Nels Stromborg is a VP Transformational Leader for Media and Entertainment at Adobe, based in Chicago, with 20+ years of digital media sales experience. Known for scaling sales organizations and consistently outperforming targets - hitting 300% of goal in FY2020 and winning Adobe's North American and Media & Entertainment Seller of the Year award - he has built a career arc from floor trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange to driving Adobe's most strategic entertainment partnerships. He has held senior sales leadership roles at Undertone, Retale, and AOL before joining Adobe.
Ranga Mohan is a technology executive with roughly two decades of experience building digital platforms at the intersection of engineering and go-to-market strategy. Currently VP of Digital Technology (GTM-Marketing) at ServiceNow, he joined the Santa Clara-based enterprise cloud leader in 2025 after five years as VP of Digital Technology & International at 7-Eleven, where he led the construction of a global convenience tech platform. Earlier stints at Capital One - where he helped create the industry's first online-only mortgage pre-approval experience - and Bank of America shaped his deep fluency in scaling digital customer experiences inside large, complex organizations.
Clover builds cloud-based point-of-sale systems and payment processing for small and mid-sized businesses. Founded in Sunnyvale in 2010 and acquired by First Data in 2012 (now part of Fiserv), Clover bundles Android-powered hardware with a software platform for restaurants, retail, and personal services - processing well over $300B in annualized card volume.
Narvar is a San Mateo-based enterprise SaaS platform that owns the 'post-purchase' moment for retailers - the stretch between checkout and a customer's next order. Its software powers order tracking, delivery notifications, returns, exchanges and fraud prevention for 1,500+ brands including Sephora, Gap, Patagonia, Home Depot, Levi's and Sonos, and has handled billions of consumer interactions across 38+ countries.
Amit Sharma founded Narvar in 2013 to fix the most overlooked moment in e-commerce: the anxious gap between clicking 'buy' and the package arriving at the door. Drawing on years spent optimizing supply chains at Williams-Sonoma, Walmart, and Apple, he built a post-purchase experience platform from a bootstrapped garage operation into a market leader serving 650+ retailers - including Sephora, Home Depot, LVMH, and Patagonia - before stepping back from the CEO role in October 2024 to an advisory position.
Anisa Kumar is the CEO of Narvar, a retail technology platform serving 1,500+ global brands with AI-powered post-purchase experiences. With over 23 years across Target, Walmart.com, and Levi Strauss where she helped lead the company's IPO, she became Narvar's Chief Customer Officer in 2021 and was elevated to CEO in October 2024. Under her leadership, Narvar launched its IRIS AI engine - analyzing 42-74 billion consumer interactions annually - to transform the moment after checkout from a cost center into a growth engine.
Kathleen Schnering is the Chief Executive Officer of Clover Network, one of the largest cloud-based point-of-sale platforms in the United States. Under the Fiserv umbrella, Clover serves more than 800,000 merchants across retail, restaurant, and services verticals, processing hundreds of billions in payments annually. Schnering leads a platform generating over $2.7 billion in annual revenue with a workforce of approximately 1,500 employees, steering Clover's expansion into international markets and value-added services as it targets $4.5 billion in revenue by 2026.
Kevin H. Johnson is the CEO of Focal Systems, an AI-powered retail operations company deploying shelf-scanning cameras across brick-and-mortar stores worldwide. A 30-year veteran of building and scaling tech businesses, he grew Ebates forty-fold before selling it to Rakuten for $1 billion, then led Udemy as a publicly-traded company, and now applies that commercial track record to the frontier problem of putting real-time AI intelligence into every grocery aisle.
Melissa Wong is the CEO and co-founder of Zipline, the operations platform that fixes the broken communication chain between retail headquarters and store floors. Before building the product, she lived the problem — spending over a decade at Gap and Old Navy trying to get stores to actually execute corporate strategy. She started Zipline in 2014, raised $39.6 million, grew the customer base to 150+ brands including Sephora, American Eagle, and 7-Eleven, and co-authored 'Stores Don't Suck: The 5 Principles of Amazing Retail Execution.' In 2026 she was named to Inc.'s Female Founders 500 and won RetailTech Company CEO of the Year.
Trove is the Oakland-based recommerce platform that powers branded resale and trade-in programs for retailers like Patagonia, Levi's, Lululemon, REI, Canada Goose, and Carhartt. Its software, operations, and AI-driven pricing engine turn used goods into a profitable new sales channel, helping brands extend product life and capture value from items already in customers' closets.
Zippin builds the AI brain that lets shoppers walk into a store, grab what they want, and walk out — no lines, no scanners, no cashiers. Its computer-vision and sensor-fusion platform powers checkout-free stores in stadiums, airports, hotels, hospitals and workplaces around the world.
Tanner Johnson is the Co-Founder and Former President of Curated, a San Francisco-based expert marketplace that matches shoppers with passionate product specialists for high-consideration purchases like outdoor gear, skiing equipment, golf clubs, and jewelry. A Princeton-educated psychology and neuroscience graduate with roots in outdoor education, Johnson helped build Curated from a 2017 founding concept into a $141.5M-funded platform with over 250 employees - until its $330 million stock acquisition by social commerce company Flip in July 2024.
Hypersonix is an agentic AI platform purpose-built for retail and eCommerce profitability. Its flagship product, ProfitGPT, gives merchants autonomous decision-making across pricing, promotions, forecasting, and inventory - replacing weeks of analyst work with minutes of AI-driven insight. With 5M+ SKUs optimized and 100K+ daily autonomous pricing decisions, Hypersonix helps retailers like LVMH, Woodman's Market, and Rogers Sporting Goods capture margin lift of 10-12% within 90 days.
Vori is a San Francisco-based SaaS company building the all-in-one operating system for independent grocery stores. Their platform, VoriOS, combines AI-powered point-of-sale, inventory management, automated ordering, pricing automation, loyalty programs, and back-office analytics into a single system — giving independent grocers the same technological leverage that Walmart and Amazon use against them. Founded in 2019 by a third-generation grocer and Stanford/Cornell engineers with backgrounds at SpaceX, Lyft, and Stripe, Vori has processed over $500 million in payments across 140+ stores in 55+ cities, and raised $50 million total including a $22M Series B in May 2026.
João Diogo 'JD' Falcão is the CEO and co-founder of AiFi Inc., the San Francisco-based company building the world's largest autonomous retail network. A PhD from Carnegie Mellon and Master's from Cornell in Robotics, JD spent years shaping AiFi's core technology as CTO before stepping up as Chief Executive in September 2025. Under his and the team's leadership, AiFi has deployed 300+ camera-only autonomous stores globally, processes over 90 petabytes of spatial data annually, and counts Microsoft, ALDI, and 7-Eleven among its partners. His central thesis: the physical world deserves to be as queryable as the internet.
Marcus Shen is the CEO and Board Member of B-Stock, the world's largest B2B marketplace for excess merchandise, helping retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Costco efficiently recover value from returned and surplus inventory. A former Yahoo! VP of Corporate Development and KKR advisor, Shen joined B-Stock as CFO in 2019, rose to COO, and took the CEO role in March 2022. Under his leadership, B-Stock has become a defining force in the recommerce economy, selling 160 million units annually and keeping nearly 300,000 tons of inventory out of landfills.
Michael Jaszczyk is the CEO (US) of NEWWORK Software, a Berlin and Palo Alto-based startup founded in 2023 by former SAP and Workday veterans to rebuild enterprise software for the AI era. With over two decades of technology leadership - including 15 years at GK Software SE where he rose from CTO to Chief Digital Transformation Officer and CEO of GK Americas - he is a recognized thought leader at the intersection of AI, cloud computing, and enterprise workflow automation. Jaszczyk helped pioneer retail AI as far back as 2003 through the Metro Group Future Store initiative, and today leads NEWWORK's mission to replace legacy ERP, CRM, and HR systems with AI-native, agentic platforms that understand business requirements and generate working solutions in minutes.
Neschae Fernando is the CEO of Zone24x7, a 22-year-old technology engineering company headquartered in San Jose, California, with a major hub in Sri Lanka. With a dual background in electrical engineering (MS and BS from UCLA) and enterprise IT delivery at Cisco, Fernando leads a 270-person team that sits at a rare intersection: companies capable of integrating hardware and software end-to-end. Under his leadership since June 2022, Zone24x7 has won seven industry awards in 2025 alone, including Gold at NBQSA and the IoT Technology of the Year Award, while expanding its AI, RFID, and cognitive vision platforms across 50+ enterprise clients globally.
Brandon Hill is the co-founder and CEO of Vori, a San Francisco-based B2B operating system for the grocery industry. A Stanford graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Hill grew up surrounded by grocery — his grandparents ran a small store in Oklahoma and his parents spent 40+ years in the industry. He channeled that heritage into Vori, which he co-founded in 2019 with Tre Kirkman and Robert Pinkerton to modernize the technology stack powering America's independent and regional supermarkets. Vori's AI-powered platform, VoriOS, handles point-of-sale, inventory, pricing, supplier integration, and back-office operations for 140+ stores across 55+ cities, having processed over $500 million in payments. The company raised a $22M Series B in May 2026, bringing total funding to over $32M.
Sara Ittelson is a Partner at Accel, the global venture capital firm, where she invests in early-stage AI, consumer, enterprise, and SMB technology companies. Before joining Accel in 2022, she spent four years at Faire as Head of Strategic Partnerships, helping the wholesale marketplace grow from a $535M to a $12.4B valuation, and four years at Uber spanning ride-share and Uber Eats. A Stanford MBA and GSE alum originally from Chico, California, Sara brings a rare blend of operator grit and investor acuity to founders building category-defining companies.