Savage X Fenty is Rihanna's inclusive lingerie, loungewear and apparel brand, launched in 2018 as a joint venture with TechStyle Fashion Group. Built around radical size inclusivity (30+ bra sizes, XS-4X), it sells direct-to-consumer through an Xtra VIP membership model and an expanding wholesale footprint in Nordstrom, Galeries Lafayette and Selfridges. Backed by L Catterton, Neuberger Berman and Advent International, the company reached a reported $1 billion valuation and turned an annual Amazon Prime Video runway show into an Emmy-winning cultural event. It positions itself as the inclusive, unapologetic alternative to the old Victoria's Secret playbook.
Simon AI, formerly Simon Data, is a New York-based marketing technology company that builds an AI-first, composable customer data platform with embedded AI agents. Its Agentic Marketing Platform lets marketing teams reason over live customer and contextual data in their own data cloud to detect signals like churn risk and demand spikes, turn messy data into campaign-ready attributes, and orchestrate personalized campaigns across channels and tools like Braze, Attentive, and Iterable. Founded in 2013 by data scientists Jason Davis and Matt Walker, the company has raised roughly $117.8M and serves fast-growing and enterprise brands including SeatGeek, Equinox, Tripadvisor, ASOS, Venmo, and BarkBox.
Jason Davis is the co-founder and CEO of Simon AI (formerly Simon Data), a New York customer data platform that rebranded around agentic AI in 2025. A machine-learning PhD who built search algorithms at Google, he founded the ad-tech startup Adtuitive, sold it to Etsy in 2009, then ran Etsy's search and data teams as the marketplace grew from $180M to a $1B+ run rate. He and grad-school friend Matt Walker started Simon to give marketers direct, governed access to the data trapped inside their own warehouses. The company has raised roughly $117.8M, including a $54M Series D led by Macquarie Group.
Michelle Bacharach is the co-founder and CEO of FindMine, a New York AI company that teaches machines to style and merchandise like a brand's best human stylist - then runs that expertise across millions of products for retailers like Lululemon, Gap, Adidas and Anine Bing. A UC Berkeley grad and NYU Stern MBA who detoured through professional acting before building software, she turned a frustrating hunt for an outfit to match a pair of green waxed leggings into a venture-backed 'Complete the Look' platform that brands say lifts shopper spend dramatically.
Paul Meinshausen is the CEO and co-founder of Aampe, a San Francisco company that deploys agentic AI infrastructure so consumer apps can learn from each user's behavior and adapt their messaging in real time. An anthropologist turned data scientist who started his career in US Army Intelligence, he co-founded the Indian fintech PaySense (acquired by PayU for $185M) before building Aampe with collaborators he first met in a military analysis unit. He argues that businesses win not by understanding the past but by making better decisions about the future, and that personalization should be about responsiveness rather than prediction.
Rishabh Jain is the co-founder and CEO of FERMÀT, a San Francisco AI-native commerce platform that builds personalized, content-native shopping experiences for direct-to-consumer and enterprise brands. A LiveRamp alum who saw Apple's privacy changes coming before most, he launched FERMÀT in late 2021 to rewire how brands sell when shoppers can no longer be tracked across the web. The company has raised roughly $86M across rounds, capped by a $45M Series B in June 2025, and counts Glossier, GNC, ILIA Beauty, BISSELL and Unilever's Olly among its customers.
Steve Johnson is the co-founder and CEO of Notable Systems, a Denver-based company using AI, machine learning, and human-in-the-loop review to turn messy healthcare paperwork into clean, usable data. Three decades before that, he co-founded Johnson-Grace, whose patented compression algorithm delivered the first online pictures on America Online in 1993 - a building block of modern streaming media. AOL acquired the company in 1996 and made him a VP running software and technology development; he later founded the personalization pioneer ChoiceStream. In 2025 Notable Systems raised a $12M Series B to push beyond order intake into full revenue cycle automation.
Gibson Biddle is a product strategy teacher who ran product at Netflix from 2005 to 2010 and was Chief Product Officer at Chegg through its 2014 IPO. He now writes the 'Ask Gib' newsletter for 30,000+ product people, runs workshops, and gives talks built around his DHM model: delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways. His career stretches from building video games at Electronic Arts to co-founding kids' software firm Creative Wonders to lecturing at Stanford.
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.
Adam Justis is VP of Solution Marketing & Evangelism at Adobe, where he leads go-to-market strategy for Adobe Experience Cloud. With 20+ years spanning digital advertising at Microsoft, web analytics at Omniture, and more than a decade at Adobe, he sits at the intersection of AI, personalization, and customer experience. He is a speaker at Adobe Summit, an instructor at UC Irvine's Digital Marketing Certification Program, and a prolific author on Adobe's business blog. Based in Sandy, Utah, he is one of the faces Adobe puts in front of enterprise marketers to explain what modern customer experience looks like.
Corrine (Corrie) Sahli is Area Vice President, Content Supply Chain - Enterprise Accounts at Adobe, based in Chicago. With 20+ years in SaaS sales and 15+ years in MarTech, she leads enterprise relationships around Adobe's content supply chain platform - helping major brands in CPG, retail, financial services, healthcare, and automotive scale personalized content production. A former VP at Sitecore and Kontent.ai, she is a recognized industry voice on content operations, composable DXP, and AI-driven marketing workflows.
Scott Zieglar is an Area Vice President at Adobe focused on Content and Experience Delivery at Scale With AI. Based in Indialantic, Florida, he is a seasoned enterprise sales and technology leader with a career that spans Adobe Experience Manager, AI-driven personalization, and content supply chain solutions. With roots in financial services tech and previous executive roles at Accent Technologies and Communication Intelligence Corp, Zieglar has carved out a specialty at the intersection of content operations and artificial intelligence within one of the world's largest software companies.
Constructor is an AI-powered product discovery and search platform for enterprise ecommerce. Its clickstream-trained models run search, browse, recommendations, autosuggest, quizzes, and agentic shopping experiences for retailers like Sephora, Petco, Under Armour, Birkenstock, and The Very Group - tying every result back to KPIs like revenue per visitor.
Vanessa Thompson is the Vice President of Revenue and Growth Marketing at Twilio, where she leads a global team driving top-of-funnel growth across demand generation, lifecycle marketing, product marketing, competitive intelligence, and the developer network. A New Zealander who built her career through government tech, analyst research at IDC, and SaaS consulting at Bluewolf before joining Twilio in 2018, she has ascended from IoT marketing director to interim CMO and now oversees the full revenue marketing engine at one of the world's leading cloud communications platforms.
Lily AI is a Mountain View-based retail AI company that translates the language of the customer into the language of the catalog. Its platform uses computer vision, NLP and large language models to enrich product data with thousands of consumer-centric attributes - powering site search, recommendations, SEO/SEM and demand forecasting for retailers like Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Gap and thredUP.
Matik is a San Francisco SaaS that automates personalized, data-driven presentations, PDFs, and reports by pulling live data from CRMs, data warehouses, and BI tools into branded templates. It is used by customer success, sales, and account teams at companies like Asana, Zapier, and Reddit to turn hours of slide-grunt-work into minutes.
Eli Finkelshteyn is the co-founder and CEO of Constructor, an AI-native product discovery and search platform for e-commerce. With a background in computational linguistics and natural language processing, he built Constructor over four years in stealth before launching in 2019. Today the company powers over 400 billion requests annually, counts Sephora, Under Armour, Gap, and REI among its clients, and has raised $91M in funding at a $550M valuation. Finkelshteyn's core belief: world-class search is a competitive moat, and no retailer should have to build it from scratch.
Kevin Zerber is the Founder and CEO of Treering, the edtech company that turned the school yearbook into a personalized, sustainable, and digitally-native experience. Since co-founding Treering in 2009, Zerber has guided the company from a scrappy startup to a platform serving 15,000+ schools across the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - printing over 11 million yearbooks along the way. With $7.6M in funding backed by notable investors including Rich Barton (Expedia, Zillow) and Mike McCue (Flipboard), and recognition on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list, Zerber has carved out a distinctive niche at the intersection of nostalgia, technology, and inclusivity.
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).
Purva Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Lily AI, the Mountain View-based AI platform that bridges the gap between how retailers describe products and how consumers actually search for them. Founded in 2015 after her own frustrating experience shopping online as a newly arrived immigrant from India, Gupta built Lily AI into an enterprise-grade solution serving major retailers including Macy's, Bloomingdale's, J.Crew, and thredUP. The company has raised $62 million in total funding, achieved triple-digit year-over-year growth, and is recognized as a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 company. A Tory Burch Fellow, Ad Age Leading Women honoree, EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, and venture partner at Unshackled Ventures, Gupta has become a prominent voice in retail AI and immigrant entrepreneurship.
Uniform is the composable, AI-powered digital experience platform that lets enterprise marketing and engineering teams orchestrate content, commerce, and personalization across every channel - without ripping out the systems they already own.
Zazzle is a Redwood City based online marketplace that lets anyone design and order custom products - from invitations and t-shirts to home decor and corporate gifts - manufactured on demand. Founded in 2005 by Robert, Bobby and Jeff Beaver, it pairs a creator community of independent designers with proprietary on-demand manufacturing.
Daydream is a conversational, AI-powered fashion shopping platform founded by Julie Bornstein. It lets people search for clothing with natural language and images across roughly two million products from 8,000+ brands, then sends them to the retailer to check out.
Wen Miao is the co-founder and CEO of Lava.ai, a San Francisco-based company building real-time AI-powered customer engagement and loyalty platforms for sports teams, entertainment venues, and enterprise brands. Before Lava.ai, he was SVP and GM at TIBCO Software, where he led global client services and launched real-time predictive customer engagement platforms. Lava.ai counts Real Madrid, the LA Rams, the Sacramento Kings, and the Cleveland Browns among its clients, and has raised over $33.7M in funding. In 2015, Computerworld named Miao a Premier 100 IT Leader.
Julie Bornstein is the founder and CEO of Daydream, an AI-powered shopping search engine that raised $50M in seed funding in 2024 and publicly launched in 2025. A serial entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer, she grew Nordstrom.com from $10M to $350M in sales, transformed Sephora's digital business and launched Beauty Insider, scaled Stitch Fix to $1B as COO, and sold her AI fashion startup The Yes to Pinterest in 2022. With a Harvard BA and HBS MBA, Bornstein has spent 25+ years at the intersection of retail, technology, and artificial intelligence.
Kimen Warner is SVP of Product Management for Personalization and Marketing Intelligence at Salesforce, where she leads the AI-powered unification of Marketing Cloud's fragmented ecosystem into a coherent platform. A veteran of nearly two decades in personalization and optimization technology, she rode one product from Offermatica through Omniture to Adobe — spending over a decade building Adobe Target into a leading A/B testing and personalization platform — before joining Drift as VP of Product and then Salesforce. A Stanford-educated product designer and former varsity fencer, she is now one of the most prominent voices shaping how enterprise marketers adopt AI agents and autonomous campaign optimization.
Typeface is an enterprise marketing AI platform that orchestrates specialized AI agents, brand intelligence, and agentic workflows to help Fortune 500 companies produce personalized, on-brand marketing content at scale. Founded in 2022 by former Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis - before ChatGPT launched - the company became a unicorn within one year of founding, raised $265M, and built the Arc platform: a full-stack marketing operating system spanning brand intelligence (Arc Graph), purpose-built marketing agents (Arc Agents), collaborative workspaces (Arc Spaces), and enterprise-grade custom workflow tooling (Arc Forge).
Klaviyo is a Boston-based AI-first B2C CRM platform that unifies email marketing, SMS, push notifications, and customer service into a single data-driven system. Founded in 2012 by Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen, it went public on the NYSE in September 2023 and crossed $1.2B in annual revenue in 2025, serving 193,000+ brands in 100 countries. Klaviyo's core edge is its built-in Customer Data Platform that manages 7.3 billion customer profiles and processes 2.5 billion events daily, enabling hyper-personalized marketing at scale for direct-to-consumer brands.