
A planned surgical career became a decade-long lesson in risk, reinvention and patient-centered product design. The result is Alio - and a founder’s playbook built around fast decisions, aligned incentives and the discipline to change course.

The Wesper founder spent years making electronics bend. Then he built a company around a harder discipline: making complex technology disappear into an ordinary routine.
AT Nakanishi (Atsushi Nakanishi) is the founder and CEO of Triple W, the company behind DFree, the world's first personal wearable ultrasound sensor that predicts toilet timing. He launched the company in 2015 with high school and college friends, took it from Tokyo to Berkeley, and steered it to a Best of CES award and Series D funding. A self-described non-engineer who built a hardware company from zero, Nakanishi blends business pragmatism with a stubborn focus on solving an unglamorous, very human problem.
Harry DiFrancesco is the CEO and co-founder of Carda Health, a New York-based virtual care company rebuilding heart and lung rehabilitation for the home. A philosopher turned coder turned operator, he taught with Teach For America, helped found a school, did business operations at Stripe, and started Carda in 2020 after caring for a parent who could not access prescribed recovery care. He blends human clinicians with AI to remove friction from care delivery, and runs ultramarathons and climbs mountains in his spare time.
Dave Icke is the CEO of Medisafe, the medication engagement platform that helps more than ten million patients stay on their treatments. A chemical engineer turned digital-health operator, he has spent two decades turning hardware and software into tools that keep people healthier: founding CEO of wearable biosensor company mc10, launcher of Becton Dickinson's digital health business, VP of Digital Health Product at Humana, and executive chair of mental-health AI company ieso. In 2025 he took the reins at Medisafe from founder Omri Shor to scale medication engagement across the global pharmaceutical ecosystem.

Nichole Garcia is Co-Founder and President of OrthoFX, the doctor-delivered clear aligner startup she built with two former Invisalign executives. With a BS in Biochemistry from UCLA, an MBA from Pepperdine, and a diploma from Oxford, she spent two decades running global divisions at Philips Oral Care and Align Technology before co-founding OrthoFX in 2017. The company raised $17M total - including a $13M Series A led by SignalFire in 2020 - to commercialize a proprietary FXTetra polymer that delivers 50% faster treatment, paired with an AI-powered remote monitoring platform called FXOnTrack.