Severence MacLaughlin is the founder and CEO of DeLorean Artificial Intelligence, a Palm Beach-based company building predictive AI products for healthcare and sales. A Cornell-trained scientist with a PhD from the University of Adelaide, he ran AI and data science practices at Cognizant and Capgemini Invent before bootstrapping DeLorean AI with his own savings. The company says its Medical AI was the first to be biologically validated by two independent laboratories, trained on tens of millions of patient records and backed by seven patents. He advises the United Nations and World Health Organization on AI.
Scott Morello is VP of HR Business Insights for Activision Blizzard King at Microsoft, a role he stepped into in October 2023 after building the people analytics function at Activision Blizzard. Before corporate life, he was a marine ecologist - his PhD from UMass Boston studied species interactions in Gulf of Maine intertidal zones. That pivot from counting mussels to measuring workforces defines his unusual edge: he brings the precision of population ecology to questions about how organizations actually behave.
Jonathan Trevor is a Co-Founder of Observe, Inc., an AI-powered observability platform built on a streaming data lake that unifies logs, metrics, and traces to help engineering teams detect, investigate, and resolve incidents faster. He came to Observe from Wavefront (now VMware Tanzu Observability), where he served as Frontend Lead, and before that led frontend engineering at Shocase. Trevor holds a PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University. Observe - co-founded with Jacob Leverich (ex-Splunk), Jon Watte (ex-Roblox), and Philip Unterbrunner (ex-Snowflake) and incubated by Sutter Hill Ventures - raised $156M in Series C funding in July 2025 before Snowflake announced its intent to acquire the company for approximately $1 billion in January 2026, its largest acquisition to date.
Noureddine Tayebi is the founder and CEO of Yassir, North Africa's most valuable tech startup and the leading super app for francophone Africa. Born in Algiers in 1977, he earned a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University after completing a master's degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He spent eight years at Intel in Silicon Valley accumulating over 50 patents before founding InSense, a nano-motion sensor startup acquired by Mojo Vision in 2018. In 2017, he co-founded Yassir, which has grown to serve 8 million+ users across 45 cities in six countries, offering ride-hailing, food delivery, grocery delivery, and fintech services. Yassir has raised $193.25 million in total, including a historic $150M Series B led by Mary Meeker's BOND, cementing Tayebi's position as a defining figure in Africa's digital economy.
Pablo Palafox is the Co-Founder and CEO of HappyRobot, a San Francisco-based AI workforce platform that deploys autonomous voice agents for logistics and freight operations. A Spanish-born roboticist who left a PhD program at the Technical University of Munich in 2022, he has built HappyRobot from a YC S23 startup into a company serving 70+ enterprise clients including DHL, Ryder, Schneider, and Werner - raising $103M across three funding rounds, most recently a $44M Series B led by Base10 Partners with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.
Paroma Varma is a co-founder and Head of Solutions at Snorkel AI, the $1.3B data-centric AI platform she helped build from a Stanford AI Lab research project into a unicorn serving Fortune 500 enterprises. Holding a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, she pioneered weak supervision techniques that reduce AI training data preparation from months to days, enabling domain experts in healthcare, finance, and government to build state-of-the-art ML models without massive labeled datasets.
Robert Nishihara is a co-founder of Anyscale, the company commercializing Ray - the open-source distributed computing framework powering AI workloads at OpenAI, Apple, Uber, and thousands of other organizations. A Harvard math grad and UC Berkeley PhD, he built Ray during his doctoral research to solve the tooling bottlenecks he personally experienced doing AI research. Anyscale has raised $259.6M and reached a $1B+ valuation under his leadership before he transitioned from CEO to a product-focused role in mid-2024.
Sarang Jagdale is a PhD engineer turned supply chain AI co-founder who spent over two decades cracking some of the world's hardest logistics problems - from IBM's global consulting floors to the startup that eventually became Lyric. As Head of Decision Science at Lyric, he architects the algorithmic core of a platform now trusted by Coca-Cola, Google, and Mondelez to make their supply chains think for themselves. Lyric raised $43.5M in Series B funding in August 2025, bringing total funding to $67M.
Soups Ranjan is the co-founder and CEO of Sardine, an agentic AI platform for financial crime prevention and AML compliance headquartered in San Francisco. With a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University and career stints at Coinbase (as Head of Risk) and Revolut (Head of Financial Crime), he channeled over 15 years of fraud-fighting expertise into Sardine, which has raised $145.6M and grown to 300+ enterprise customers. Sardine's behavioral biometrics and device intelligence platform now profiles 2.2+ billion devices, making it one of the most comprehensive financial crime databases in existence.
Stanford Graduate School of Business is the graduate business school of Stanford University, headquartered at the Knight Management Center in Stanford, California. Founded in 1925, it offers the two-year MBA, the one-year MSx, a PhD, and Executive Education, and is consistently ranked among the most selective business schools in the world. Its mission is to change lives, change organizations, and change the world.
Anandan Chinnalagu is a PhD computer scientist and serial technology entrepreneur leading MindPro Technologies, an AI-focused software development firm headquartered in Karur, Tamil Nadu, India, with personal base in Sunnyvale, California. With over two decades of building enterprise software companies - from founding AC INFOTECH INC in 2003 to steering MindPro's 110-person team - he specializes in machine learning, natural language processing, and Google Cloud AI integrations. His academic research in sentiment analysis has been published in PeerJ Computer Science and IJACSA, while his products span educational platforms, IoT consulting, and notification automation under the CanString brand.
Peter Day is a General Partner at super{set}, San Francisco's AI-native startup studio and venture fund, where he co-builds data and AI companies from day one. A machine learning PhD from the University of Liverpool who spent 12 years in quantitative finance before pivoting to Silicon Valley, Peter served as Chief Product and Technology Officer at Quantcast for nearly seven years, guiding the company's real-time ML platform used by marketers and publishers globally. He brings a rare combination of deep technical credibility — hands-on coding, ML research, financial engineering — and operational leadership at scale to the companies he helps found and grow at super{set}.
Dr. John Pritchard is the CEO of Radiant Logic, where he leads a platform that unifies identity data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments for Fortune 500 enterprises. With a PhD in open innovation in AI from the University of Denver and over 25 years spanning Lockheed Martin, IBM, Adobe, and Okta, Pritchard joined Radiant Logic in 2022 as Chief Product Officer and expanded the company from a virtual directory provider into an AI-powered Identity Security Posture Management platform - before being appointed CEO in January 2025. He is a Forbes Technology Council contributor, Identiverse keynote speaker, and a vocal advocate for treating identity data as a strategic organizational asset.
Thanh Tran is Co-CEO of A5 Labs, a Foster City-based AI company building game integrity infrastructure for competitive online gaming. With a PhD in Computer Science from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and a background scaling Upwork's data science team through its IPO, he now leads a 180-person team applying deep reinforcement learning, blockchain reputation systems, and real-time behavioral analytics to eliminate bots, collusion, and cheating from online poker and beyond.
Dr. Siva Samy is the founder, CEO, and Chief Product Strategist of ValGenesis, the global leader in digital validation lifecycle management for the life sciences industry. He built the first platform to fully digitize and automate the pharmaceutical validation process - the compliance-critical system that ensures every drug, device, and biotech product is manufactured correctly. Under his leadership, ValGenesis has become trusted by 30 of the top 50 global life sciences companies and has raised over $40 million in funding, including a $24M investment from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and a $16M debt financing in 2025.
Chris Emerson, PhD, is the Founder, Chief Scientist, and CEO of LEVEL, California's #1 cannabis tablet brand. A US Navy veteran and Chinese interpreter turned small-molecule chemist, he abandoned a Stanford postdoc in 2012 to spend four months living in a tent on a Mendocino cannabis farm - and emerged with a founding thesis that would reshape how the industry thinks about getting high. Instead of chasing THC percentages, he built LEVEL around effects-driven cannabinoid formulations using precise ratios of acidic, neutral, and degradative compounds the plant alone can't deliver. Two US patents, multiple peer-reviewed publications, and an IRB-approved clinical trial later, LEVEL is the top-selling cannabis tablet brand in California, now operating in seven states.
Dr. Judy Chou is the President, CEO, and Board Member of AltruBio Inc., a clinical-stage biotech company in San Francisco pioneering a first-in-class immune checkpoint enhancer platform targeting PSGL-1/CD162 to treat autoimmune diseases. With over 25 years of experience spanning Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Genentech, and Wyeth, she led AltruBio through a landmark $225M Series B financing in 2024 and is advancing lead candidate ALTB-268 through Phase 2 trials for ulcerative colitis. Recognized as one of Endpoints News' Top 20 Women in Biopharma (2025) and a Most Influential Women in Business honoree (San Francisco Business Times, 2018), she holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and conducted post-doctoral training at the Max-Planck Institute in Germany.
Mark McClure is the co-founder and CEO of ResFrac Corporation, a Palo Alto-based company building advanced physics-based simulation software for the energy industry. A Stanford PhD in Energy Resources Engineering, he spent time as an assistant professor at UT Austin before founding ResFrac in 2015. His research on hydraulic fracturing, induced seismicity, and enhanced geothermal systems has earned over 5,800 scholarly citations and an h-index of 38. Under his leadership, ResFrac has grown to serve 60+ exploration and production companies and secured a platform investment from Banneker Partners in 2026. He also advises Fervo Energy on geothermal development.
Scott Clark is the Co-founder and CEO of Distributional, an enterprise AI testing platform that helps companies identify behavioral drift and unknown failures in AI systems. A triple-degree graduate of Oregon State University with a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell, he co-founded and sold SigOpt (a Bayesian optimization platform backed by Y Combinator and a16z) to Intel in 2020, then led 200 engineers as VP & GM of AI/HPC Supercomputing at Intel before founding Distributional in September 2023. The company raised $30M in under a year, including a $19M Series A led by Two Sigma Ventures in October 2024.
Te (Thomas) Tang is Co-Founder and CEO of Anyware Robotics, a Fremont, California-based startup building AI-powered mobile robots for warehouse logistics. A UC Berkeley robotics PhD and founding member of FANUC's Silicon Valley research center, Tang combines deep academic research with industrial commercialization experience. His flagship robot, Pixmo, autonomously unloads shipping containers at 1,000 boxes per hour, won MHI's Best New Innovation award at ProMat 2025, and helps customers reduce receiving labor costs by up to 60%. In March 2025 Anyware Robotics closed a $12M seed round led by GFT Ventures, accelerating commercial deployments with leading third-party logistics providers.
Chema Molina is the CEO and founder of Frenetic, a Madrid-born, San Francisco-based deep-tech company that uses AI to collapse the design time for high-frequency magnetic components from nine months to one week. Holding a PhD in Industrial Electronics from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Molina built Frenetic on the conviction that power electronics — the invisible backbone of EVs, aerospace, and consumer devices — deserved smarter, faster design tools. His platform now serves clients including NASA, GE, Bosch, Infineon, and Thales Alenia Space, and has raised over $19 million in funding, including a $12.3M Series A led by Kibo Ventures in 2023.
Adam Rosenthal is the CEO and Founder of Star Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech he launched in 2018 with a mission to develop life-changing therapies for rare diseases. An MIT and Harvard-trained biomedical engineer, Rosenthal built Star around the insight that shared biology across multiple rare diseases can yield single therapies addressing many conditions at once. His lead asset VGA039 - a first-in-class monoclonal antibody targeting Protein S - entered Phase 3 trials in 2025 for von Willebrand disease, the most common inherited bleeding disorder. Star has raised over $315 million from top-tier life sciences investors including Sanofi Ventures and Viking Global Investors.
Chris Varma, Ph.D., is Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Frontier Medicines, a clinical-stage biotech attacking cancer's 'undruggable' proteins using chemoproteomics, covalent chemistry, and machine learning. A serial biotech founder with 20+ years in life sciences, he previously co-founded Blueprint Medicines (acquired by Sanofi for $9B+ in 2025) and Warp Drive Bio (acquired by Revolution Medicines in 2018), and held investor roles at Third Rock Ventures, Flagship Pioneering, and MPM Capital. His career spans the FDA, Novartis, and three successful company builds - with Frontier Medicines now advancing FMC-376, a first-in-class dual KRAS G12C inhibitor, through Phase 1/2 clinical trials.
Elan Amir is the CEO of MeasureOne, a San Francisco-based consumer-permissioned data platform that enables businesses to verify income, employment, education, and insurance data with consumer consent. A UC Berkeley PhD in Computer Science, Amir brings decades of deep technical and operational experience - from co-founding a broadcast media company acquired by Inktomi, to serving as CTO at early mobile web pioneer OmniSky, to leading Bivio Networks as CEO for nine years through a cybersecurity pivot. He joined MeasureOne as COO in 2018 and became CEO in 2019, guiding the company to raise $7.1M and forge major partnerships with Experian, BeSmartee, and GDSLink.
Enhao Gong is the CEO and co-founder of Subtle Medical, a Stanford-born AI healthcare company that has earned 9 FDA clearances for deep learning-powered medical imaging products. A PhD graduate from Stanford in Electrical Engineering, Gong co-founded Subtle Medical in 2017 alongside Stanford neuroradiologist Dr. Greg Zaharchuk, and has grown the company to serve 1,000+ scanner installations globally, touching 2.5 million patients annually. Before Subtle Medical, he co-founded Polarr, an AI photo-editing startup used by tens of millions. He has been recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 (China/APAC, 2018), Fortune 40 Under 40, and Radiology Business 40 Under 40 (2024), and led Subtle Medical to TIME's World's Top HealthTech Companies list in 2025.
Dr. Ilana Nankin is the Founder & CEO of Breathe For Change, a San Francisco-based organization that has trained over 15,000 educators in mindfulness, social-emotional learning, and yoga — reaching an estimated 1-5 million students across the United States. A former Pre-K teacher turned Ph.D. researcher turned movement builder, she launched Breathe For Change in 2015 after her own students demanded she formally train them. Her organization runs the world's only 200-hour Mindfulness, SEL & Yoga Teacher Training designed exclusively for educators, a Master's in Human-Centered Education in partnership with William Jewell College, and an expanding professional development platform for schools and districts.
Stan Richter is co-founder and CEO of signageOS, the company that built a unification layer between digital signage hardware and the CMS platforms that run on top of it. Founded in Prague in 2016, signageOS solves the fragmentation problem that has plagued digital signage for decades - dozens of SoC operating systems, dozens of manufacturers, no common API. Richter turned that chaos into a business, bootstrapped growth to global scale, raised $4.2M from Reflex Capital, relocated to San Francisco, won the 2025 Outstanding Individual award at the Global Digital Signage Awards, and in January 2026 unveiled Supra - an encrypted edge-streaming platform that extends the usable life of existing hardware by two to five years.
Tim Wagner is the co-founder and CEO of Vendia, and the inventor of AWS Lambda - the service that launched the global serverless computing movement. With a PhD from UC Berkeley and stints at AWS (as GM of Lambda, API Gateway, and Serverless App Repository) and Coinbase (as VP Engineering), Wagner brings a rare double expertise in serverless infrastructure and blockchain. At Vendia, he has combined both disciplines to build a platform that enables secure, real-time data sharing across companies, clouds, and ecosystems - positioning it as the operating layer for the AI data era.
Karttikeya Mangalam is the Founder and CEO of SigIQ.ai, a Berkeley-based AI tutoring startup that raised $9.5M in seed funding to make elite-level, personalized education accessible globally. A PhD graduate from UC Berkeley's BAIR lab with 40+ published papers and 10,000+ citations, he grew up in Muzaffarpur, Bihar and built an AI tutor that set the all-time record on India's notoriously brutal UPSC civil service exam — scoring 175/200, beating 1.3 million candidates in under 7 minutes.
John Mern is the Co-Founder and CEO of Terra AI, a Khosla Ventures-backed startup using generative AI and probabilistic modeling to transform how humans find and develop critical minerals and energy resources underground. A Stanford PhD in aerospace engineering and alumnus of Boeing Phantom Works and KoBold Metals, Mern built Terra AI's platform to cut mine development timelines in half - running geophysical simulations 125,000x faster than traditional methods, achieving 40% reductions in drilling costs, and helping partners unlock over $100 million in investments. His work sits at the intersection of deep reinforcement learning, geoscience, and the urgent global race to secure the copper, lithium, and cobalt the energy transition demands.