Tagged: princeton
30 results
Michael Monovoukas
Michael Monovoukas is the CEO and co-founder of AcuityMD, a Boston-based commercial intelligence platform for the medical device industry. Founded in 2019, AcuityMD gives medtech sales teams a shared view of physicians, procedures, and referral networks. In April 2026 the company raised an $80M Series C led by StepStone Group, pushing its valuation near $1B and total funding past $160M.
Syed T. Husain
Syed T. Husain is the Chairman and CEO of Made Scientific, a Princeton, New Jersey cell therapy contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) that he relaunched in 2025 out of the former BioCentriq. Backed by GC Corporation, the company runs a 60,000-square-foot GMP facility built to move autologous and allogeneic cell therapies from clinical batches to commercial supply. A chemical engineer by training who started on the manufacturing floor at Wyeth and Pfizer, Husain spent more than two decades in CDMO leadership at Lonza, Alcami, Emergent BioSolutions, and Resilience before taking the top job. He named the rebranded company MADE for Manufacturing and Development Excellence.
Naveen Verma
Naveen Verma is the co-founder and CEO of EnCharge AI and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton University. He spent roughly six years de-risking a single, stubborn idea - computing with electric charge stored in metal capacitors instead of noisy transistors - before spinning it out of his lab in 2022. The result is analog in-memory computing hardware that his company says runs AI inference at roughly 20 times less energy than a typical GPU, aimed squarely at putting powerful AI on laptops and edge devices rather than in power-hungry data centers. EnCharge has raised more than $144 million, including an oversubscribed $100M+ Series B led by Tiger Global in early 2025, and shipped its first commercial accelerator, the EN100.
Ly Tran
Ly Tran is the CEO of Belle.ai (BelleTorus Corporation), a Cambridge, Massachusetts computer vision company whose AI reads smartphone photos to help clinicians evaluate more than 1,600 skin conditions across 60-plus countries. He took the helm in 2021 after co-founding AtHoc, the crisis-communications company he built into the top supplier to the U.S. Defense and Homeland Security markets before BlackBerry acquired it in 2015. A Princeton history graduate with a Harvard MBA, Tran pairs a go-to-market operator's instincts with board and investor roles at companies like Jane Technologies and Cirkul.
Noah Freedman
Noah Freedman is the co-founder and CEO of Nucleos, a public benefit company that builds secure, tablet-powered learning systems for people inside U.S. jails and prisons. What started as PortableCloud - an offline education project for under-resourced schools in India, Zimbabwe and Kenya - pivoted hard after an incarcerated colleague showed Freedman that the same digital divide existed inside American corrections. Today his Achieve DXP platform handles the roughly 95% of mainstream e-learning that prisons can't otherwise allow for security reasons, tracking courses and credentials so people can walk out with a path to a job. A Princeton public-policy grad who ran global e-learning software at Stanford's Graduate School of Education, Freedman has turned a quiet conviction about second chances into a working business that's free for the facilities that use it.
Rob Cirincione
Rob Cirincione is the co-founder and CEO of Sunairio, a Baltimore-based weather intelligence company that helps energy traders, utilities, and grid planners price the risk hiding inside the weather. A Princeton-trained engineer with a master's from MIT, he spent over 12 years trading power at Constellation Energy and Boston Energy Trading & Marketing before deciding the off-the-shelf weather forecasts the whole industry relied on were dangerously blurry. Sunairio runs thousands of high-resolution simulations to catch the rare extreme hours that drive most grid risk, and in 2025 launched ONE, a next-generation grid forecast model trained on its proprietary high-resolution climate archive.
Vivian Wang
Vivian Wang is the founder and CEO of LANDED, a generative-AI hiring platform built for the people who never had software built for them: the line cooks, cashiers, baristas and shift managers behind America's restaurants, hospitality groups and retailers. Launched in late 2019, LANDED automates sourcing, screening, vetting and interview scheduling for high-volume hourly roles, and by 2025 had grown to 500+ business customers, a database of 3.2 million-plus candidates and 6.3 million-plus job matches. A Princeton graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Enterprise Technology, Wang has raised roughly $8.7M from investors including Javelin Venture Partners and Blockchain Capital, and frames her mission around the 2.7 billion hourly workers worldwide.
Jason Ehrlich
Jason Ehrlich is the co-founder and CEO of Ollin Biosciences, an Austin-based clinical-stage biopharma launched in September 2025 with $100 million to build best-in-disease eye medicines. An MD-PhD ophthalmologist trained at Princeton and Stanford, he spent a decade at Genentech/Roche helping shepherd retina drugs including Lucentis and the bispecific faricimab (Vabysmo), then served five years as chief medical and development officer at Kodiak Sciences. At Ollin he is taking direct aim at the market leader: in early 2026 his lead asset OLN324 beat faricimab head-to-head in a randomized Phase 1b study, drying retinas faster and deeper with a clean safety record.
Adnan Hamid
Adnan Hamid is the founder and core-technology inventor of Breker Verification Systems, a San Jose EDA company that pioneered graph-based, specification-driven chip verification and helped birth the industry's Portable Stimulus Standard. A Princeton-trained electrical engineer and computer scientist with an MBA from UT Austin, he earned the nickname 'The Breaker' for a simple reason: he breaks things for a living. After leading AMD's verification team to 100% coverage on an x86-class microprocessor and a stint at Cadence, he founded Breker in 2003 with his wife Maheen. He now serves as Executive President and CTO, holds more than 17 patents, and is regarded as one of the original visionaries behind teaching computers to verify the chips inside nearly every modern device.
Akin Akinc
Akin Akinc is the founding CEO of Aera Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech building a new way to deliver genetic medicines using human protein nanoparticles derived from the body's own retroelements. A chemical engineer by training, he spent nearly two decades at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, where he helped invent the lipid nanoparticle delivery that produced ONPATTRO, the world's first approved RNAi therapeutic, and later ran the Givlaari and fitusiran programs. Recruited by CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang, Akinc launched Aera out of stealth in 2023 with $193 million to tackle what he calls genetic medicine's single greatest unmet need: delivery.
Alex Sappington
Alex Sappington is the Co-CEO of Page Vault, the legal web-capture company whose software turns a tweet, a TikTok, or a vanishing webpage into court-admissible evidence. He bought the business in 2022 alongside his Stanford classmate Luke Suydam through a search fund, taking the wheel from founder Jeffrey Eschbach. Under their shared leadership Page Vault has landed on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies three years running. A Princeton economist turned BCG consultant turned operator, Sappington talks evidence law at the dinner table too - his spouse is a federal prosecutor.
Rachel Chen
Rachel Chen is a corporate communications specialist at eBay in San Jose, where she works on CEO communications and the global content team. A Princeton graduate from Philadelphia, she blends press-release craft with editorial storytelling and a data-driven instinct for what readers actually want.
Alice Zhang
Alice Zhang is the CEO and co-founder of Verge Genomics (now Verge Labs), a San Francisco biotech she started in 2015 after walking away from an MD/PhD program at UCLA. She built a company that pairs machine learning with one of the largest collections of human brain tissue to find drug targets for diseases like ALS, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. A Princeton molecular biology graduate, Soros Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Zhang turned her inexperience into what she calls a 'superpower,' raising more than $130 million and partnering with Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca before pivoting the company toward selling its data and insights to pharma in 2025.
Amanda Rees
Amanda Rees is the co-founder and CEO of Bold, a Los Angeles based digital fitness platform that delivers personalized, science-based exercise programs to help older adults build strength, ease pain, and prevent falls. A Princeton-trained chemical and biological engineer who is also a longtime dance and tai chi instructor, Rees built Bold after spending most of her twenties caring for her grandmother and discovering how few preventive tools existed for aging well. Bold partners with Medicare Advantage plans and has raised about $27 million in total funding, including a $17 million Series A.
Andrew Collins
Andrew Collins is the CEO and co-founder of Bungalow, the largest co-living network in the United States. Raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma among serial entrepreneurs, he studied sociology and economics at Princeton and earned an MBA from Wharton before deliberately collecting skills at Medallia, Facebook, and the startup studio Atomic. In 2017 he and Justin McCarty turned their own struggle to find affordable housing and friends in a new city into Bungalow, which furnishes homes and rents individual bedrooms at roughly 30% below the cost of a studio. The company has raised about $175 million, including a $75 million Series C in 2021, from backers like Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, and Coatue.
Andy Markoff
Andy Markoff is the co-founder and CEO of Smack Technologies, an El Segundo defense startup he calls the first frontier AI lab built for national security. A former Marine Raider who served as an operations officer during the Battle of Mosul and later worked on Palantir's strategy team, Markoff is building AI products - Omega for the command center and Alpha for the edge - aimed at compressing military planning from days into minutes. In March 2026 the company announced $32 million in combined Seed and Series A funding led by Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures, behind a thesis Markoff sums up bluntly: 'Decision Dominance will be the deciding factor in preventing WWIII because it's the only goal achievable before 2027.'
Antonio Juliano
Antonio Juliano is the founder and CEO of dYdX, one of the largest decentralized exchanges for crypto perpetuals and derivatives. A Princeton computer science graduate who learned crypto at Coinbase, he launched dYdX in 2017 and built it into a leading DeFi protocol. After stepping back from daily operations in 2024, he returned as CEO six months later, declaring he was going into 'Founder Mode' to revitalize the company.
Brian Jeong
Brian Jeong is the CEO and cofounder of Hawthorne, a New York personalized men's personal care brand he launched in 2016 with his childhood best friend Phil Wong. Hawthorne built its business on a data-driven quiz that matches men to fragrances, skincare, hair care and grooming products tuned to their body chemistry and preferences. With no prior beauty experience, Jeong reverse-engineered the fragrance world through roughly 100 industry interviews in three weeks, growing Hawthorne from an online storefront into a Series B company stocked in thousands of retail doors, including the vast majority of Target stores.
Brooks Powell
Brooks Powell is the founder and CEO of Cheers (formerly Thrive+), a Houston-based consumer health brand built around DHM, a plant extract he first read about as a Princeton sophomore writing a neuroscience paper on alcohol. He licensed a permeabilizer technology from the university, launched in 2017, pitched on Shark Tank, and grew the company past $25M in revenue and 13M+ doses sold. A former religion major and Division I swimmer, he turned a class assignment into a category and earned a spot on the Forbes Next 1000 list.
Bryan Frist
Bryan Frist is the CEO and co-founder of Yoshi Mobility, a Nashville-based automotive services startup that began by delivering gasoline to cars in San Francisco and has grown into a fleet maintenance, virtual vehicle inspection, and mobile EV charging company backed by General Motors, ExxonMobil, Bridgestone, and Y Combinator. A Princeton and Harvard Business School graduate and son of former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, he also runs the early-stage investment firm Friale Ventures and has raised more than $90M for Yoshi at a valuation north of $200M.
Dan O'Malley
Dan O'Malley is the CEO of Engageware, the AI-powered customer engagement platform trusted by more than 600 enterprises in regulated industries. A Princeton-trained financial engineer, he spent more than 20 years building and selling fintech: he co-founded PerkStreet Financial, one of the first U.S. neobanks; ran digital at Eastern Bank; launched its Eastern Labs innovation arm; and from it spun out Numerated, an AI lending platform that powered over $70 billion in commercial loans before Moody's acquired it in 2024. He took the Engageware top job in September 2025.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet
Danielle Cohen-Shohet is the CEO and co-founder of GlossGenius, the all-in-one booking, payments and point-of-sale platform built for salons, spas and independent beauty professionals. A summa cum laude Princeton graduate and former Goldman Sachs analyst, she taught herself to code and wrote the first version of the product after running a freelance makeup business out of her dorm room. Founded with co-founder Karim Butt and run alongside her twin sister Leah, GlossGenius now serves tens of thousands of beauty and wellness businesses, crossed roughly $100M in revenue, and reached a $510M valuation on its 2023 Series C.
Gabriel Stengel
Gabriel Stengel is the co-founder and CEO of Rogo, a generative AI platform built for investment banks, private equity firms and hedge funds. A 2020 Princeton computer science graduate who did stints at J.P. Morgan and whose co-founder came from Lazard, Stengel turned a clunky senior-thesis econometrics chatbot into a company that, by April 2026, raised a $160 million Series D at a roughly $2 billion valuation. Rogo's AI agent Felix now serves more than 35,000 finance professionals across 250-plus institutions, automating the grunt work of benchmarking, earnings analysis and pitch decks that once kept junior bankers awake at night.
Henson Orser
Henson Orser is the founder and CEO of Soter Insure, a digital asset insurance carrier licensed in Bermuda that writes policies denominated in dollars, bitcoin and ether. After roughly three decades in traditional finance - 17-plus years at The Royal Bank of Scotland and senior markets roles at Nomura - he crossed into crypto as president and acting CEO of institutional custodian Komainu before founding Soter, which closed a Galaxy-led Series A in February 2025.
Jaimeson Rice
Jaimeson Rice is the CEO of Pinwheel, the New York fintech that has positioned itself as the income layer for financial services, connecting banks and fintechs to over 1,500 payroll platforms covering nearly 80% of U.S. paychecks. He stepped into the top job in July 2025 after three years as the company's CFO and chief of staff, succeeding co-founder Kurtis Lin. A Princeton engineer and Harvard MBA who passed through Goldman Sachs and Bain before founding his own SaaS CRM startup, Vlaris, Rice is now steering Pinwheel through marquee wins with KeyBank, Robinhood, DoorDash, and MoneyLion and the launch of its Switch Kit and Bill Navigator products.
Jeannie Tarkenton
Jeannie Tarkenton is the founder and CEO of Funding U (Funding University), an Atlanta-based fintech lender that makes no-cosigner student loans to high-achieving, low-income undergraduates based on grades, grit and trajectory rather than a parent's credit score. A Princeton English major who spent a decade in Atlanta education nonprofits, she built an AI underwriting model that reads transcripts and internships instead of FICO and balance sheets. Since 2018 the company has deployed well over $125 million to thousands of mostly first-generation students, and counts Goldman Sachs and her former college roommate MacKenzie Scott among its backers.
John Knorring
John Knorring is the founder and CEO of Green Tiger Markets, the first and only forward marketplace for Philippines electricity. A Princeton-trained trader with more than two decades inside commodity futures - Goldman Sachs, DRW Commodities, and the founding CEO of Abaxx Exchange and Clearing in Singapore - he built Green Tiger to do one stubborn thing: let companies in emerging markets agree on the price of power months or years before it is delivered. He does not build power plants. He builds the contracts that make building them financeable.
Kate Adamson
Kate Adamson is the CEO and co-founder of Folio, a financial operations platform built for hotels. A former pre-professional ballet dancer who studied engineering at Princeton before switching to economics, she spent five years at Plaid scaling sales and product teams, where she once shipped a Paycheck Protection Program product from idea to market in about eight days. In 2023 she teamed up with Plaid's founding designer Al Hertz to build Folio, which turns the messy world of hotel purchasing, invoices, and payments into one procure-to-pay platform. Folio won the E20X Judge's Choice Award at HITEC 2024 and raised a $14M Series A led by Thrive Capital and Construct Capital in July 2025.
Kerry Song
Kerry Song is the founder and CEO of Abbot's (formerly Abbot's Butcher), a Costa Mesa, California plant-based meat company she launched in 2017. A Princeton economics graduate who once worked in finance at Morgan Stanley and Citigroup and spent five years as a brand strategist for Tony Robbins, she built Abbot's around a strict clean-label promise: no gluten, no soy, no gums, no synthetic flavors, no preservatives. The brand became the only Whole30 Approved plant-based meat and grew from a Venice farmers-market table into a category leader stocked in thousands of retailers including Sprouts, Publix and Target.
Leah Cohen-Shohet
Leah Cohen-Shohet is co-founder and Chief Business Officer of GlossGenius, the all-in-one booking, payments, and point-of-sale platform built for beauty and wellness professionals. A Princeton economics graduate and former Goldman Sachs strategic investor, she left a fintech career at Symphony and Archipelago to scale the company her twin sister Danielle founded out of a Princeton dorm-room makeup side hustle. Under their partnership GlossGenius has grown to serve tens of thousands of independent beauty businesses, reached a valuation north of half a billion dollars, and raised roughly $134 million in total funding.