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Christian Apfel Is Betting on the Tumor, Not the Spreadsheet
The physician-scientist behind SageMedic built his career turning clinical uncertainty into compact decisions. Now he is applying the same habit to functional precision oncology, angel investing and the slow work of changing a standard.
Seyed Tabatabaei
Seyed A. Tabatabaei is the founder, chairman and CEO of mmTron, a Redwood City fabless semiconductor company building high-linearity millimeter-wave MMICs for 5G, 6G, SATCOM, instrumentation and defense. A PhD engineer who has worked in mmWave since 1986, he spent decades at M/A-COM, Hewlett Packard, and Endwave before starting the design house Teramics and then founding mmTron in 2020. In April 2026 the company closed a $45M Series A led by Maverick Silicon.
Tianyin Zhang
Tianyin Zhang is the founder and CEO of DreamCraft Entertainment, a Redwood City-based startup building a code-free platform that lets anyone create, publish, and monetize video games without programming or art skills. A former Google engineer and game programmer, he co-founded DreamCraft in 2018 with Veronica Yao out of Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch. The company has raised more than $15 million, including a $10 million Series A in November 2021 led by March Capital, with backing from Makers Fund, Tencent, and Hiro Capital. DreamCraft's mission is to make game creation roughly ten times easier and to open game development to hobbyists, modders, and first-time creators.
David Weber
David Weber, PhD, is the President and CEO of Mosanna Therapeutics, a Redwood City biotech developing MOS118, a bedtime nasal spray for obstructive sleep apnea that aims to restore the body's natural airway reflex during sleep. A biotech operator with more than 30 years in drug development, capital formation, and corporate strategy, he previously led Otonomy through its IPO and multiple clinical programs, and served as CEO of MacuSight and Oculex Pharmaceuticals. He joined Mosanna in June 2025 as the company launched with an $80 million Series A.
Dhanush Balachandran
Dhanush Balachandran is the founder and CEO of Sortly, a visual, QR-code-driven inventory and asset tracking platform used by small businesses, families, and teams in construction, medical, retail, and education. A marketer-turned-iOS-developer, he taught himself to code, built an app originally called 'My Things,' rebranded it to Sortly, and grew it to millions of downloads. Before Sortly he spent over 15 years across Intel, Apple, DJI, and Y Media Labs, where he forecast worldwide CPU demand, priced server chips, and built ResearchKit medical research apps.
Nathan Schuett
Nathan Schuett is the founder and CEO of PreNav, a Redwood City company that builds drones guided by computer vision to inspect the infrastructure most people never look at - cell towers, wind turbines, bridges, smokestacks. The idea started as a half-serious plan to fly coffee across a cafe and grew into a navigation system precise enough to fly a robot within centimeters of a steel structure without a GPS signal or an expert pilot. A Stanford computer-music graduate who detoured through video games and robotics, Schuett now also lists himself as founder of Forming AI, the next chapter of turning the physical world into analyzable 3D data.
Rahul Kar
Rahul Kar is the founder and CEO of Hammerhead AI, a Redwood City startup that uses reinforcement-learning control agents to squeeze stranded power out of AI data centers. After helping build and scale AutoGrid - the distributed-energy software pioneer acquired by Schneider Electric - Kar launched Hammerhead in November 2025 with a $10M seed round led by Buoyant Ventures. His thesis is blunt: the real bottleneck for AI is not chips or models, it is power, and most data centers run at 30-50% of their allocated capacity. Hammerhead's ORCA platform orchestrates power, cooling, and compute in real time to unlock roughly 30% more usable capacity without touching the grid.
Rui Jing
Rui Jing Jiang is the Founder and CEO of Avisi Technologies, a Redwood City-based clinical-stage medical device company developing VisiPlate, the world's thinnest freestanding ophthalmic implant for treating glaucoma. Built on University of Pennsylvania nanotechnology, VisiPlate is a multichannel aqueous shunt composed of alumina and Parylene-C that is 20 times thinner than a human hair. Rui Jing co-founded the company in 2017 as a junior at Penn's Wharton School, won the $100,000 President's Innovation Prize in 2018, secured FDA Investigational Device Exemption approval in October 2025 for the US SAPPHIRE trial, and closed a $10.7M Series A in February 2026 to advance pivotal clinical development.
Fedele Bauccio
Fedele Bauccio is co-founder and CEO of Bon Appetit Management Company, the Redwood City onsite restaurant operator that runs more than 1,000 cafes for universities, corporations and museums in 33 states. He built the business in 1987 on a then-heretical pitch - hire trained chefs to cook from scratch for cafeteria diners - and turned it into the contract food industry's most outspoken laboratory for local sourcing, animal welfare and farmworker rights.
Priscilla Chan
Priscilla Chan is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a pediatrician-turned-philanthropist directing one of the largest private bets on biomedical science. With husband Mark Zuckerberg she has pledged the bulk of their fortune to a mission to help scientists cure, prevent, or manage all disease by the end of the century, increasingly through AI-powered biology and the Biohub network.
Rajeev Goel
Rajeev Goel is the co-founder and CEO of PubMatic, the publicly traded (Nasdaq: PUBM) supply-side ad tech company he started with his brother Amar in 2006 to give publishers a seat at the programmatic table. Two decades in, he is steering PubMatic into Connected TV, agentic AI buying, and an NVIDIA-powered infrastructure overhaul while continuing to argue that the open web deserves more than the walled gardens it competes against.
Yuxing Li
Yuxing Li is listed as an Interim CEO connected with Huawei, the Shenzhen-headquartered telecommunications and consumer electronics giant. Based in Redwood City, California, Yuxing sits at the intersection of two of the most scrutinized technology ecosystems in the world: Silicon Valley and Shenzhen.
Abhimanyu Choudhary
Abhimanyu Choudhary is Co-Founder and Chief Sales Officer of Xoxoday, a B2B SaaS rewards, incentives, and loyalty platform serving 5,000+ enterprise clients across 175+ countries. After a decade-long career at Tata Steel rising to General Manager of Sales, he joined Xoxoday in 2018 to lead its commercial growth engine. Today, Xoxoday processes ~250,000 transactions daily and has raised over $100M in funding, most recently a Series C in January 2026 from Apis Partners and 57 Stars.
Coco Mao
Coco Mao is the CEO and co-founder of OpenArt AI, the creative platform that grew from a viral Hacker News post about AI image prompts to $70M+ ARR with just 20 people. A Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who spent seven years at Google building search products and the Tangi short-form video app, she left in 2022 to co-found OpenArt with CTO John Qiao. Under her leadership, OpenArt scaled 7x in 2025, reached 8 million monthly active users, raised a $30M Series A from Canaan Partners, and launched One-Click Story — a feature that lets anyone turn a single sentence into a complete video with persistent characters.
Hariharan Kolam
Hariharan Kolam (Hari Kolam) is the co-founder and CEO of Findem, an AI-powered talent data platform headquartered in Redwood City, California. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years building technology companies, he previously co-founded Instart Logic as CTO, accumulating over 50 technology patents. At Findem, Kolam is reimagining recruitment by replacing resume-based hiring with 3D candidate profiles that synthesize data from over 100,000 sources and 1.6 trillion data points - turning talent acquisition from a guessing game into a data science problem. Under his leadership, Findem raised a $51M Series C in October 2025, bringing total funding to $124M.
Henry Ehrenberg
Henry Ehrenberg is Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Snorkel AI, the data-centric AI company he helped build out of Stanford's AI Lab in 2019. With a background in applied mathematics (Yale) and computational engineering (Stanford), Ehrenberg co-developed the Snorkel system — a paradigm-shifting framework for training machine learning models using programmatic weak supervision rather than hand-labeled data. Snorkel AI has raised $338M total, including a $100M Series D in May 2025 at a $1.3B valuation, and counts five of the top ten US banks, Fortune 500 companies, and leading research labs like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic among its clients.
John Martin
John Martin co-founded Level Home in 2016 with the idea that the best technology is invisible - literally. After a snowstorm stranded him and his family at Lake Tahoe without keys, he set out to reinvent the deadbolt from scratch. The result: Level Lock, a smart lock engineered to hide entirely inside the door, preserving home aesthetics while adding full smartphone control. Martin spent decades across Microsoft, Starbucks, Apple, and Nokia before building Level into a $171M-funded company that was ultimately acquired by ASSA ABLOY in 2024 - a hardware giant recognizing that the future of the lock is invisible.
Piyush Rajput
Piyush Rajput is the Co-Founder and SVP of Engineering at Simpplr, the AI-powered employee experience platform he helped build from the ground up in 2014. A civil engineering graduate from IIT Delhi, he pivoted to software and has spent 15+ years at the intersection of engineering and product - now overseeing the technology behind a platform serving 2 million+ employees at companies like Moderna, Penske, and the NHS. Simpplr has raised $139M+ in total funding and reached a Series D under his technical leadership.
Punit Soni
Punit Singh Soni is the founder and CEO of Suki, the ambient clinical intelligence platform that lets doctors spend more time with patients and less time typing into electronic health records. A product veteran who helped ship the Moto X and rebuild Flipkart's consumer experience, Soni founded Suki in 2017 on a single thesis - 'AI is the new UI' - before that phrase became a conference staple. Suki now serves 350+ health systems across the US, has raised $255 million in total funding, and helps clinicians complete notes 72% faster. Soni was educated at NIT Kurukshetra, the University of Wyoming, and Wharton, and has lived at the intersection of big tech, emerging markets, and healthcare for over two decades.
Sumit Khandelwal
Sumit Khandelwal is Co-Founder and CEO of Xoxoday, a global rewards, incentives, and loyalty technology platform he built from a borrowed desk in Bengaluru in 2012 into a profitable enterprise serving 5,000+ clients across 175+ countries, processing 250,000 transactions daily and surpassing $1 billion in cumulative GMV. A software engineer turned FMCG product manager turned SaaS founder, Sumit embodies the rare combination of technical grounding and brand-building instinct, steering Xoxoday through a Series C raise in January 2026 and eyeing a potential IPO by late 2027 or early 2028.
An-Yen Hu
An-Yen Hu is Operating Partner and General Counsel at Benchmark, the storied Sand Hill Road venture firm. He handles the legal and operational machinery so the investing partners can focus on companies. He joined in July 2020 from Goodwin Procter, where he made partner in 2014, led the Silicon Valley office's hiring, and ran point for the underwriters on Snap's $3.4 billion IPO.
Arthur Kaneko
Arthur Kaneko is Co-Founder and General Partner of Coreline Ventures, a boutique early-stage firm investing across the US, Japan and other key markets. He spent a decade running RealScout, a real estate technology company, after starting his career as an investor at DCM Ventures and a product manager at Togetherville. Coreline's pitch is restraint: a small number of high-conviction bets and a decade-plus commitment to each founder.
Joe Belanoff
Joe Belanoff is the co-founder and CEO of Corcept Therapeutics, a Redwood City-based biopharmaceutical company he has led since 1999. A physician-scientist trained at Amherst College, Columbia University, and Stanford, Belanoff pivoted from academia to entrepreneurship after co-developing intellectual property on cortisol modulation with Stanford psychiatry chair Alan Schatzberg. Under his leadership, Corcept achieved two landmark FDA approvals: Korlym in 2012 for Cushing's syndrome and Lifyorli in 2026 for platinum-resistant ovarian cancer - the first selective glucocorticoid receptor antagonist ever approved. He maintains an adjunct professorship at Stanford while steering a company with over $760 million in annual revenue and more than 30 ongoing clinical studies.
Lindon Gao
Lindon Gao is the co-founder and CEO of Dyna Robotics, a Redwood City-based company building commercially deployed foundation model robots for real-world automation. After immigrating from China at age 11, he attended Stuyvesant High School and NYU Stern before pivoting from Goldman Sachs investment banking to entrepreneurship. He co-founded Caper AI, an AI-powered smart grocery cart company acquired by Instacart for $350 million in 2021. In 2024, he left Instacart to launch Dyna Robotics alongside York Yang and former Google DeepMind scientist Jason Ma. Within a year, Dyna raised $143.5 million in total funding, achieved a $600 million valuation, and deployed robots folding napkins and handling laundry for 16 hours daily at hotels, restaurants, gyms, and laundromats — backed by NVIDIA, Amazon, Salesforce Ventures, and First Round Capital.
Adaire Fox-Martin
Adaire Fox-Martin is CEO and President of Equinix, the world's largest data-center company. A Trinity College Dublin graduate who once taught school in Ireland, she spent 18 years at Oracle, 14 at SAP, and three at Google Cloud before taking the top job at Equinix in 2024. She runs 280 data centers across 77 markets and calls the internet 'the fourth utility'.
Alec Ford
Alec Ford is the chief executive of Karius, a Redwood City genomics-diagnostics company that reads microbial cell-free DNA from a single tube of blood to identify more than a thousand pathogens. He took the job in October 2020 and led the company through a $100M Series C in May 2024.
Siddhartha Agarwal
Siddhartha Agarwal is CEO of JazzX AI, the first end-to-end AI platform built for the mortgage industry. With over 30 years steering product strategy and go-to-market transformation at Oracle, Google Cloud, Databricks, and Freshworks — where he helped drive more than $700M in annual recurring revenue — he now leads a SAIGroup-backed company that is rewiring mortgage lending with governed, auditable AI automation. He holds degrees from Grinnell College, Caltech, and Stanford, sits on the Wisconsin School of Business advisory board, and publishes widely on why digital employees will eventually outnumber human ones by a factor of 10 to 20.
Gabe Gotthard
Gabe Gotthard is the CEO of DataWalk Inc., a graph analytics and AI-powered investigation platform used by top U.S. and European banks, national security agencies, and defense organizations to detect fraud, money laundering, and organized crime. With over 33 years in enterprise IT - including a stint at 3ParData (acquired by HP for $2.5B) where he coined 'utility storage' - Gotthard now leads a Wrocław-born, Silicon Valley-validated company that has displaced Palantir at the U.S. Department of Justice and earned Ally Financial's 2023 Technology Disruptor Award. Based in Redwood City, California, he is building DataWalk into a leading global alternative to Palantir for government and financial-sector intelligence work.