Russell Beckerman is a biotech entrepreneur and Co-Founder & CEO of Overture Therapeutics, a Cambridge-based company engineering precision antibody medicines targeting obesity and metabolic dysfunction. He previously co-founded 82VS, a venture studio embedded within Alloy Therapeutics that has launched nine drug companies since 2020. His work sits at the intersection of cutting-edge antibody biology, company creation, and the conviction that the next generation of obesity drugs will be antibodies - not peptides.
EvenUp is a San Francisco-based legal-AI company building a Claims Intelligence Platform for personal injury law firms. Its proprietary Piai model and human-in-the-loop experts produce demand letters, medical chronologies, case insights, and drafting tools, helping over 2,000 firms resolve more than 200,000 cases and secure over $10 billion in damages for injury victims.
Alex Bouaziz is the co-founder and CEO of Deel, the $17.3 billion global HR and payroll platform that allows companies to hire anyone, anywhere. Born in Paris in 1993 and raised between France and Israel, Bouaziz studied civil engineering at Technion and MIT before pivoting to entrepreneurship. He co-founded Deel in 2019 with MIT classmate Shuo Wang after observing glaring pay inequities for international talent and experiencing firsthand the pain of paying overseas workers. Under his leadership, Deel surpassed $1 billion ARR in Q1 2025, raised $300 million in Series E funding at a $17.3 billion valuation in October 2025, and became one of the fastest-growing HR technology companies in history.
Augusto 'Aghi' Marietti is the CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc., the company behind the world's most widely deployed API gateway. Born in Rome in 1988, he co-founded Mashape at age 19 in a Milan garage, arrived in San Francisco with $600 and a 90-day visa, crashed on Travis Kalanick's couch, and built what became Kong - a $2 billion enterprise processing over 20 trillion API requests monthly. Known as the 'API Godfather,' Marietti has raised $424 million in total funding, surpassed $146M in annual recurring revenue with 800+ employees, and is now positioning Kong as the essential AI connectivity layer for the enterprise.
Bret Taylor is the co-founder and CEO of Sierra, an enterprise AI agent platform valued at $15.8 billion following its $950M Series E in May 2026. A Stanford computer science graduate, he co-created Google Maps, helped invent Facebook's Like button, served as Facebook CTO, co-founded Quip (acquired by Salesforce), and rose to co-CEO of Salesforce before founding Sierra in 2023. He also chairs the OpenAI board, having stabilized the company after Sam Altman's brief ouster in November 2023. Forbes recognized him as a billionaire in 2025, and Silicon Valley has nicknamed him the 'Forrest Gump of Silicon Valley' for his uncanny presence at every landmark moment in the internet age.
Clint Sharp is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cribl, a data infrastructure company valued at $3.5 billion that helps Fortune 500 enterprises route, filter, and control their telemetry data at scale. Before building Cribl, he spent five years as Senior Director of Product Management at Splunk, where he and his co-founders identified the problem that would become Cribl's founding mission: data volumes were exploding, budgets were not, and enterprises needed a vendor-agnostic way to manage what goes where. Under Sharp's leadership, Cribl grew from a 2017 idea to more than $200M in ARR, serving 43 Fortune 100 companies - all while he also briefly served as interim Chief Revenue Officer during a pivotal growth moment.
Danny Shader is the founder and CEO of PayNearMe, a Santa Clara-based fintech platform that processes over $50 billion annually for more than 20,000 businesses. A serial entrepreneur whose previous ventures were acquired by Amazon, Motorola, and Netscape, Shader built PayNearMe from a niche cash-payment network into PayXM, the industry's first full-stack Payment Experience Management platform. Backed by $245 million in total funding including a $50M Series E in September 2025, he has spent 15+ years turning a deceptively simple problem - helping the cash-dependent and underbanked pay their bills - into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise payments category.
Deepak Diwakar is the Co-Founder and COO of Mindtickle, the AI-powered revenue enablement platform that became a $1.2B unicorn in 2021. An IIT Bombay computer science graduate and former machine learning engineer at PubMatic, Diwakar built Mindtickle's technology infrastructure from the ground up, helping transform how enterprise sales teams learn, practice, and perform. Under his watch, Mindtickle raised $281M in total funding, hit $118M+ in revenue, and earned recognition as a Forrester Wave Leader in Revenue Enablement Platforms.
Jahangir Mohammed is a serial entrepreneur and inventor who built Jasper Technologies into the world's largest IoT platform - sold to Cisco for $1.4 billion in 2016 - then turned his attention to metabolic disease. As Founder and CEO of Twin Health, he is using AI-powered whole-body digital twin technology to reverse chronic conditions like Type 2 diabetes, with clinical results published in the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst showing 71% of participants achieving A1C below 6.5% while eliminating most medications. Twin Health has raised $335 million total and reached a $950 million valuation in 2025.
Jeff Schneble is the CEO of Human Interest, a San Francisco-based fintech company on a mission to close America's $28 trillion retirement savings gap by making 401(k) and 403(b) plans affordable and accessible for small and medium-sized businesses. A physicist turned venture capitalist turned operator, Schneble brought together a rare trifecta of academic rigor (PhD from Cambridge, MBA from Harvard), investment experience (Partner at Wing Venture Capital), and hands-on operational chops (Silver Lake Partners) before taking the helm at Human Interest in 2019. Under his leadership, the company has grown to serve over 45,000 companies, surpassed $200 million in ARR, raised over $1 billion in total funding at a $3 billion valuation, and is eyeing a public listing.
Jonathan Perichon is the Co-founder and CTO of Checkr, Inc., a San Francisco-based AI-powered background screening platform he co-founded in 2014 with Daniel Yanisse. A French-born software engineer who discovered the gig economy's broken background check infrastructure while working at an LA startup, Perichon turned that frustration into a $4.6 billion company serving over 100,000 clients including DoorDash, Lyft, Coinbase, and Uber. A Y Combinator S14 alumnus who applied three times before getting in, he embodies the principle that persistence and execution beat credentials every time.
Laura Behrens Wu is the founder and CEO of Shippo, a San Francisco-based shipping platform that she built after getting frustrated trying to ship handbags from her own e-commerce store. What started as a personal pain point in 2013 became a unicorn company valued at over $1 billion, serving 100,000+ merchants with a multi-carrier shipping API. Born in Germany and raised across four continents - China, Ecuador, Egypt, and Germany - Laura dropped out of her master's program at University of St. Gallen to move to San Francisco, interned at a Y Combinator startup, and co-founded Shippo at 28. She tracked 125 investor conversations, absorbed 115+ rejections, and raised $154.3M in total funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, and D1 Capital Partners, including a $50M Series E in 2021.
Larry Liu is the Founder and CEO of Weee!, North America's largest and fastest-growing Asian online grocery platform. Born in Wuhan, China, he came to the US via an Intel engineering role in 2003, earned an MBA from UC Davis in 2008, and launched Weee! in 2015 after noticing Chinese immigrants using WeChat to organize group grocery buys. He built the company from a Bay Area WeChat group into a $4.1 billion unicorn with $1 billion in annual revenue, delivering 1 million orders per month across 40+ states and serving seven ethnic cuisines including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian, and Hispanic communities.
Liran Zvibel is the Co-Founder and CEO of WEKA, a Campbell, California-based AI-native data platform company valued at $1.6 billion. He co-founded WEKA in 2013 after earlier stints at XIV Storage Systems (acquired by IBM) and Fusic, bringing deep expertise in high-performance distributed storage. Under his leadership, WEKA has raised $465M+ in funding, surpassed $100M in annual recurring revenue, and built a platform powering 300+ of the world's largest AI and GPU deployments including 11 of the Fortune 50. A former Israeli military Captain who earned the Israeli Defence Award, Zvibel holds a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.
Masahiro 'Masa' Shimizu is the Founder & CEO of ZEALS Co., Ltd. and Omakase.ai, the Japanese pioneer of Chat Commerce. He started ZEALS as a Meiji University freshman in 2014 with robots and a mission to 'elevate Japan,' pivoted to chatbots within one month of Facebook opening its Messenger API in 2016, built Japan's #1 social chat commerce platform with 300+ employees and $69M+ raised, and is now taking that same hospitality-first philosophy — what he calls 'Omotenashi' — into voice-powered AI agents for global e-commerce through Omakase.ai.
Milin Desai is the CEO of Sentry, the developer-first error monitoring and application performance platform trusted by over 4 million developers and 100,000+ organizations. A computer engineer by training with a master's from USC, Desai spent nearly a decade at VMware scaling the NSX network virtualization product line into a billion-dollar business before joining Sentry in January 2020. Under his leadership, Sentry raised a $90 million Series E in 2022 (total funding $219.75M), achieved unicorn status at a $3B+ valuation, surpassed $100M ARR, and grew to process 790+ billion events per month - all while staying true to its open-source, developer-first ethos and charging one-third of what competitors ask.
Rajesh Ramanand is the Co-Founder and CEO of Signifyd, the enterprise fraud prevention platform that put its money where its mouth is - literally. Instead of selling scores, Signifyd guarantees merchants against fraud losses, backing every decision with a financial guarantee. Built on a decade of risk expertise at FedEx and PayPal, Ramanand transformed a two-desk startup into a $1.34B+ company serving the world's largest retailers, raising $411M in the process.
Rami Karabibar is the CEO and co-founder of EvenUp, a San Francisco-based AI legal tech company he co-founded in 2019 with Raymond Mieszaniec and Saam Mashhad. After observing the massive inefficiencies in personal injury claim handling during his time at Waymo, he built EvenUp into the dominant AI platform for plaintiff personal injury law - now valued at over $2 billion following a $150M Series E in October 2025. The platform has resolved 200,000+ cases and secured over $10 billion in damages for injury victims, serving 2,000+ U.S. law firms.
Sadi Khan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aven, a San Francisco-based fintech unicorn valued at $2.2 billion that created the world's first home equity-backed credit card. A University of Waterloo computer engineering graduate, Khan spent over a decade at Facebook leading product for Internet.org, Maps, Search, and Ads before co-founding Aven in 2019. Aven has since issued over $3 billion in credit lines, saved consumers more than $215 million in interest, and raised $252 million in total funding. Known for his maximally rational decision-making style and habit of wearing the same outfit every day to reduce cognitive load, Khan aims to build America's first 'machine banking' platform and democratize access to home equity for millions of homeowners.
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.
PayNearMe runs PayXM, a payment experience management platform that lets non-commerce billers (lenders, iGaming operators, tolling agencies, property managers and credit unions) accept and disburse money across cash, cards, ACH, and every major mobile wallet from a single integration. Founded in 2009 in Santa Clara by serial entrepreneur Danny Shader, it started by digitizing cash at 7-Eleven and has grown into a platform processing payments for thousands of organizations including the State of California, Comcast and Santander.
WEKA builds a software-defined data platform engineered for AI and HPC workloads, feeding GPUs and CPUs with low-latency, high-throughput storage across on-prem, cloud, edge and hybrid environments. Its NeuralMesh architecture underpins hundreds of the world's largest AI deployments, including model builders, hyperscale neoclouds, and Fortune 50 enterprises.
Shiv Rao is the CEO and co-founder of Abridge, the AI platform transforming clinical conversations into structured medical documentation. A practicing cardiologist at UPMC and history-major-turned-physician, Rao founded Abridge in 2018 out of personal frustration with nightly dictation sessions. The company, now valued at $5.3 billion after raising $300M in Series E in 2025, deploys across 150+ U.S. health systems including Mayo Clinic, Duke Health, and Johns Hopkins, supports 28 languages and 55 medical specialties, and is used by over 50,000 clinicians. Rao is equal parts cardiologist, technologist, and artist — a former DJ, skateboarder, and avant-garde music producer whose unconventional path runs straight through the operating room.
Sid Gupta is the Co-Founder and CEO of Quince, a San Francisco-based manufacturer-to-consumer (M2C) brand that sells luxury-quality cashmere, silk, and home goods at a fraction of traditional retail prices. Founded in 2018 alongside his wife Zunu Mittal and CTO Sourabh Mahajan, Quince reached a $10.1 billion valuation in March 2026 after raising a $500M Series E led by Iconiq Capital. Before Quince, Gupta built Lolli & Pops, a specialty candy retail chain, from 11 struggling locations to nearly 100 stores across 28 states. A University of Chicago economics graduate and Stanford MBA, he has spent his career dissecting pricing inefficiencies in consumer retail - and building businesses to exploit them.
Evan Kaplan is the CEO of InfluxData, the company behind InfluxDB - the world's most popular open-source time series database with over 1.3 million developers. With nearly 20 years in CEO roles across multiple companies, he took InfluxData from a scrappy open-source project of 3,000 users to a platform handling billions of data points per second for 1,900+ enterprise customers. His path to the C-suite ran not through computer science but through environmental science degrees and years spent as a mountain guide in his late 20s - an unconventional origin story that shows up in how he thinks about resilience and long-term endurance.
Rick Fitz is the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board at Contrast Security, the application security company behind the 'Shift Smart' approach to securing software from within. A 25-year enterprise software veteran, Fitz came to the role in April 2023 after six-plus years as SVP and General Manager of Splunk's IT Operations and Application Development Market Group, where he steered the company through landmark acquisitions including SignalFX. At Contrast, he leads a 240-person company with $274M in total funding as it works to redefine how developers and security teams find and fix vulnerabilities at runtime - inside applications as they run, rather than scanning from the outside.
Brian Dye is the CEO of Corelight, the network detection and response (NDR) company behind the enterprise deployment of Zeek, the open-source network security monitor trusted by the U.S. military, major banks, and critical infrastructure operators worldwide. After a 20-year career spanning Symantec, McAfee, Citrix, and Intel, Dye joined Corelight as CPO in 2018 and was elevated to CEO in August 2020. Under his leadership the company has grown 40% annually, expanded its cloud/SaaS business by 300%, secured a $150M Series E at a $900M valuation in April 2024, and positioned itself at the intersection of AI-driven automation and high-fidelity network evidence.
Jonathan Siddharth is the CEO and Co-founder of Turing, a $2.2 billion AI-powered talent and AGI infrastructure company based in San Francisco. A Stanford CS alum with a lifelong obsession with artificial intelligence, he built his first neural network as a teenager to drive a simulated car. After founding and selling Rover (an AI content discovery app) for ~$30M, he launched Turing in 2018 to build the world's largest intelligent developer talent cloud. Today, Turing partners with frontier AI labs including OpenAI to train and improve the world's most capable language models, and counts Fortune 500 companies among its 900+ enterprise clients. He has raised $334M in total funding and led Turing to over $167M in annualized revenue.
Zach Perret is the co-founder and CEO of Plaid, the financial infrastructure company that quietly powers the apps half of America uses every day. He and co-founder William Hockey built Plaid from a hackathon project in 2013 into a $8B+ company connecting over 500 million bank accounts to thousands of financial apps - including Venmo, Robinhood, and Coinbase. After famously walking away from a $5.3B Visa acquisition in 2021 (called a 'blessing in disguise'), Perret rebuilt Plaid as an independent company, reaching $546M ARR and profitability before raising a $575M Series E in 2025. A symphony conductor's son from North Carolina, he runs Plaid like he leads: with timing, rhythm, and an eye on what everyone else is missing.