san-mateo
(29)
John Rueca Makes Strategy Survive Contact With the Calendar
At Menlo Security, John Rueca works in the narrow, consequential space between an executive decision and the hundreds of details required to make it real.
Guofeng Cheng’s second act is a $360 million race from lab bench to launch
After a dozen years helping antiviral programs move through Gilead, the scientist-founder built AusperBio around one stubborn idea: make the molecule do more work. Seven years later, the company is preparing for the harder passage from clinical promise to commercial reality.
Peter Ostrow Built a Career in the Unfashionable Middle
Before marketplaces became a default business model, Peter Ostrow was turning product specifications, federal rules and sales logistics into an online buying system. His career is a study in making complicated markets usable.
Craig Gass Built a Payments Company Around One Quiet Question: Where Is My Money?
A lawyer turned payments operator, Gass has spent more than three decades following the trail from a customer’s click to a merchant’s cash - and learning what leadership costs when the system fails.
Steve Huang
Steve Huang is the founder and CEO of KiWi New Energy, a Taiwan-born, San Mateo-based startup building what he calls an operating system for global renewable energy. A serial green entrepreneur with more than 15 years across the semiconductor and solar value chain, Huang went from NVIDIA and public silicon-wafer ventures to a near-total collapse when Chinese rivals undercut his micro-inverter business, then rebuilt around an AI-driven energy datacenter that matches clean supply with retail and small-business demand in real time.
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.
Michael Onuscheck
Michael Onuscheck is CEO and Chairman of Presidio Medical, a San Mateo clinical-stage neuromodulation company developing an ultra-low-frequency waveform platform aimed at chronic pain. He joined in September 2021 after two years on the board, returning to neuromodulation after leading Alcon's global businesses and, earlier, Boston Scientific's Neuromodulation division.
John Doherty
John 'Jack' Doherty is the Co-Founder and CEO of Forest Park Group, a San Mateo-based fintech building LoanOS - a permissioned blockchain settlement platform targeting the $1 trillion-plus syndicated loan market. With a Mathematical Economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania and stints in CLO credit research at Pretium Partners, he founded Forest Park in April 2019 to attack one of Wall Street's most persistent inefficiencies: syndicated loan settlement times averaging 23 days in North America and 6+ weeks in Europe. The company raised a $1.2M seed round in 2021 from EvoNexus and Advanced Blockchain AG, and its technology promises to compress settlement from T+21 to T+1, potentially increasing syndicate sizes by 25% and cutting credit costs by 4%.
Min Lee
Min Lee is the founder, CEO and president of IPMD, Inc., a San Mateo emotional-AI company born at UC Berkeley in 2016. He led the build of EchoAI (also known as Project M), a human-centered emotional-AI platform that reads facial micro-expressions, tone, and language to classify human emotion with a reported 96% comprehension rate - trained over 130,000 hours by a team of roughly 500 collaborators. In 2025 he was named a Visionary CEO in Emotional AI by Business Worldwide Magazine.
Richard Meng
Richard Meng is the co-founder and CEO of Roe AI, a Y Combinator-backed (W24) startup building an AI-powered data warehouse that lets data teams query unstructured, multimodal data - documents, images, web pages, video - with plain SQL. A UC Berkeley CS and Statistics double major, he previously led generative AI engineering at Snowflake and worked on the Skills and Knowledge Graph products at LinkedIn before founding Roe AI in 2023 to solve a problem that nagged him for a decade: the 80% of enterprise data that never gets used because it isn't in neat rows and columns.
Tareq Aljaber
Tareq Aljaber is the founder and CEO of Averroes.ai, a San Mateo company building no-code AI visual inspection and virtual metrology software for semiconductor and industrial manufacturing. Before founding Averroes in 2021, he spent more than two decades shipping products used by millions at Adobe, Microsoft, Atlassian, and Samsung NEXT, including work that helped scale Adobe Flash and the launch of Microsoft's Visual Studio App Center. He now focuses on making AI-powered defect detection accessible to quality and reliability engineers who have no data science background.
Dilpreet Sahota
Dilpreet Sahota is the co-founder and CEO of Trek Health, a San Mateo-based, AI-powered platform that turns the federal price-transparency data dump into a weapon healthcare providers can use to benchmark and negotiate their payer contracts. Founded in January 2022, Trek Health landed its first paying customer two months later, crossed 100 customers by late 2024, and raised an $11M Series A led by Madrona in 2025. A Stanford and UC Berkeley graduate who cut his teeth at Health IQ and Big Health, Sahota built Trek to attack a quietly brutal problem: identical medical services can be reimbursed at rates that vary 300-500%, and the smaller players almost never know it.
Eunjoon Cho
Eunjoon (EJ) Cho is the co-founder and CEO of Tofu, a San Mateo AI platform that automates personalized, multichannel B2B marketing at scale. A Stanford PhD who trained speech-recognition neural networks at Google and worked at Meta, Affirm and Fast, Cho spent years mapping the generative-AI landscape before ChatGPT opened the door. He started Tofu with Honglei Liu and Elaine Zelby in 2023, raised about $17M from SignalFire, Index Ventures and HubSpot Ventures, and grew revenue 12x in roughly a year by replacing the bloated stack of point tools marketers juggle with one platform that ships finished assets.
Lydia Han
Lydia Han is the co-founder and CEO of ModernLoop, a recruiting operations platform she started in December 2020 to fix the chaos of coordinating hundreds of interviews. A product manager by training, she built Slack's calendar and Zoom integrations and set up Brex's interview process before founding the company through Y Combinator's W21 batch. ModernLoop has raised roughly $12.4M, including a $9M Series A led by Accel with the CEOs of Slack and Zoom writing checks, and powers hiring for companies like Ramp, Benchling, Chainalysis, and VSCO.
Peter DiLaura
Peter DiLaura is the CEO and Board Director of Helicore Biopharma, a San Mateo biotech building long-acting antibody-peptide conjugates that go after obesity by neutralizing the GIP hormone in the bloodstream rather than blocking its receptor. With nearly three decades of company-building behind him - CEO roles at Initial Therapeutics and Second Genome, business and strategy chief at Sonoma Biotherapeutics, and time as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Third Rock Ventures - he is the operator brought in to turn a $65M Series A and a clinic-ready antibody into medicines that aim for quarterly dosing and better-quality weight loss.
Stella Wu
Stella Wu is the founder and CEO of Eano, a San Mateo construction-tech company that started as a way to fix the chaos of home renovation and grew into all-in-one software for contractors covering sales, project management, and payments. A UC Berkeley grad and the first marketing hire at Wish, where she managed $400M+ in annual ad spend, she built Eano after her own ADU project turned into 150 unanswered emails, a 350-day permit, and quotes that swung from $40K to $100K. Investors describe her as the opposite of the steel-toed-boots construction stereotype. Eano has raised over $20M.
Andy Ballard
Andy Ballard is the CEO and co-founder of Wiser Solutions, Inc., the San Mateo-based omnichannel retail intelligence platform he built through the 2017 merger of Quad Analytix and Mobee. A Harvard undergrad and Stanford MBA, Ballard spent nearly a decade at Hellman & Friedman where he sat on the boards of DoubleClick, Getty Images, Internet Brands, and Catalina Marketing before launching Quad Analytix in 2012. Today he leads a 510-person company that tracks billions of online and in-store data points for over 750 global brands and retailers, while also serving on the boards of Domino's Pizza and Etsy, and running Figtree Partners, his software-focused investment firm.
Chase Kim
Chase Kim is a startup founder who spent years deep inside Sendbird, the messaging infrastructure company powering conversations for DoorDash, Reddit, and Hinge, where he led the forward deployment team during Sendbird's critical 2024 pivot into AI agents for customer experience. In 2026, he co-founded Light Anchor (YC P26) with Sangha Park to build fully autonomous e-commerce brands run entirely by AI agents, betting that the future of consumer business is capped by compute, not headcount.
Satoshi Sugie
Satoshi Sugie is the Co-founder and CEO of WHILL, a San Mateo-based personal mobility company that has reimagined the electric wheelchair as a design-forward consumer product. Drawing on his automotive design background at Nissan, Sugie co-founded WHILL in 2012 with a mission to redefine how people perceive and use mobility devices. Under his leadership, WHILL has grown to 350 employees, expanded to 30+ countries, raised over $153 million in funding, and deployed nearly one million autonomous rides at airports worldwide including Tokyo's Haneda, Rome Fiumicino, and Narita. Named to Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40 in 2017 and recognized by TIME Magazine's 50 Best Inventions, Sugie's approach treats mobility not as a medical necessity but as an aspirational lifestyle product.
Yoshi Yokokawa
Yoshi Yokokawa is the co-founder and CEO of Alpaca, the San Mateo-based API-first brokerage infrastructure company that powers over 300 global fintech partners across 45 countries. A former Lehman Brothers analyst and forex trader turned repeat entrepreneur, Yoshi built Alpaca from a YC W19 startup into a $1.15 billion unicorn after raising a $150 million Series D in January 2026. His vision: a 'Global Financial OS' that makes investing borderless, accessible, and developer-native.
Bobby Bahl
Bobby Bahl is the founder and CEO of teleSys Software, Inc., a San Mateo-based telecommunications software company he established in 1997. With over 40 years of industry experience, he led the deployment of the first SS7 signaling network in the United States at Sprint and managed the creation of Equal Access, the nation's first long-distance network. Under his leadership, teleSys has grown into a global provider of carrier-grade multi-generation signaling solutions, with 400+ installations serving 100+ operators across 80+ countries supporting more than 1 billion active subscribers.
Paul McCabe
Paul McCabe is the CEO of JetBrains Americas, Inc., the North American subsidiary of JetBrains - the Czech developer tools company behind IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, Kotlin, and dozens of other IDEs and tools trusted by over 11 million developers worldwide. With a career spanning Logitech, Symantec, Miro Computer Products, and WebGain, McCabe brings over three decades of enterprise software sales and operations experience to one of the most influential developer tooling companies on the planet. He also co-founded Chronon Systems, a Java time-travel debugging startup, and has been steering JetBrains' Americas business since November 2015.
Ray Villeneuve
Ray Villeneuve is the CEO and Board Director of BriteCore, a cloud-native policy administration platform built for mid-size property and casualty insurers and MGAs. Appointed in September 2021 alongside a $20M Series C close led by Warburg Pincus, Villeneuve brings 30+ years of B2B enterprise technology leadership spanning storage (NetApp, Auspex), predictive analytics (MonoSphere/Quest), machine learning (Skytree), AI-powered eCommerce (Reflektion), and industrial AI (Quartic.ai). At BriteCore, he is repositioning the company as the modern core system of choice for the underserved mid-market insurance segment, driving awards recognition (FinTech Breakthrough 2025 Best P&C InsurTech Solution, Top 100 Software Companies 2024), growing to 100+ insurer clients, and building AI-native capabilities including agentic workflows and MCP-standard integration.
Vikash Kothari
Vikash Kothari is the Founder and CEO of Infovity, Inc., a San Mateo-based Oracle Cloud consulting firm he built from scratch in 2008 into a 380-person, $85M-revenue enterprise serving clients across manufacturing, pharma, financial services, and more. A former Oracle engineer turned entrepreneur, he leads one of the most Oracle-obsessed consulting shops in North America - a company where nearly 70% of employees are former Oracle insiders, and where roughly 90% of new business comes from referrals. He is also a General Partner at BAT VC, a venture fund focused on fintech, healthtech, and web3 with a dual US-India investment thesis.
Leslie Wilberforce
Leslie Oley Wilberforce is the CEO of Evidation, a San Mateo-based digital health company that has built a 5-million-person platform where individuals share permissioned health data to power real-world clinical research. A mechanical engineer by training (BS Penn State, MS Stanford), she joined Evidation in 2015 and spent a decade building the company's enterprise technology platform and landmark partnerships with Johnson & Johnson, Apple, the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and the American Heart Association before becoming Evidation's first non-founder CEO in March 2025.
Saket Saurabh
Saket Saurabh is the co-founder and CEO of Nexla, an AI-powered data integration platform built for the age of generative AI. A serial entrepreneur who started as an engineer at NVIDIA — where he worked on GPU tech for the PlayStation 3 and automotive computing — he went on to co-found Mobsmith, a mobile ad-serving startup that was acquired by Rubicon Project (NYSE: RUBI). Armed with a BTech from IIT Kanpur and an MBA from The Wharton School, Saket founded Nexla in 2016 to automate the hardest parts of data engineering, earning recognition as a 2021 Gartner Cool Vendor and landing enterprise customers like DoorDash, Johnson & Johnson, and American Express. Nexla has raised $33.5 million in funding.
Herman Yang
Herman Yang is the CEO and co-founder of Upscale AI, an AI-native platform that lets e-commerce brands create, run, and optimize performance TV ads on streaming channels. A Stanford CS grad with an MBA from Harvard Business School, Yang spent over a decade reshaping mobile advertising at AdMob (acquired by Google) and MoPub (acquired by Twitter, then AppLovin), before stints at Facet Data, Chatgrid, and Moloco. In May 2025, he emerged from stealth with $5.5M in seed funding - backed by Nvidia Ventures, M12, Eniac, and others - to democratize what was once a $100K-minimum medium: streaming TV ads, rebuilt from scratch for performance marketers.
Tarun Gaur
Tarun Gaur is the Founder and CEO of qikfox Cybersecurity Systems, a San Mateo-based startup building what it calls the world's first browser with integrated decentralized identity and quantum-resistant cryptography. With 24+ years spanning Microsoft, Deloitte, and HP - and one successful exit (Tringapps, 500 employees, acquired 2018) - Gaur launched qikfox in 2019 after his mother was scammed online. Backed by Tim Draper with $1.1M in seed funding, qikfox charges $180/year for an invite-only premium browser targeting everyday consumers who want safety, security, and privacy baked into the foundation - not bolted on as an afterthought.
Troy Kanji
Troy Kanji is an analyst at Boost VC, a pre-seed venture capital firm in San Mateo focused on deep tech investments. With a background in molecular biology from Brown University—where he researched ALS using Drosophila genetics—he bridges the worlds of science and finance. Before Boost VC, he cut his teeth at Trinity Life Sciences, F-Prime Capital (genomics), and Castle Island Ventures (crypto), building a unique cross-disciplinary lens. He's also co-founder and board member of Revalia Bio, a Yale spinout revolutionizing drug development with human data trials using donated organs.