providence
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Billy Libby and the price of keeping your company
A dinner between a quant trader and the co-founder of Seamless became the starting point for Upper90. Billy Libby has spent the years since asking founders to count the ownership they keep alongside the capital they raise.
The Recession Gave Gregg Perry the Push He Wouldn’t Give Himself
He did not plan to become an entrepreneur. Then the financial system cracked, a Fortune 1000 client called, and a Providence communications shop discovered that small teams can be useful precisely when the stakes get large.
Venda Ravioli sells dinner. The spoon has opinions.
A Providence pasta maker turned a neighborhood specialty into groceries, catering and gifts. Its next sale might be a tray of chicken Parmesan or an entire Italian night in a box.
Abe Dane Put Down the Magazine and Built a Better Way to Read
Before Abe Dane helped publishers turn dense libraries into searchable products, he reported from fighter jets, Arctic ice and the early internet. His career is a study in making complicated things useful.
Denielle Finkelstein Put the Product Where the Problem Happens
After 22 years in fashion retail, Denielle Finkelstein walked away from the shelf - then made a second, sharper exit from retail itself. Her company found its future inside the bathroom stall, where a basic product had been hiding in plain sight.
The Little Fund That Turned $44 Million Into a $1.15 Billion Habit
It started as a modest state bet on Rhode Island's innovation economy. Twenty-five years and 144 companies later, Slater is the quiet engine underneath the state's startup scene - and it keeps recycling its wins.
David Durand
David Durand is the CEO and co-founder of Tizra, the Providence-based digital publishing platform that helps associations and scholarly publishers sell, organize, and deliver high-value content. A PhD computer scientist who has worked with markup languages and hypertext since 1984, he helped shape the standards that quietly run the web - XML, TEI, HyTime, XLink, and WebDAV - and co-wrote the first in-depth guide to HyTime. He taught at Brown, served as Chief Scientist at its Scholarly Technology Group, and turned decades of document-engineering research into a company that powers digital libraries for groups like the American Dental Association.
Narragansett Brewing Company
Narragansett Brewing Company is New England's storied lager brand, founded in 1890 in Rhode Island and once the largest brewery in the region. After the brand nearly vanished in the early 2000s, Rhode Island native Mark Hellendrung and a group of local investors bought it back in 2005, rebuilt its reputation around the classic Lager and the 'Hi, Neighbor, have a Gansett!' slogan, and in 2021 finally brought brewing home to a new 18,000-square-foot brewery and taproom in Providence's Fox Point neighborhood. Today it is an independent craft brewer producing roughly 100,000 barrels a year.
Margaret Hartigan
Margaret Hartigan is the founder and CEO of Marstone, a Providence-based digital wealth management platform that banks and financial institutions white-label to deliver investing and planning tools to clients of all means. A former top-quintile Merrill Lynch financial advisor, she launched Marstone in 2013 to demystify and humanize finance, raised a Series B in 2024, and was named Innovator of the Year at the 2025 US Fintech Awards.
Maria Gabriela Salvador
Dr. M. Gabriela Salvador is the CEO of Maternova, Inc., a Providence-based global health company that runs an e-commerce marketplace for vetted, life-saving medical devices, diagnostics and nutrition products aimed at low- and middle-income countries. A physician trained as a pediatric ophthalmologist in Argentina, the United States and Mexico, she spent two decades building high-impact health programs at Americares, Grameen Foundation, Freedom from Hunger and Pro Mujer before taking the helm at Maternova in March 2023. Originally from Salta, Argentina, she pairs a medical degree from the National University of Cordoba with a Harvard MPH in health policy and management.
Mark Hellendrung
Mark Hellendrung is the Rhode Island native who bought a fading 1890 beer brand for less than $100,000 and made it New England's again. As owner and CEO of Narragansett Brewing Company, he resurrected a lager that had nearly vanished, brought brewing back to Rhode Island after a 30-plus-year exile, and opened a waterfront brewery and beer hall on the Providence harborfront. Before beer, he ran Nantucket Nectars and coached the team at Magic Hat. His pitch has always been the same: stay homegrown, stay local, and don't sell out to the big guys.