Homecourt is a luxury home and personal care brand founded in 2022 by actress Courteney Cox and beauty-industry veteran Sarah Jahnke. It applies beauty-grade standards to everyday household products, selling non-toxic, plant-based, fine-fragrance cleaning sprays, candles, body care and laundry products through its own site and retailers including Nordstrom, Bluemercury, Revolve and Amazon. The company raised an $8 million Series A in October 2025 led by CULT Capital after doubling revenue every year with a famously tiny team.
Little Sesame is a Washington, D.C.-born food company that makes freshly spun, organic hummus from regeneratively farmed American chickpeas. What began in a 500-square-foot basement beneath a deli has grown into a two-part business: a fast-casual hummus restaurant and a national consumer-packaged-goods brand sold in more than 1,000 retail doors, including Whole Foods, Sprouts and Wegmans. The company pairs chef-driven flavor with a direct, traceable supply chain that supports regenerative organic farmers and treats good agriculture as a climate tool.
NuCicer is a Davis, California agtech and food-tech company breeding a new generation of high-protein chickpeas. Spun out of UC Davis and built on the largest pool of chickpea genetic diversity on earth, the company uses predictive (precision) breeding and genomics to develop chickpea varieties with up to 75% more protein than conventional beans - alongside better flavor, lower fat, and higher fiber. NuCicer sells whole beans, functional flours, protein powders, and bespoke trait packages to food brands seeking minimally processed, sustainable plant-protein ingredients that out-compete soy and pea isolates on taste and texture.
Plant People is a plant-based functional wellness brand making science-backed, zero-sugar supplements built around functional mushrooms, adaptogens, and vitamins. Founded by Hudson Gaines-Ross and chef Gabe Kennedy, the company sells a line of 'Wonder' gummies and chews - WonderDay, WonderSleep, WonderFocus, WonderCalm and more - direct-to-consumer and through major retailers including Whole Foods, Sprouts, Target, REI and Amazon. A Certified B Corporation, Plant People grew profitably for roughly seven years before raising a Series A led by Manna Tree Partners in November 2025.
RYZE Superfoods is a Boston-based direct-to-consumer wellness brand best known for its mushroom coffee - a blend of organic instant coffee, organic fiber, and a six-mushroom 'Super6' functional blend (cordyceps, lion's mane, reishi, turkey tail, shiitake, and king trumpet). Founded in 2020 by Harvard classmates Andrée Werner and Rashad Hossain, RYZE pitches a calmer, lower-caffeine ritual that delivers focus and immune support without the spike-and-crash of regular coffee. The company grew largely on early seed money plus aggressive social and influencer marketing, reaching reported revenue in the tens of millions while expanding into matcha, hot cocoa, creamers, and other functional blends.
Soupergirl is a Washington, DC-area food company making fresh, plant-based, certified-kosher soups, gazpachos, and salsas. Founded in 2008 by former stand-up comedian Sara Polon and her mother Marilyn, the mother-daughter business grew from a local home-delivery operation into a brand sold in 800+ retail locations including Costco, Whole Foods, Kroger, and Amazon Fresh. Soupergirl pairs radically simple, responsibly sourced recipes with an outspoken commitment to sustainability and farmworker rights - it was the first consumer packaged goods brand certified under the Fair Food Program.
Nick Wiseman is the co-founder and CEO of Little Sesame, a Washington, D.C. born hummus company that grew from a 500-square-foot restaurant basement into a national consumer brand sold in nearly 3,000 stores. A third-generation Washingtonian who started cooking at 15 and trained on New York's fine-dining line, Wiseman built Little Sesame with chef Ronen Tenne and cousin David Wiseman, anchoring the brand to regeneratively grown organic chickpeas from Montana. In July 2025 the company closed an $8.5M Series A to fund a new 23,000-square-foot manufacturing facility and a push to convert 10,000 acres to regenerative farming by 2027.
Sara Polon is the co-founder and CEO of Soupergirl, the Washington, DC plant-based soup company she launched in 2008 with her mother Marilyn (a.k.a. Soupermom). A former stand-up comedian who once led tours through the Middle East, she turned a reading of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma into a mission to fix a broken food system one bowl at a time. Soupergirl survived a no-deal turn on Shark Tank, raised a $2M Series A from sustainability investors, became the first brand to earn Fair Food Program certification, went plastic-neutral, and now sells in hundreds of retailers including Whole Foods, Costco and Kroger.
Will Nitze is the founder and CEO of IQBAR, a brain-and-body nutrition brand he built from a Kickstarter campaign into a nine-figure CPG company selling plant-based protein bars, hydration mixes, and instant coffee in more than 10,000 retail doors. A Harvard psychology and neuroscience graduate who once sold software to oil-and-gas companies, he formulated his first products with no food-science background, scaled IQBAR past 100 million bars sold, and now hosts the founder podcast Eating Glass.
Amy's Kitchen is a family-owned, privately held organic food maker based in Petaluma, California. Founded in 1987 by Andy and Rachel Berliner and named after their daughter, the company makes 250-plus vegetarian frozen and convenience meals - soups, burritos, pizzas, bowls and mac and cheese - all built from organic, non-GMO ingredients. A Certified B Corporation, Amy's has grown from a kitchen-table pot pie into a roughly billion-dollar retail brand without ever going public.
Paul Schiefer is the CEO of Amy's Kitchen, the family-founded organic frozen food maker in Petaluma, California. He started on the canning line as a high-school intern, then spent more than two decades inside the company - in IT, international, sustainability, government affairs and Chief of Staff - before being named President in 2023 and CEO in April 2026.
OLIPOP is a prebiotic soda company that turned the soft drink industry on its head by proving that soda can be both delicious and good for your gut. Founded in 2018 by Ben Goodwin and David Lester, the Oakland-based company combines nostalgic flavors with functional ingredients - each can delivers 6-9 grams of prebiotic fiber from plant-based sources like cassava root, chicory root, and nopal cactus. After reaching $400 million in revenue and profitability in 2024, OLIPOP closed a $50 million Series C at a $1.85 billion valuation in 2025, making it the fastest-growing non-alcoholic beverage brand in the United States.
Ashwin Cheriyan is the CEO and co-founder of Thistle, a San Francisco-based plant-forward meal delivery company he built from a cold-pressed juice pop-up in 2013 into a nationwide subscription service delivering over 20 million meals. A self-described 'recovering corporate lawyer,' he traded a career at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett doing billion-dollar M&A deals for the chance to fix how Americans eat — driven by his parents' experiences as physicians watching patients suffer from diet-related chronic disease. Thistle, which he runs alongside his wife and co-founder Shiri Avnery, has raised over $20 million and now serves the West and East Coasts with chef-designed, nutritionist-approved meals that are gluten-free and dairy-free by default.
Ryan Pandya co-founded Perfect Day in 2014 with the audacious goal of making dairy without cows. Using precision fermentation, the Berkeley-based biotech raised nearly $800 million, built partnerships with Fortune 500 food companies, and proved that animal-free whey protein could reach global markets across dozens of product categories. After a decade at the helm, Pandya stepped down as CEO at the end of 2023 to pursue future ventures, leaving behind a company that had fundamentally shifted the conversation around sustainable dairy.
Thistle is a plant-forward meal delivery service that ships chef-crafted, nutritionist-designed ready-to-eat meals, cold-pressed juices, and snacks to homes across much of the U.S. Founded in San Francisco in 2013 by Ashwin Cheriyan and Shiri Avnery, the company built its business on a simple wager: that the easiest way to fix both human health and the climate is to help people eat more plants.
Eat Just, Inc. is a San Francisco-area food technology company best known for JUST Egg, a plant-based scrambled egg made from mung bean protein, and GOOD Meat, the first cultivated meat product cleared for sale anywhere in the world. Founded in 2011 by Josh Tetrick and Josh Balk, the company has raised more than $850 million to push affordable, animal-free protein into mainstream grocery aisles, restaurants, and - now - U.S. retail meat cases under the Just Meat brand.
Dan Hoskins is the President & CEO of Sundia Corporation and its parent entity GT Brands, a plant-based snacking company headquartered in Orinda, California. A veteran of the food and beverage industry with 25+ years of experience, Hoskins helped turn Sundia from a fresh watermelon branding startup into one of the fastest-growing plant-based snacking brands in the US, distributing preservative-free True Fruit refrigerated cups and True Chia products to more than 6,000 grocery and convenience stores across the US and Canada. Before Sundia, he built his chops scaling Odwalla's national distribution and managing e-commerce at Hello Direct. An English Lit grad and former varsity swimmer and rower at UC Berkeley, Hoskins brings a rare blend of operational discipline and consumer intuition to a category he has helped define.
Nathaniel Chu is the co-CEO and co-founder of Tezza Foods (now Plonts), an Oakland-based food company using ancient fermentation techniques and microbial science to make genuinely complex, stinky plant-based cheese from soy milk. Holding a PhD in microbiology from MIT and a BS from Brown University, Chu spent years studying gut microbiomes before pivoting to harness those same microbial principles in food. With $12M in seed funding led by Lowercarbon Capital, Plonts launched in August 2024 in New York City and San Francisco restaurants, offering a plant-based cheddar that actually ages, melts, and smells like the real thing.
Josh Tetrick is the co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, Inc., the San Francisco-based food technology company behind JUST Egg (a mung bean-based egg substitute) and GOOD Meat (the world's first commercially sold cultivated chicken). Starting with $37,000 of personal capital in 2011, he has raised over $456 million to build a company that simultaneously cracked the plant-based egg market and won the world's first regulatory approval for lab-grown meat in Singapore in 2020. A former Fulbright Scholar, UN initiative leader, and Cornell-educated lawyer turned food disruptor, Tetrick has made it his life's work to prove that removing animals from the food system doesn't mean sacrificing flavor or scale.
Ev Williams is the Nebraska farm boy who accidentally invented blogging, co-founded Twitter, built Medium, and is now trying to make social media actually social again with Mozi. A serial founder who has shaped how the world communicates - and who openly regrets some of what that meant - he remains one of tech's most quietly consequential figures, running Obvious Ventures, a B Corp impact fund with $585M in assets, while incubating his next idea from San Francisco.