Kendo Brands is a San Francisco-based beauty brand incubator and operator owned by LVMH. Named as a play on the phrase 'can do,' Kendo creates and acquires beauty brands and scales them into global businesses, blending startup energy with the backing of the world's largest luxury group. Its portfolio includes Fenty Beauty, Fenty Skin, Fenty Hair and Fenty Fragrance by Rihanna, OLEHENRIKSEN, and Lip Lab, distributed in 60+ countries.
Arun Kumar Ramchandran - known as 'Rak' - is the Chief Executive Officer of QBurst, a global product development and consulting firm backed by Multiples Private Equity. Appointed in April 2025 following a $200M investment, Rak brings 25 years of leadership experience spanning Infosys, Virtusa, Capgemini, and Hexaware Technologies. An IIT Bombay and IIM Calcutta alumnus based in Palo Alto, he is driving QBurst's transformation into an AI-first engineering services company with his 'High AI-Q' framework - embedding generative and agentic AI into every layer of software delivery.
Chandra Singh is the CTO and Co-Founder of Rescale Technologies, a Thane-based technology firm helping global enterprises navigate digital transformation through cybersecurity, IT staffing, M&A support, and product development. An IIT Bombay graduate, Singh co-founded Rescale Technologies in 2022 alongside Pawan Kumar and Gaurav Meena, positioning the company at the intersection of creative strategy and technical execution.
PCH International is a product development and supply-chain orchestration company founded in 1996 by Cork-born entrepreneur Liam Casey. With operations spanning Cork, San Francisco, Shenzhen and Cape Town, PCH helps consumer-electronics brands and startups design, engineer, manufacture, package and fulfill hardware products at global scale.
Mikael Carlsson is the CEO of Forte Group, an AI-native product development partner with 900+ specialists and 25 years of history. A Swedish-born technology executive with 20+ years in digital engineering, he scaled Lohika 5X before joining Forte in October 2022. Under his leadership, Forte Group closed 2025 at an all-time financial high and has positioned itself around AI transformation, data engineering, and outcome-driven software delivery for Fortune 500 and mid-market clients across North America, Europe, and Latin America.
Moriah Katherine Nachbaur is the Chief Business Officer at Pheast Therapeutics, a clinical-stage immuno-oncology company in Redwood City, California, pioneering macrophage checkpoint inhibitors to teach the immune system to destroy cancer cells. Drawing on two decades of cross-functional biopharma experience - from lab benches at Genentech to executive boardrooms at Coherus BioSciences and her own consulting firm MKN Biotech - she brings a rare blend of scientific literacy, operational depth, and strategic vision to one of oncology's most promising new frontiers: the innate immune system's untapped power against solid tumors.
Sasha Novakovich is the Founder and CEO of Alchemy Cloud, a San Francisco-based enterprise SaaS company bringing AI-powered lab management and product development software to the specialty chemicals and applied sciences industries. Born in Russia and raised in Los Angeles after immigrating at age five, she built her first company in 1999, sold it to CNET, spent years as an angel investor backing female-led startups, and then spotted a glaring gap - brilliant chemists stuck doing brilliantly manual work with spreadsheets. Alchemy is her answer: a connected lab platform that merges ELN, LIMS, DOE, and AI into one system to help companies like those in beauty, food, building materials, and industrial chemicals bring better products to market faster.