regulated-industries
(9)
Matt Kaufman Learned the Rules - Then Built a Career Making Complicated Things Clear
A lawyer by training and a builder by temperament, Matt Kaufman has spent two decades translating regulated, technical businesses into stories people can understand - and teams can act on.
Brandon Henning Built a Career in the Quiet Machinery Behind Modern Labs
From factory-floor systems to AI-assisted research, Brandon Henning has spent three decades making regulated work easier to trace, manage, and improve.
Christian Rockwell Has a Framework for the Messy Middle
After two decades marketing complicated software, Christian Rockwell’s sharpest idea is also his simplest: know where you are before deciding where to go.
Ashwin Raj Is Building the Boring Parts Cannabis Needs
After Visa, Amazon, Lyft and ezCater, the LeafLink CEO has landed in a market where every transaction carries a regulation, a relationship and a lesson in listening.
Anthony Habayeb
He spent a career refusing to specialize, then a bike ride with doctors handed him the one hard problem worth building a company around: making the AI behind real decisions something a human can actually answer for.
Joel Kandy
Joel Kandy is the Chief Business Officer at Lyzr AI, the New Jersey-based agent-building platform, where he runs global enterprise sales and pushes governed, production-ready AI agents into banks, insurers, healthcare and e-commerce. A Columbia computer-science grad who started on a Credit Suisse trading-tech desk, he spent the 2010s selling security and intelligence software in heavily regulated markets at ThetaRay, KELA, CipherTrace (acquired by Mastercard) and IronVest before betting on agentic AI. He argues, loudly and often on LinkedIn, that banks are stalled not by the models but by operating discipline.
Andre Bliznyuk
Andre Bliznyuk is a General Partner at Runa Capital, where he leads North American investments in software for regulated industries: fintech, edtech, and digital health. Before VC, he spent a decade in capital markets at Goldman Sachs and UBS, running 20+ IPOs. He has backed Brainly, Mambu, Lendio, Smava, and Zopa, with exits at Cloudflare, Goldman Sachs, and Colt Telecom.
Michael Fanfant
Michael Fanfant is a General Partner at Runa Capital, a $200M+ early-stage VC firm, where he backs B2B SaaS and regulated-industry startups in fintech, edtech, and digital health. Before turning investor, he co-founded Octane Lending — a point-of-sale financing platform for powersports vehicles that hit a $900M+ valuation in 2021. A Stanford economics graduate, Kauffman Fellow (Class 27), and Events & Community Chair at BLCK VC, Fanfant brings the operational credibility of a builder and the pattern-recognition of an investor to every check he writes.
Minal Hasan
Minal Hasan is a Silicon Valley-born venture capitalist, ex-lawyer, and entrepreneur who co-founded K2 Global - one of the largest inaugural women-run VC funds in history at $183M - and now runs Cyphr VC, a solo-GP seed fund focused on fintech, cybersecurity, and regulated tech infrastructure. Raised inside boardrooms (literally), she parlayed a dual career in Big Law and product marketing into becoming one of Silicon Valley's sharpest early-stage investors, with a portfolio spanning Palantir, Spotify, Coinbase, Airbnb, and 8 unicorns.