palo-alto-startup
(5)
Shruti Gupta
Shruti Gupta is the founder and CEO of Zania, a Palo Alto startup building agentic AI 'teammates' that execute governance, risk, and compliance work end to end. Before founding Zania in 2023, she spent years inside security teams at Microsoft Identity, Airbnb, Instacart, and Brex, moving from founding security engineer to CISO. In September 2025 Zania raised an $18 million Series A led by NEA, backed by the Anthology Fund (Menlo Ventures and Anthropic) and a syndicate of operators from Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and PwC. Her pitch is simple: stop shipping compliance tools that organize work, and start shipping AI that does the work.
David Feinleib
David Feinleib is a serial entrepreneur, former venture capitalist, and author who is now Founder and CEO of It'sRapid.ai, a Palo Alto AI platform that turns product data and existing assets into finished commerce content for major brands. He has founded multiple companies acquired by EMC, HP, and Keynote Systems, sold Content Analytics to Syndigo in 2019, invested as a General Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, and written four books including 'Why Startups Fail' and 'Big Data Bootcamp.'
Peggy Chang
Peggy Chang is the co-founder and CEO of ActivityHero, the online marketplace where parents discover, compare and book summer camps, after-school classes and workshops for their kids. An MIT-trained engineer with a Stanford MBA, she spent more than 15 years building consumer software at Intuit's QuickBooks, Charles Schwab, Excite@Home, the Los Angeles Times new-media division and Walt Disney Imagineering before turning a personal frustration - it took her three months to enroll her daughter in gymnastics - into a company. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Palo Alto, ActivityHero now connects more than 4 million families with over 10,000 activity providers, and Chang frames its mission as both helping kids find their passions faster and helping parents (often mothers) stay in the workforce.
Sumit Agarwal
Sumit Agarwal is the CEO and co-founder of Ario, a Palo Alto AI assistant that takes aim at the 'invisible labor' of running a household - the school calendars, the returns, the meal planning. Before Ario he co-founded Shape Security, a fraud-prevention company F5 acquired for more than $1 billion. Earlier he was the youngest-ever Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon, a retired US Air Force major and one of the first officers in network warfare at Cyber Command, and ran mobile operations at Google. Ario raised $16 million in seed funding in June 2024 from Floodgate, Wing Venture Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and Moxxie.
Vinay Goel
Vinay Goel is the CEO and co-founder of Wald.ai, a Palo Alto startup building contextual data-loss protection for the age of generative AI. After more than 30 years in product and technology - a decade at Google leading Maps and Local, then top product roles at JLL, Kiavi, Check Point and Webroot - he co-founded Wald.ai in 2024 to solve the 'shadow AI' problem: employees feeding sensitive company data into ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Wald.ai redacts sensitive data inline, lets the AI answer, then restores the original context before the user sees it. He raised a $4M seed round in December 2024 and sits on the Forbes Technology Council.