Benjamin Encz is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ashby, a San Francisco-based AI-native recruiting platform used by companies like OpenAI, Shopify, and Snowflake. A German-born software engineer turned recruiting-infrastructure builder, he spent 80% of his time on recruiting operations as Director of Engineering at PlanGrid before co-founding Ashby in 2018. Under his leadership, Ashby has grown to 2,700+ customers, 380 employees, and $142.5M in total funding including a $50M Series D in 2025.
Foodsmart (formerly Zipongo) is a San Francisco-based telenutrition company that pairs registered dietitians with a food benefits marketplace to treat diet-related chronic disease and food insecurity. It serves more than 2.2 million members across employer plans, Medicaid managed care, Medicare Advantage and commercial insurers, and in 2024 raised $200M led by TPG's The Rise Fund to expand its 'Foodscripts' food-as-medicine programs with major U.S. health systems.
Instawork is an AI-powered on-demand staffing platform that connects businesses with vetted hourly workers across hospitality, warehousing, food service, retail, and light industrial sectors. Operating in 400+ cities across the U.S. and Canada, the company uses over 2 billion data signals to match businesses with pre-vetted workers, achieving a 98% worker show rate and filling 90% of jobs within 24 hours — metrics that traditional staffing agencies rarely approach. Founded in 2015 and backed by Y Combinator, Benchmark, Greylock, and TCV, Instawork has raised $171M and serves 15,000+ businesses, with a network of 10M+ workers. The platform handles everything from a single catering shift to large-scale distribution center operations.
Aaron Katz is the Co-Founder and CEO of ClickHouse, the world's fastest OLAP database company, which he has built from a 12-person open-source project into a $15 billion enterprise serving 4,000 customers including Tesla, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI. A veteran of Salesforce (12 years, from $20M to $4B in revenue) and Elastic (CRO, $5M to $500M), Katz assembled a founding team mid-pandemic, relocated engineers from Russia to Amsterdam, and raised over $1 billion in funding. In January 2026 ClickHouse closed a $400M Series D; by May 2026 the company surpassed $250M ARR, growing 250% year-over-year.
Albert Wang is the co-founder and CEO of PatPat, a direct-to-consumer children's and family apparel brand he built from a mobile app in 2014 into a global platform serving 21 million customers across 140 countries. A Carnegie Mellon-trained engineer and former Oracle founding member, Wang spotted the gap in affordable, stylish kids' clothing when he and his co-founder Ken Gao both became fathers the same year. PatPat has raised over $465 million in funding, including a $160 million Series D2 from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in 2021, and has pioneered innovations like Go-Glow light-up apparel technology.
Alex Robinson is the CEO and Co-founder of Juniper Square, a San Francisco-based private markets software platform serving 2,000+ GPs managing over $1 trillion in investor equity. Founded in 2014 after Robinson spent years at Microsoft and building GreenDoor (a PACE clean energy lending platform that collapsed when federal regulators abruptly ended the subsidy program), Juniper Square has grown into a $1.1 billion unicorn after a $130M Series D in June 2025. Robinson's singular focus: digitizing the paper-and-spreadsheet world of private equity partnerships and making private markets infrastructure as reliable as the public markets infrastructure that came before it.
Anant Bhardwaj is the founder and CEO of Instabase, a San Francisco-based AI platform that helps enterprises extract intelligence from unstructured data - PDFs, images, emails, and documents of every kind. He dropped out of a PhD at MIT in 2015 to build what has become a $1.24 billion company with $277M in total funding, serving clients like NatWest, AXA, Uber, and four of the five largest U.S. banks. Born in Bihar, India, he studied at Pune, Stanford, and MIT before pioneering the idea that the enterprise's biggest untapped asset is the data it can't yet read.
Andrew Butt is the co-founder and CEO of Enable, the San Francisco-based B2B rebate management platform that reached unicorn status in 2023 with a $1.12 billion valuation after raising $120 million in Series D funding. A UK-born entrepreneur who left school at 15 and became the youngest qualified helicopter pilot in his region at 17, Butt built his first software business from a flying school in Coventry and has spent over two decades turning overlooked operational problems in distribution and manufacturing into category-defining software companies. Enable now serves over 10,000 brands across 50+ industries and has raised more than $275 million total, with Butt positioning it as the system of record for all B2B rebate and trading agreements between manufacturers, distributors, and retailers.
Anil Dharni is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sense, a San Francisco-based AI-powered talent engagement platform that serves over 1,000 organizations. Before reshaping how companies hire, he co-founded Funzio, the mobile gaming studio behind 'Crime City' and 'Modern War,' which sold to GREE for $210 million in 2012. At Sense, backed by SoftBank with $106 million raised and a $500M valuation, he is on a mission to humanize the contingent workforce and make candidates feel genuinely valued through AI, automation, and omnichannel communication.
Asaf Ganot is the co-founder of ControlUp, the company that pioneered the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management category. He spent a decade as CEO building ControlUp from an Israeli VDI monitoring tool into a global enterprise software leader backed by $141M in funding, before transitioning to Executive Chairman and CEO of ControlUp Labs in 2023 to focus on product vision and innovation.
Chris Turlica is the CEO and Co-Founder of MaintainX, a San Francisco-based industrial operations platform that has raised $254M and reached a $2.5B valuation. A McGill commerce graduate who previously built and sold a consumer messaging startup, Turlica spotted a striking data point while at Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners — 80% of the global workforce is deskless, yet only 1% of enterprise software spend serves them. That insight became MaintainX, which now helps over 11,000 companies manage 11M+ assets and has transformed maintenance teams at companies including ABInBev, Duracell, Marriott, and McDonald's.
Christina Cacioppo is the co-founder and CEO of Vanta, the agentic trust management platform that has become the default infrastructure for security compliance among modern tech companies. After stints at Union Square Ventures and Dropbox Paper, she built Vanta from a spreadsheet prototype into a $4.15 billion company serving 12,000+ organizations across 58 countries, raising $504 million in total funding. She is one of America's self-made female billionaires, known for applying rigorous first-principles thinking to the usually-dull world of corporate security.
Dan Adler is the CEO of Sourcegraph, the code intelligence platform powering search and AI across 54 billion lines of code for companies like Uber, Stripe, and Atlassian. A Rice computer science graduate and Stanford MBA, Adler joined Sourcegraph in 2016 as an early employee - writing infrastructure code, selling the first contracts, and building every major business function from scratch - before being elevated to CEO in December 2025 when co-founder Quinn Slack spun out Amp Inc. He has shepherded the company from zero revenue to $50M ARR and a $2.6B valuation, and believes agentic AI will only amplify the need for enterprise-grade code context.
Daniel Villegas is Co-Founder and COO of Domestika, the world's fastest-growing online learning community for creative professionals. Starting from a scrappy Spanish-language forum in 2002, Daniel helped steer Domestika into a $1.3 billion unicorn with over 10 million members worldwide. Based in New York, he brings over two decades of experience across e-commerce, digital marketing, SEO, and startup operations — including earlier ventures as co-founder of Webpop and founder of Infohostal.com — making him one of the key architects of a platform that has trained millions of designers, illustrators, photographers, and creators globally.
Dhiraj Sharma is the Founder and CEO of Simpplr, the AI-powered employee experience platform that has raised $139M across four funding rounds, including a $70M Series D in 2023. A serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience, he previously founded Simplion Technologies and Lirik Inc. before co-founding Simpplr in 2014. Under his leadership, Simpplr has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Intranet Packaged Solutions, the Forrester Wave for Intranet Platforms, and the IDC MarketScape for Integrated Employee Workspaces, building a platform designed to make work more human for hundreds of enterprise clients.
Frank Mycroft is the co-founder and CEO of Booster, the tech-driven mobile energy delivery platform that dispatches custom mini-tankers directly to fleet and consumer vehicles - eliminating the gas station entirely. A Princeton-trained aerospace engineer who worked at NASA, Boeing, and an asteroid-mining startup before parenthood inspired him to reinvent how America fuels its cars, Mycroft has raised over $242 million and built Booster into a platform serving Amazon, UPS, PepsiCo, and hundreds of fleets across the U.S.
Hitoshi Harada is the Co-Founder, CTO, and CPO of Alpaca Markets - the fintech unicorn building what he calls the 'Global Financial OS.' A Keio University-trained computer scientist who rewrote parts of PostgreSQL (Window Functions, PL/v8), Harada spent years building distributed databases at Greenplum before co-founding Alpaca in 2015 with Yoshi Yokokawa. The company, named after an alpaca they spotted on a Silicon Valley billionaire's estate, has grown to command 94% of the global tokenized US equities market, serve 300+ financial institutions across 40+ countries, and reach unicorn status at $1.15B valuation with a $150M Series D in January 2026.
Guru Hariharan is the Founder and CEO of CommerceIQ, a unicorn-valued AI platform that helps 2,200+ consumer brands - from Nestle to Kellogg's - automate and optimize their retail ecommerce operations across Amazon, Walmart, and other major retailers. A veteran of Amazon and eBay, he co-invented the Amazon Selling Coach, sold his first company Boomerang Commerce's analytics unit to Lowe's in 2019, and pivoted to build CommerceIQ into a $136.6M ARR business by 2024. In May 2025, he launched AllyAI, a suite of agentic AI teammates purpose-built for retail - a product he describes as pioneering the next era of algorithmic commerce.
Harman Singh Narula is the Co-Founder and CEO of Canary Technologies, the hospitality industry's leading AI-powered guest management platform trusted by 20,000+ hotels across 100+ countries. A Cornell Hotel School and Wharton MBA graduate, Narula co-founded Canary in 2017 alongside childhood friend SJ Sawhney, tackling the hotel industry's notoriously outdated technology infrastructure one paper form at a time. What started as a solution to clunky credit card authorization forms has grown into a $600 million company backed by Y Combinator, Insight Partners, and Brighton Park Capital, with $175 million raised in total funding including an $80 million Series D in June 2025.
Henry Ehrenberg is Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Snorkel AI, the data-centric AI company he helped build out of Stanford's AI Lab in 2019. With a background in applied mathematics (Yale) and computational engineering (Stanford), Ehrenberg co-developed the Snorkel system — a paradigm-shifting framework for training machine learning models using programmatic weak supervision rather than hand-labeled data. Snorkel AI has raised $338M total, including a $100M Series D in May 2025 at a $1.3B valuation, and counts five of the top ten US banks, Fortune 500 companies, and leading research labs like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic among its clients.
Hubert Palan is the Czech-born founder and CEO of Productboard, the AI-powered product management platform used by 5,400+ companies including Salesforce, Zoom, and Microsoft. After earning an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and spending nearly four years as VP of Product at GoodData, he founded Productboard in 2014 with co-founder Daniel Hejl to solve a problem he'd lived firsthand: the disconnect between customer feedback, product strategy, and what actually gets built. The company reached unicorn status in 2022 with a $1.725B valuation following a $125M Series D, and Palan has since led a bold AI-first transformation of the platform with products like Productboard Spark and Productboard Pulse.
Ian Christopher is the Co-Founder and Chief Engineer of Qventus, the AI-powered hospital operations platform backed by KKR and Bessemer Venture Partners. A Stanford-trained computational engineer, he co-built Qventus from a 2012 YC startup into a $400M+ company that automates how hospitals manage patient flow, surgical scheduling, and care coordination - reducing staff burnout and cutting length of stay for major health systems across the US.
Jamie Hale is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ladder, the Palo Alto-based digital life insurance company that has issued over $42 billion in coverage and raised $194 million in venture funding. Motivated by losing his father at age 11 and experiencing firsthand the stabilizing power of a life insurance payout, Hale set out to strip the life insurance industry down to its essential truth: a pure, flexible term product that takes minutes to buy online, not weeks of paperwork. Ladder reached a $900 million valuation in its 2021 Series D and has tripled revenue year-over-year, making Hale one of the most prominent voices in insurtech.
Julio G. Cotorruelo is the co-founder and CEO of Domestika, the global online learning community for creative professionals. Starting in 2002 as a modest Spanish-language forum for designers in Madrid, Domestika grew under his leadership into a unicorn valued at $1.3 billion, with over 8 million members, 2,000+ courses, and a presence in six languages. A notoriously press-shy entrepreneur, Cotorruelo built one of the world's largest creative education platforms by championing affordable, pay-per-course learning and the belief that creativity is best learned through doing - not just reading.
Kurt Knight is the CEO of Foodsmart, the largest digital food-as-medicine platform in the United States, appointed in March 2025 after 13 years at Amwell where he rose to COO and helped scale virtual care nationally. With an MBA from Harvard, an MPH from Columbia, and field experience everywhere from UNICEF to the Gates Foundation to the Boston Consulting Group, Knight brings an unusually wide lens to the intersection of food, nutrition, and healthcare delivery.
Luke Han is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kyligence, the enterprise data analytics company built by the team that created Apache Kylin - the first Apache Software Foundation top-level project developed in China. A former eBay big data product lead, Han co-invented Apache Kylin in 2013, open-sourced it in 2014, then founded Kyligence in 2016 to commercialize the technology. Under his leadership, Kyligence raised $110M+ in funding including a $70M Series D, serves clients including UBS, McDonald's, and L'OREAL, and has evolved into an AI-powered metrics platform. Han is also a Microsoft Regional Director, Apache Kylin VP, Forbes Technology Council member, and Fortune China 40 Under 40 honoree.
Maayan Cohen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hello Heart, a Menlo Park-based digital therapeutics company focused exclusively on cardiovascular health. A former Israeli tank platoon commander turned strategy consultant, she built Hello Heart from a 2013 startup into a platform covering 1.6+ million members across Fortune 500 employers, backed by $148.5M in funding from investors including Khosla Ventures, IVP, and Stripes. Named to CNBC Changemakers 2024 and Inc. Female Founders 500 in 2025, Cohen is recognized for her empathy-driven leadership style - including managing her company from Tel Aviv bomb shelters during the 2023 Israel-Hamas war while providing housing and support for both Israeli and Palestinian staff.
Manu Sharma is the CEO and Co-founder of Labelbox, the leading AI data infrastructure platform that powers training data pipelines for frontier AI models. Born in Roorkee, India, he studied aerospace engineering at Embry-Riddle and Stanford before building CoPilot at DroneDeploy and leading data analytics at Planet Labs. In 2018, he co-founded Labelbox with former colleagues Brian Rieger and Daniel Rasmuson, raising $188.9M through a Series D led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Labelbox now serves as the command center for AI teams building and scaling production machine learning systems, from annotation and RLHF to evals and synthetic data generation.
Mathias (Matt) Biilmann Christensen is a Danish-born entrepreneur who went from music journalist to Silicon Valley CEO. He co-founded Netlify in 2014, coined the term 'Jamstack' that reshaped modern web development, and most recently introduced 'Agent Experience (AX)' — the idea that software must be designed not just for humans but for the AI agents that increasingly act on their behalf. Netlify now serves 35 million+ websites and raised $212M total including a $105M Series D in 2021.
Max Liu (刘奇) is co-founder and CEO of PingCAP, the company behind TiDB - an open-source distributed SQL database designed for hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP). He co-founded PingCAP in 2015 after stints at JD.com and Wandou Labs, solving the database scaling crisis at hyperscale. Under his leadership, PingCAP raised $341.6M in total funding including a $270M Series D, and TiDB now serves customers including Pinterest, Plaid, Bolt, and Atlassian. In 2025, Liu was named one of The Top 50 Software CEOs of 2024 by The Software Report.