series-a-founder
(15)
Sara Leoni
Sara Leoni is the founder and CEO of Ziplines Education, a Bay Area career accelerator that partners with 30-plus universities to deliver industry-recognized certificate programs in fields like AI, project management, and digital marketing. A former Division I softball player at UNLV and ex-CEO of the $50M course-materials company Rafter, she raised a $6.4M Series A in 2023-2024 to help close the digital skills gap and has helped more than 20,000 adult learners retool their careers. She frames learning as a zipline: intimidating, exhilarating, and continuous, with a clear start and a clear landing.
Cameron Howieson
Cameron Howieson is the co-founder and CEO of Opencare, a Toronto-based digital health company that connects patients with a curated network of top-rated dentists across North America. A computer engineer by training, he co-founded the stock-research startup Vuru (acquired by Wave Accounting in 2012) before helping build Opencare, where he moved from CTO to COO to CEO. His work centers on making preventive dental care transparent, convenient and comfortable for patients.
David Dokes
David Dokes is the co-founder and CEO of Polar Analytics, a first-party data and business intelligence platform built for Shopify and direct-to-consumer brands. Before Polar, he led growth at car-sharing marketplace Turo, where he ran a roughly $20M annual marketing budget. He teamed up with former Airbnb data scientist Charbel Seif in 2020 to give smaller retailers the kind of enterprise-grade data infrastructure that big companies take for granted, unifying scattered marketing, sales, and inventory data into one dashboard that installs in days rather than months. Under his leadership Polar has raised roughly $28.5M and now serves several thousand merchants across dozens of countries.
Feng Xuan
Feng Xuan is a Boston-based scientist-entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Spear Bio, a biotechnology company building ultra-sensitive immunoassays for protein research and early disease diagnostics. He invented the company's core SPEAR (Successive Proximity Extension Amplification Reaction) technology as a Technology Development Fellow at Harvard's Wyss Institute, translating a decade of research in molecular and immuno-diagnostics into a platform that can measure minute quantities of protein biomarkers from sub-microliter samples. Under his leadership, Spear Bio raised an oversubscribed $45 million Series A in 2024 and earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for a blood-based pTau 217 test aimed at early Alzheimer's disease detection.
George Eliadis
George Eliadis is the co-founder and CEO of Probook, a New York based company building an AI operating system for home services businesses such as HVAC, plumbing, and electrical contractors. A 24-year-old Wharton graduate who spent six summers pressure washing homes in upstate New York with his father, he started Probook to fix the operational problems he lived through in the field. In June 2026 the company raised a $40 million round, combining a $34 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and a $6 million seed led by Sequoia Capital, and it now serves hundreds of clients across more than 35 states.
Mamoun Benkirane
Mamoun Benkirane is the co-founder and CEO of MarketLeap, an AI-driven operating system that helps direct-to-consumer brands sell and scale across global online marketplaces. A former Amazon and Jumia executive who built and expanded marketplaces across Europe and Africa, he started MarketLeap after realizing that even the biggest platforms left independent sellers drowning in fragmented data and complexity. Backed by an $8M Series A led by Smedvig Ventures in 2025, MarketLeap now operates across 30+ countries and is expanding into Madrid and New York.
Michael G. Johnson
Michael G. Johnson is the founder, president and CTO of Sea Machines Robotics, a Boston company building autonomous control and perception systems for commercial ships and workboats. A Texas A&M marine engineer who spent two decades in offshore oil, heavy-lift ocean transport and salvage at Crowley and TITAN Salvage, Johnson started Sea Machines in 2015 after seeing how avoidable human error was on an Arctic oil-spill response job. In November 2024 he handed the CEO seat to David 'Chip' Wasson and moved into a technology and product role focused on defense and international expansion.
Sai Alluri
Sai Alluri is the co-founder and CEO of Momos, a Singapore-and-San Diego-based software platform that helps multi-location restaurant brands manage customer feedback, reviews, marketing, and reputation with AI-powered workflows. He was an early Uber employee, helped launch Uber Eats across Asia-Pacific, then built and ran GrabKitchen - Southeast Asia's largest cloud kitchen network - before starting Momos in 2020 with Andrew Liu after watching favorite restaurants shut during COVID. Momos raised a $10M Series A in September 2024, bringing total funding to about $16.5-17M.
Saleh ElHattab
Saleh ElHattab is the founder and CEO of Gravity, a San Francisco-based carbon accounting and energy management platform that helps industrial businesses measure emissions, cut energy costs, and automate sustainability disclosures. A former product leader at Samsara and Salesforce IoT, and a former Eclipse Ventures venture partner, he raised a $13M Series A in January 2025 led by Ansa Capital, bringing Gravity's total funding to more than $20M with customers including WM, Autodesk, and MiddleGround Capital.
Sam Fitzroy
Sam Fitzroy is the co-founder and CEO of Dalia, a Boston-based candidate conversion platform that re-engages job seekers who visit career sites but don't apply. A former Indeed early employee and later VP at The Muse and partnerships lead at Jobcase, he started Dalia in 2019 and raised a $5M Series A in January 2023. His pitch, delivered in interviews with a kind of exhausted evangelism, is that 75% of applicants drop off at the account-creation step, and someone should probably do something about that.
Tarrence Van As
Tarrence Van As is the co-founder and CEO of Cartridge, a New York-based company building the infrastructure for fully onchain games. Cartridge leads development of Dojo, an open-source toolchain for provable games and autonomous worlds on Starknet, alongside Controller, a passkey-based smart contract wallet, and Slot, a rollup-as-a-service for game developers. A University of Michigan computer science engineer who bought his first Bitcoin in 2013 and shipped Ethereum smart contracts by 2015, Tarrence previously worked on mixed reality at Magic Leap before helping build the Dope Wars NFT ecosystem and founding Cartridge in 2022. In August 2024 the company raised a $7.5M Series A led by BITKRAFT Ventures.
Tyler Payne
Tyler Payne is the founder and CEO of Vellum Health, an Austin-based company that sends clinicians to draw a line, hang an infusion, or run a blood transfusion at a patient's bedside in a skilled nursing facility or living room instead of an emergency room. He rolled up a set of regional vascular-access businesses, wrapped them in a single brand and an AI platform that reads a facility's EMR to find patients who need care, and closed a Series A in mid-2025 led by FCA Venture Partners. Before Vellum he helped build CVS Health's nationwide clinical-trial infrastructure and worked at Elligo Health Research and ePatientFinder. He holds a molecular biology degree from Colorado and an MBA from UT Austin's McCombs School.
Grant Walter
Grant Walter is the Chairman, CEO and President of KoreLock, a Denver-based IoT technology company that sells turnkey embedded smart lock platforms to the lock and access-control industry. Rather than making locks or software, KoreLock builds the printed-circuit-board module, firmware and cloud that let any manufacturer ship a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connected lock. Its patent-protected, gateway-free Wi-Fi direct technology sits inside tens of thousands of locking devices across 65+ countries. In 2023 Walter was named a Security Industry Innovator for that WiFi-ready platform.
Dan Furman
Dan Furman is a neuroscientist and the co-founder and CEO of Arctop, a company building the software intelligence layer that decodes human brain signals in real time from everyday wearables like headbands, earbuds and VR headsets. A Harvard-trained neurobiologist with a Technion PhD, he once helped adapt a sleep-monitoring device into a brain-computer interface for Stephen Hawking, and his doctoral work showed that non-invasive scalp sensors could control individual neuroprosthetic fingers. In 2023 Arctop raised a $10M Series A to apply its 'Brain ID' and real-time cognition technology across medicine, education, cybersecurity and entertainment.
Elliott Rapaport
Elliott Rapaport is the founder and CEO of Birches Health, a national virtual clinic treating gambling, gaming and other behavioral addictions, covered by insurance and state funding. A lifelong New Yorker with an Amherst BA and a Cambridge MBA, he scaled healthcare marketplaces at Elemy before building Birches into a 50-state operation backed by $20M from AlleyCorp, General Catalyst and Will Ventures. He also serves as Vice President of the IPGGC board.