a text-to-video platform with over 25 million users - and Ray 3, the world's first reasoning video model. Before founding Luma AI in 2021, he spent four years at Apple leading development of the Passthrough feature for Apple Vision Pro and integrating the first LiDAR sensors into iPhones. Under his leadership, Luma AI has raised over $1 billion in funding including a $900M Series C led by HUMAIN at a $4 billion valuation, and is building unified multimodal intelligence systems that blur the line between reasoning and reality synthesis.
Andre Ferraz is the co-founder and CEO of Incognia, a Palo Alto-based privacy-first location identity company that uses passive behavioral signals - where your phone goes, how it moves, what Wi-Fi networks it trusts - to verify users without passwords or biometric friction. Before Incognia, Ferraz co-founded In Loco Media in 2011 at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, building it into a company that mapped 6 million indoor venues and captured 250 billion location data points monthly, before selling it to Brazilian retail giant Magazine Luiza in 2020. With Incognia, he pivoted that location intelligence from advertising into fraud prevention, raising $46.5M total (including a $31M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners in 2024), deploying technology on over 200 million smartphones, and pioneering what he calls zero-factor authentication - security that works without the user doing anything at all.
Art Agrawal (full name Abhas 'Art' Agrawal) is a serial entrepreneur and Co-Founder & CEO of Jerry (jerry.ai), an AI-powered car ownership super app based in Palo Alto, California. A TechCrunch Disrupt 2012 winner with his prior startup YourMechanic, Art has spent over a decade attacking the friction-laden world of car ownership - from on-demand repairs to insurance comparison and auto loan refinancing. Jerry has raised $330M+, reached profitability in 2024, and serves over 4 million customers, saving them an average of $800/year on car insurance.
Dean Leitersdorf is the 27-year-old Co-Founder and CEO of Decart, an AI research lab building real-time world models and ultra-fast inference infrastructure. A Technion PhD graduate at 23 and veteran of Israel's elite Unit 8200, he co-founded Decart in late 2023 with Moshe Shalev. The company went from stealth to unicorn status in under a year, raising over $453M total including a $300M Series C in May 2026 backed by NVIDIA, Radical Ventures, Adobe, Toyota, and angel investors including Andrej Karpathy. Decart's products - DOS (inference stack), Lucy (real-time video transformation), and Oasis (the viral AI-generated Minecraft-like game) - position it as a vertically integrated AI company targeting a billion-user consumer app.
Ishaan Bhola is the Co-Founder of SuperAGI, a Palo Alto-based AI company building full-stack autonomous agent infrastructure and a next-generation AI-native CRM. A serial entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded six ventures across consumer apps, home decor e-commerce, fintech lending, account-based marketing, and now AGI infrastructure, Bhola has scaled teams to 200+ employees and built products used by millions. SuperAGI raised a $10M Series A led by WhatsApp founder Jan Koum's Newlands VC in March 2024, and has grown to $9.9M in revenue with an open-source platform boasting 15,200+ GitHub stars.
Jamie Hale is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ladder, the Palo Alto-based digital life insurance company that has issued over $42 billion in coverage and raised $194 million in venture funding. Motivated by losing his father at age 11 and experiencing firsthand the stabilizing power of a life insurance payout, Hale set out to strip the life insurance industry down to its essential truth: a pure, flexible term product that takes minutes to buy online, not weeks of paperwork. Ladder reached a $900 million valuation in its 2021 Series D and has tripled revenue year-over-year, making Hale one of the most prominent voices in insurtech.
Jeremy Suard is the Co-Founder and CEO of Exodigo, a Palo Alto-based deep tech company applying AI and multi-sensor fusion to solve one of infrastructure's oldest problems: accurately mapping what's underground before drilling through it. Born in France and raised partly in Israel, Suard served nearly eight years in Israeli Military Intelligence Unit 81, directing AI and signal processing R&D teams and becoming the most decorated technology major in the IDF. He co-founded Exodigo in 2021 with fellow IDF alumni Ido Gonen and Yogev Shifman, channeling classified sensor-fusion expertise into a commercial platform that scans the ground non-intrusively, locates 20-30% more utility lines than premium competitors, and has raised over $271 million in funding to date.
Marty Massih Sarim is the President of Sanas, a real-time speech AI platform that modulates accents and eliminates background noise for contact center agents globally. An Afghan refugee who came to the US in the early 1980s and started his career at 18 as a call center agent, Sarim brings over 25 years of BPO and contact center industry expertise to Sanas. He is also Co-Founder and General Partner at Carya Venture Partners, a $20M micro-fund focused on deep tech and enterprise AI, and founder of the Moe123 Scholarship Fund, which has awarded $125,000+ to high school seniors in the Minneapolis area.
Maxim (Max) Kholin is the co-founder and COO of Gero, a physics-powered longevity biotech company applying statistical physics and AI to crack the biology of aging. With roots in contract law, international business, and computational drug design, he bridges the gap between cutting-edge science and real-world commercialization. Gero - which he co-founded with physicist Peter Fedichev in 2015 - has pioneered the field of 'Gerophysics,' trained its models on 100M+ longitudinal medical records, and secured partnerships with Pfizer and Chugai Pharmaceutical worth up to $250M in milestones. Based across Singapore and Palo Alto, Kholin's mission is nothing less than transforming humans into a non-aging species.
Mukunda Srinivasagowda is a seasoned technologist and Co-Founder of SuperAGI, a Palo Alto-based AI company building a full-stack agentic intelligence platform. With over 13 years spanning Amazon, Zomato, and fintech unicorn Navi, he co-built SuperAGI from the ground up in 2023 alongside CEO Ishaan Bhola. The company's open-source autonomous agent framework earned 17,500+ GitHub stars, attracted a $10 million Series A led by Jan Koum's secretive Newlands VC, and spawned a suite of AI-native products including SuperSales, SuperMarketing, and SuperCoder - all targeting the shift from LLMs that generate content to agents that actually take action.
Naveen Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Birdeye, a Palo Alto-based AI-powered customer experience platform that serves over 100,000 businesses globally. Inspired by a personal struggle to find a quality surgeon for his mother at Stanford, Naveen and his brother Neeraj built Birdeye in 2012 to help businesses manage their online reputation and grow through customer feedback. Under his leadership, Birdeye crossed $100M ARR in 2023, raised over $93M in total funding, and pioneered what Naveen calls 'Experience Marketing' - the discipline of turning customer satisfaction into organic growth. A veteran of Yahoo and RingCentral, he brings deep product and operational expertise to one of SaaS's quietest success stories.
Navin Thadani is the Founder and CEO of Evinced, the leading AI-powered digital accessibility testing company based in Palo Alto, California. A serial entrepreneur with two prior successful exits (Qumranet to Red Hat and Ravello Systems to Oracle), he co-founded Evinced in 2018 with a mission to make the web and mobile apps accessible to the 1.3 billion people worldwide living with disabilities. Under his leadership, Evinced has raised $112 million across three funding rounds, built a 130-person team, and become the only pure technology play in the enterprise accessibility market, serving clients including five of the ten largest media companies in the US and UK, and financial institutions collectively managing $26 trillion in assets.
Nishant Nair is the Founder and CEO of RecVue, a Palo Alto-based enterprise revenue operating system that manages over $100 billion in revenue for global enterprises. With 20+ years navigating quote-to-cash complexity, he built RecVue to unify billing, revenue recognition (ASC 606/IFRS 15), and partner compensation on a single AI-powered platform—bridging the stubborn gap between CRM and ERP that legacy systems have never solved. Backed by $20.19M in funding including a $13.19M Series A led by Cota Capital, RecVue processes over 100 million transactions monthly for customers like Hertz, World Wide Technology, and Crown Castle.
Peter Fedichev is a theoretical physicist turned longevity entrepreneur who co-founded Gero, a biotech AI company applying physics-based generative AI models to crack the root causes of aging. A former top-2 cited Russian physicist under 35, he traded quantum gases for aging clocks, building a platform that predicted biological age from wearable data before it was fashionable, secured a Pfizer collaboration, and landed a potential $250M deal with Chugai Pharmaceutical (Roche Group) in 2025 - all while publishing over 75 scientific papers and winning a $10,000 prize for winning a public debate on defeating aging.
Rahul Raj is Co-Founder and VP of Product Architecture at JIFFY.ai, an AI-powered no-code enterprise automation platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California. With a background spanning SAP Labs, IBM, and Option3.io, Rahul brings deep engineering and systems-architecture expertise to JIFFY.ai's mission of enabling financial services firms to build autonomous, AI-driven operations without writing a line of code. The company — launched at Stanford University — has raised over $105 million in total funding, including a $53 million Series B in March 2022, and serves Fortune Global 500 companies and Big 4 consulting firms worldwide.
Raj Bains is the Founder and CEO of Prophecy, a Palo Alto-based low-code data engineering platform that lets analysts and engineers build Apache Spark pipelines visually - generating real, production-grade code to Git. With a background spanning compiler engineering at NVIDIA (where he was a founding CUDA team engineer), product management at Hortonworks through its IPO, and a patent for designing a language for insurance contracts, Bains launched Prophecy in 2017 to solve a problem he had watched the data industry ignore for two decades: making data transformation fast and accessible for everyone, not just Spark specialists. The company has raised $114M+ from Insight Partners, SignalFire, JPMorgan, and HSBC, and counts Fortune 50 enterprises including HSBC, JP Morgan, Microsoft, and Toyota among its customers.
Amir Sadeghian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Astrocade, the world's first agentic AI game creation platform that lets anyone build fully playable games from a text prompt. A Stanford PhD in Computer Vision and AI, Sadeghian previously co-founded Aibee Inc. - a Sequoia-backed AI unicorn - before teaming up with his brother Ali Sadeghian and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li to build Astrocade. The platform has amassed 20 million users and 140 million monthly game plays across 80 countries within 8 months of launch, backed by $68M from Sequoia Capital, Sea, NVIDIA, Google, and Eric Schmidt.
Sean D. Murray is the CEO of Productiv, the AI Portfolio Governance platform that gives enterprise IT teams real-time visibility over every SaaS and AI application running in their organization - including the ones nobody approved. A 20-year revenue and sales leadership veteran, Murray spent years building go-to-market engines at CEB (now Gartner), Xactly Corp, SalesLoft, and Greenhouse Software before stepping into the CEO seat at Productiv in April 2024. He now leads a 160-person company backed by IVP, Accel, and Norwest - on a mission to turn shadow AI from an enterprise liability into a managed capability.
Tom Sagi is co-founder and CEO of Hourly, a Palo Alto-based fintech and insurtech platform that integrates payroll, time tracking, and workers' compensation insurance for small businesses with hourly employees. His frustration managing payroll manually at his family's construction business inspired him to build Hourly in 2018 alongside CTO Shay Litvak and Executive Chairman Amir Faintuch. The company has raised over $39 million in funding, forged partnerships with Great American Insurance and Nationwide, and grown to serve thousands of small businesses across construction, home services, and retail.
Cube is an AI-powered marketing automation platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California, that deploys autonomous AI agents to manage paid ads, SEO, social media, email marketing, and online reputation management from a single dashboard. Founded by IIT and Stanford alumni, the company trains its AI on historical ad-spend data to deliver real-time campaign optimization across Google, Meta, TikTok, Amazon, and more - promising businesses a full marketing team's output without the headcount.
Darren Hakeman is the CEO of Genesis Digital LLC, the company behind Kartra, WebinarJam, and EverWebinar - software tools powering the creator economy for 25,000+ entrepreneurs worldwide. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer, Hakeman spent decades in enterprise tech - from RFID logistics at Savi Technology to scaling 8x8's ARR 5x to over $500 million through eight acquisitions - before stepping into the CEO role at Genesis Digital in April 2024, where the company has processed over $1 billion in transactions for small business owners seeking financial freedom.
Darren Bonnstetter is the CEO of Conexiom, a Vancouver-based AI-native platform automating sales order processing for manufacturers and distributors. Appointed in August 2025, he brings a rare blend of mechanical engineering rigor (Iowa State, Stanford MS, Harvard MBA), turnaround consulting at AlixPartners, and climate-tech entrepreneurship - having co-founded and led 280 Earth, a Google X spinout that raised $50M to capture carbon using industrial waste heat. At Conexiom, he leads a 210-person company serving 16 of the top 20 distributors globally, with $170M in total funding backed by Warburg Pincus, Luminate Capital Partners, and ICONIQ Capital.
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.