rhodes-scholar
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Nat Ware
Nat Ware is an Australian economist and social entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of Forte, a New York-based company that finances education, reskilling and healthcare at zero cost to individuals or governments. An Oxford PhD and Rhodes Scholar, he invented the Forte (Financing Of Return To Employment) mechanism, where governments repay training costs only out of the additional income-tax revenue that newly employed graduates generate. He earlier built 180 Degrees Consulting into the world's largest consultancy for nonprofits and social enterprises. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and three-time TEDx speaker, he calls his approach trickle-up economics.
Nick Shelly
Nick Shelly is the co-founder and CEO of Apero Health, a Y Combinator-backed (S19) medical-billing and revenue-cycle company in San Francisco that helps healthcare practices get paid faster and gives patients clearer bills. Before software, he was a computer scientist with an unusually wide runway: a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a Stanford CS researcher in computer networking, and an engineer at Apple, Nicira, and Forward Networks. He turned that systems-and-networks training toward one of the least glamorous, most broken corners of American life - the medical bill - and built Apero with co-founder Jacinda Shelly to fix the plumbing behind it.
Will Roper
Will Roper is a physicist-turned-defense-strategist who now runs Istari Digital, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup trying to build an 'engineering metaverse' where machines from satellites to medicines can be designed, tested and certified entirely in software. Before founding Istari in 2022, he was the 13th Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, steering a roughly $40-60 billion annual portfolio, and earlier the founding director of the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office, where he turned a $50 million budget into a $1.5 billion-plus prototype machine that produced drone swarms, hypervelocity guns and fighter-jet AI co-pilots. A Rhodes Scholar with an Oxford doctorate in string theory, he names his ventures after Tolkien wizards and argues America must learn to make hardware behave like software before its rivals do.
Carina Hong
Carina Hong is the founder and CEO of Axiom Math, an AI startup building an autonomous "AI mathematician" that can generate and formally verify its own proofs. A Guangzhou-born first-generation college student, she finished dual MIT degrees in math and physics in three years, won the Morgan Prize, became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, then left a Stanford PhD-and-JD track to start Axiom in March 2025. Her thesis is blunt: "Math is AGI." Within roughly nine months the company raised about $264M total, reached a reported $1.6B valuation, and pulled researchers from Meta FAIR, Meta GenAI, and Google Brain/DeepMind.
Josh Lospinoso
Josh Lospinoso is the co-founder and former CEO of Shift5, an observability and cybersecurity company that protects the onboard operational technology of planes, trains, tanks, and ships. A West Point graduate, Rhodes Scholar, and Oxford-trained statistician, he spent more than a decade as an Army cyber officer building elite hacking tools for the NSA's Tailored Access Operations and the Cyber National Mission Force. Before Shift5 he co-founded RedOwl Analytics (acquired by Raytheon/Forcepoint in 2017). He wrote the C++ course that U.S. Cyber Command uses to train junior developers and turned it into the book C++ Crash Course. In January 2026 he moved from CEO to the board to focus on long-term vision while Shift5, having raised more than $180M, scaled past 130 employees.
Larry Berger
Larry Berger is the co-founder and CEO of Amplify, the Brooklyn-based education company he started in 2000 as Wireless Generation. A Yale-trained English major, Rhodes Scholar, and former White House Fellow at NASA, he built mobile assessment tools that put data in teachers' hands, then steered the company through a $360M News Corp acquisition and a 2015 spinout backed by Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective. Today Amplify's curricula reach millions of students across all 50 states. Berger is also a published poet and the rare edtech CEO who wrote a public 'confession' questioning the hype around the very personalized-learning future he once championed.
Luca Springer
Luca Springer is the co-founder and CEO of Numen (formerly Cleancard), a San Francisco synthetic-biology company building rapid at-home diagnostic tests that read biomarkers from a urine sample in about 30 minutes. A 2016 German Rhodes Scholar who once planned a career in European politics, he traded the policy track for the lab bench, pairing degrees in computer science and global governance from Oxford with a dual BA from Columbia and Sciences Po. He started the company in 2021 with fellow Rhodes Scholar Thomas Carroll, went through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch, and has raised roughly $5.1M to make lab-grade screening as simple as a pregnancy test.
Benjamine Liu
Benjamine Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Formation Bio, an AI-native pharmaceutical company in New York that licenses and develops its own drug pipeline. A Rhodes Scholar with a DPhil from Oxford, he started the company (originally TrialSpark) in 2016 after concluding during his graduate work that clinical trials, not discovery, were the real bottleneck slowing new treatments from reaching patients. Formation Bio has raised over $610 million, including a $372 million Series D led by a16z with backing from Sanofi.
Jamie Beaton
Jamie Beaton is the New Zealand-born co-founder and CEO of Crimson Education, the global university-admissions consultancy he started at 18 from a Harvard dorm room. After getting into all 25 elite universities he applied to, he built Crimson into a roughly billion-dollar company spanning 25+ countries, while personally collecting degrees from Harvard, Stanford, Yale Law, Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar) and more. He is the author of the bestselling admissions guide ACCEPTED!
Roxanne Petraeus
Roxanne Bras Petraeus is the co-founder and CEO of Ethena, a New York compliance-training startup that turns the most ignored hour at work, the annual harassment course, into something people actually finish. A Rhodes Scholar, Harvard ROTC graduate, and U.S. Army combat veteran who deployed to Afghanistan before consulting at McKinsey, she launched Ethena in 2019 with engineer Anne Solmssen and has raised roughly $50 million, including a $30 million Series B in 2022, to make compliance modern, funny, and forgiving rather than fear-based.
Pavan Cheruvu
Dr. Pavan K. Cheruvu is the President and CEO of Bitterroot Bio, a Palo Alto-based biotech pioneering the field of cardio-immunology — the intersection of the immune system and cardiovascular disease. A Rhodes Scholar, board-certified cardiologist, and physician-scientist who trained at Duke, Oxford, Harvard/MIT, Johns Hopkins, and UCSF, Cheruvu is guiding Bitterroot Bio's lead program BRB-002 — a first-in-class CD47-targeting therapy for atherosclerosis — through clinical development after a landmark $145M Series A in 2023 and positive Phase 1 results in 2025.