series-d
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The Startup Trying to Kill the Military's Most Dangerous Weapon: PowerPoint
A West Point officer watched treatment units get built where the virus had already left. He sketched the fix on a napkin. Six years later it is worth $2.15 billion.
Alex Chatzieleftheriou
He spent five years living out of hotel rooms as a consultant. Then he built the company that lets you move into a city with nothing but a suitcase.
Tejas Manohar
Tejas Manohar is the cofounder and co-CEO of Hightouch, the San Francisco company that helped create the Composable CDP category by bringing customer data platform capabilities directly onto the data warehouse. He moved to San Francisco at 16 to become one of Segment's first ten engineers, then left in 2018 to start Hightouch with Kashish Gupta and Josh Curl. Under his leadership Hightouch has crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue and raised a $150M Series D in April 2026 at a $2.75B valuation, pivoting the company toward AI Decisioning and agentic marketing.
CORXEL Pharmaceuticals
CORXEL Pharmaceuticals is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing innovative therapies for cardiometabolic diseases worldwide. Spun out of RTW Investments in 2019 (formerly JiXing Pharmaceuticals) and dual-based in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey and Shanghai, CORXEL is advancing a pipeline led by CX11, a differentiated oral small-molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist for obesity and type 2 diabetes, alongside JX10 for acute ischemic stroke and JX09 for hypertension. In January 2026 the company raised up to $287 million in Series D1 financing to push these programs through late-stage clinical trials.
Farther
Farther is a New York-based technology-driven wealth management firm that pairs human financial advisors with a proprietary 'Intelligent Wealth Platform.' Founded in 2019 by Taylor Matthews and Brad Genser, the company gives advisors an all-in-one digital ecosystem for financial planning, investing, tax optimization, and estate planning, while offering clients a family-office-style experience. After a $150 million Series D led by General Atlantic in 2026, Farther has grown to roughly $23 billion in recruited assets and ranks among the fastest-growing financial services firms in the United States.
Snappy
Snappy is a New York-based corporate gifting platform that flips the traditional gift on its head: instead of shipping one preselected item, a sender picks a budget and a curated collection, and the recipient chooses the gift they actually want. Founded in 2015 by Hani Goldstein and Dvir Cohen, Snappy started in personal gifting before pivoting to enterprise, and now powers employee recognition, customer loyalty, and sales incentives for thousands of companies. Its recipient-choice model, digital 'unwrapping' experience, thank-you loop, and deep HRIS integrations have made it a favorite of HR and people teams, with more than 6 million gifts delivered across 170+ countries.
Wandercraft
Wandercraft is a French robotics company that builds self-balancing walking exoskeletons and, more recently, industrial humanoid robots. Founded in Paris in 2012 by engineers - some with personal ties to degenerative mobility disease - it created Atalante X, a hands-free clinical exoskeleton now used in more than 100 rehabilitation centers, and Eve, the first self-balancing personal exoskeleton designed for home use without crutches. In 2025 the company extended its gait-control expertise into Calvin, a family of industrial humanoids developed with Renault Group and NVIDIA. Wandercraft's stated aim is to blend frontier AI with high-performance hardware to help people work and walk.
Erik Bakstad
Erik Bakstad is the CEO and co-founder of Ardoq, an Oslo-based SaaS company reinventing enterprise architecture for the digital enterprise. A developer and software architect by training, he spent the company's first six years as CTO before moving into product leadership and, in February 2021, the CEO seat. Under his watch Ardoq raised a $125 million Series D, earned repeat placement in Gartner's Magic Quadrant, and now serves global brands such as ExxonMobil, MUFG, and Primark. A self-described former hockey player turned geek, Bakstad is a recognized voice on the intersection of enterprise architecture and AI.
Hani Goldstein
Hani Goldstein is the co-founder and CEO of Snappy, the corporate gifting platform she started in 2015 with Dvir Cohen. Under her leadership Snappy has delivered more than six million gifts and become a gifting partner to a large share of the Fortune 100, including Microsoft, Zoom, Comcast and Uber. She has raised roughly $130 million across four rounds through a Series D in 2024, and guided the company through a swag-and-merchandise expansion with its 2025 acquisition of Covver. Goldstein operates by a simple mantra, 'do good,' and built Snappy around the idea that small moments of recognition can change how people feel about their work and each other.
Jake Cooper
Jake Cooper is the CEO and co-founder of Grow Therapy, a New York based company building the infrastructure that lets therapists and psychiatric providers run insurance-covered private practices. Since 2020 he has grown it into a national network spanning 125+ insurers and tens of thousands of providers, raising $388 million to date, including a $150 million Series D in 2026. A former Blackstone and Apollo private equity investor and summa cum laude Duke graduate, Cooper is focused on making mental health care easier to find, afford, and stick with.
James Reinstein
James Reinstein is the President and CEO of Conformal Medical, a New Hampshire medical device company building next-generation left atrial appendage occlusion (LAAO) technology to reduce stroke risk in patients with atrial fibrillation. A three-decade medtech operator, he spent 17 years at Boston Scientific in commercial leadership across Asia, Europe and Latin America before running a string of device companies as CEO, including Cutera, Drawbridge Health, Aptus Endosystems and Saranas. Known for insisting that a device company think commercially from day one, he took the helm at Conformal in 2022 to guide its foam-based CLAAS system through pivotal trials toward market.
Max Junestrand
Max Junestrand is the 26-year-old co-founder and CEO of Legora, the Stockholm-based collaborative legal AI workspace that grew from a single Swedish law firm to 800 customers in 50+ markets, most recently valued at $5.55 billion after a $550M Series D led with participation from top-tier funds.
Melbourne O'Banion
Melbourne O'Banion is the co-founder and CEO of Bestow, a Dallas-based digital life insurance platform that shrunk a four-to-six-week underwriting process into a five-minute checkout. After stints founding Presidio Title and co-founding luxury skincare brand Beauty Bioscience with his wife, he teamed up with Jonathan Abelmann in 2017 to build the first fully digital life insurance carrier, later pivoting into SaaS infrastructure for incumbent carriers. Bestow closed a $120M Series D led by Goldman Sachs and Smith Point Capital in May 2025.
Misha Esipov
Misha Esipov is the co-founder and CEO of Nova Credit, a San Francisco-based credit infrastructure company that translates international credit histories and consumer-permissioned bank data into underwriting decisions for lenders. Born in the Soviet Union and raised in the US, he founded the company in 2016 out of Stanford GSB after stints at Goldman Sachs, Apollo Global Management and Google. Nova Credit closed a $35M Series D in October 2025 led by Socium Ventures.
Samantha Malone
Samantha Malone is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Farther, the New York-based wealthtech that turned unicorn in early 2026 on the back of a $150M Series D led by General Atlantic. She joined roughly five months before the round closed - her first startup - after an MBA at Chicago Booth and stints at McKinsey, Skydio, GoDaddy, and Apple's global finance projects. A Bay Area kid who commuted through Santa Clara's business school a year early, she is the person building the deck, running the room, and stitching the operating rhythm as Farther scales past $23B in recruited assets.
Sandy Mou
Sandy Mou, MD, is the Chief Executive Officer and Board Executive Director of CORXEL Pharmaceuticals, a New Jersey- and Shanghai-linked biotech developing an oral small molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist for obesity and diabetes. A Fudan-trained clinician turned pharma executive with nearly three decades at GSK, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and MSD, she led MSD China's oncology unit into the country's top three within three years and later took Shanghai Allist public on the STAR Market before joining JIXING - now CORXEL - in early 2023.
Wendelin Maners
Wendelin Maners is the President and CEO of CSA Medical, the Lexington, Massachusetts medical-device company behind the RejuvenAir System, a liquid-nitrogen cryospray technology delivered by bronchoscope. A finance-trained dealmaker who spent years buying and licensing emerging technologies for Boston Scientific, Maners moved from the deal table to the operating chair, taking the top job at CSA Medical in December 2019 and steering the company through an oversubscribed $53 million Series D and a fully enrolled pivotal trial on the road to FDA approval.
John Tenet
John Tenet is the co-founder and CEO of CHAOS Industries, a Los Angeles defense technology company he started in 2022 that reached a $4.5 billion valuation in three years on the strength of its Coherent Distributed Networks - a synchronization-based platform that spots airborne threats like drones and missiles roughly ten minutes faster than legacy radar. A former finance and venture operator at Allen & Company, Valar Ventures and 8VC, and a co-founder of counter-drone pioneer Epirus, Tenet has raised over $1 billion for CHAOS and recruited his father, former CIA Director George J. Tenet, as executive chairman.
Justin Holland
Justin Holland is the co-founder and CEO of HealthJoy, a Chicago-based digital health company that turns the maze of employee benefits into a single AI-guided app. An MIT-trained engineer and serial entrepreneur with two prior exits (OpenInstall to AVG/Avast and FreeCause to Rakuten), he started HealthJoy in 2014 after a personal run-in with the American healthcare system left him unable to find out what his own care would cost. He has led the company for more than a decade, raised roughly $108M in venture financing through a Series D, and built a platform now used by hundreds of thousands of members to navigate care, cut costs, and reach a virtual assistant named JOY.
Milo Krastev
Milo Krastev is the co-founder of Foodsmart (formerly Zipongo), the San Francisco company that turned nutrition into a covered health benefit for more than three million Americans. He spent a decade as the company's CFO and Head of Growth before handing off the finance chair in 2025 to run strategy and business development full time. Before Foodsmart he moved through the rooms where big money gets allocated - investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, activist investing at ValueAct Capital, and financial strategy at Palantir - then bet the whole resume on the idea that food, not just pills, belongs on a prescription pad.
Benjamin Encz
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.
Fore Biotherapeutics
Fore Biotherapeutics is a Philadelphia-based, registration-stage precision oncology company developing targeted therapies for patients with hard-to-treat cancers. Its lead candidate, plixorafenib, is a next-generation BRAF inhibitor (a 'dimer breaker') aimed at BRAF-altered solid tumors, including BRAF V600E-mutated high-grade glioma, for which it received FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation in 2026. Spun out of the Israeli functional-genomics company NovellusDx, Fore has raised more than $200M to push plixorafenib toward an accelerated FDA approval pathway.
AT Nakanishi
AT Nakanishi (Atsushi Nakanishi) is the founder and CEO of Triple W, the company behind DFree, the world's first personal wearable ultrasound sensor that predicts toilet timing. He launched the company in 2015 with high school and college friends, took it from Tokyo to Berkeley, and steered it to a Best of CES award and Series D funding. A self-described non-engineer who built a hardware company from zero, Nakanishi blends business pragmatism with a stubborn focus on solving an unglamorous, very human problem.
Graham Rihn
Graham Rihn is the founder and CEO of RoadRunner, a Pittsburgh-based company that uses data and AI to modernize commercial waste and recycling. A Cornell economics grad and former college linebacker who grew up in Allison Park, Pennsylvania, Rihn started RoadRunner in New York City in 2014 after watching garbage pile up on Manhattan streets and asking why an $85 billion industry had skipped the technology revolution. He moved the company to his hometown of Pittsburgh in 2017 and grew it from roughly 30 people in three cities to more than 500 employees serving over 12,000 customers nationwide, raising more than $150 million along the way, including a $70 million Series D led by General Atlantic.
Jason Davis
Jason Davis is the co-founder and CEO of Simon AI (formerly Simon Data), a New York customer data platform that rebranded around agentic AI in 2025. A machine-learning PhD who built search algorithms at Google, he founded the ad-tech startup Adtuitive, sold it to Etsy in 2009, then ran Etsy's search and data teams as the marketplace grew from $180M to a $1B+ run rate. He and grad-school friend Matt Walker started Simon to give marketers direct, governed access to the data trapped inside their own warehouses. The company has raised roughly $117.8M, including a $54M Series D led by Macquarie Group.
John Waldmann
John Waldmann is the founder and CEO of Homebase, the team-management app built for the people who run local businesses - restaurants, salons, retail shops and the hourly teams behind them. Started in 2014 after watching a childhood friend drown in paper schedules and his sister juggle unpredictable bartending shifts, Homebase now serves more than 150,000 businesses and 3.8 million workers, processing hundreds of millions of shifts a year with scheduling, time clocks, payroll, messaging and earned-wage access. A Stanford GSB grad who once sold tuxedos and started his first online business at 13, Waldmann is an unapologetic believer in accountability over consensus, 'operating velocity,' and the idea that AI will create more small business owners, not fewer.
Jon Meachin
Jon Meachin is the CEO of Fleetio, the Birmingham, Alabama-based fleet management software company that crossed a $1.5 billion valuation in 2025 after raising more than $450 million in Series D funding and acquiring maintenance-authorization platform Auto Integrate. A finance-and-operations executive by training, he joined Fleetio as Chief Operating Officer in 2022 and took the top job in May 2023 when founder Tony Summerville moved to executive chairman. Before Fleetio he was COO of A Cloud Guru, VP of Finance at Campaign Monitor, and started his career as an investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley. The Software Report named him one of the Top 50 SaaS CEOs of 2023. Together with Auto Integrate, the company now touches roughly 8 million vehicles and 13+ million repair orders a year across a network of 110,000+ repair shops.
Mazy Dar
Mazy Dar is the CEO and co-founder of Here (formerly OpenFin), a New York workspace-software company that grew out of Wall Street trading floors into an enterprise browser used to fight the 'toggle tax' - the four hours a week knowledge workers lose flipping between apps. A Cornell computer-science and French-literature grad who started as a UBS programmer, Dar built and sold the electronic credit-derivatives business at Creditex (a $625M sale to ICE) before founding OpenFin in 2010 to modernize how applications reach enterprise desktops. In 2024 he rebranded the company to Here, launched an enterprise browser built on Chromium, and raised a $35M Series D to take the technology beyond finance.
Rick Luebbe
Rick Luebbe is the CEO and co-founder of Group14 Technologies, the Woodinville, Washington company behind SCC55, a silicon-carbon battery material that boosts energy density up to 50% and enables extreme fast charging. A former Army aviation officer who flew scout helicopters in Desert Storm and later commanded an Apache attack company, he traded the cockpit for a Stanford MBA and three startups. After building B2B integrator Hubspan and selling battery-materials pioneer EnerG2 to BASF in 2016, he spun out Group14 in 2015 with co-founder Rick Costantino. The company has raised more than $1 billion, including a $463M Series D, and is building the world's largest factory for advanced silicon battery materials. His mission, stated plainly: electrify everything.
Formation Bio
Formation Bio is a New York-based, AI-native pharmaceutical company that acquires and in-licenses clinical-stage drug candidates and runs them through a proprietary, technology-driven development platform to bring treatments to patients faster and at lower cost. Formerly known as TrialSpark, the company rebranded in December 2023 and raised a $372M Series D in June 2024 led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sanofi. It pairs in-house drug selection expertise with AI tools for trial design, recruitment, regulatory writing, and safety monitoring, and partnered with OpenAI and Sanofi to build purpose-built AI agents for drug development.