Shruti Gupta is the founder and CEO of Zania, a Palo Alto startup building agentic AI 'teammates' that execute governance, risk, and compliance work end to end. Before founding Zania in 2023, she spent years inside security teams at Microsoft Identity, Airbnb, Instacart, and Brex, moving from founding security engineer to CISO. In September 2025 Zania raised an $18 million Series A led by NEA, backed by the Anthology Fund (Menlo Ventures and Anthropic) and a syndicate of operators from Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and PwC. Her pitch is simple: stop shipping compliance tools that organize work, and start shipping AI that does the work.
Sam Li is co-founder and CEO of Thoropass, the New York-based information security compliance and audit platform formerly known as Laika. He grew up in Shanghai, studied computer science and economics at the University of Virginia, worked at Goldman Sachs and Google, dropped out of Harvard Business School to run a YC-backed insurtech called Zinc Platform, watched it die, spent a year as an EIR at Bain Capital Ventures, then in 2019 co-founded a company to make SOC 2 audits less miserable. Thoropass has raised roughly $98 million across four rounds and now combines software with a licensed audit practice.
Karun Kaushik is the co-founder and CEO of Delve, a San Francisco AI compliance startup he launched in 2023 with fellow MIT student Selin Kocalar after the pair dropped out sophomore year. What began as an AI medical scribe pivoted into automated SOC 2, HIPAA and ISO 27001 compliance after the founders ran into the paperwork themselves. Delve raced through Y Combinator to a $32M Series A led by Insight Partners at a reported $300M valuation, landed both founders on Forbes 30 Under 30, and served more than 1,500 companies before a 2026 whistleblower controversy put its audit practices under a harsh spotlight.
Arash Jafari is the CEO and co-founder of Clearpol, a San Francisco healthtech company that builds AI to help post-acute and long-term care providers manage regulatory compliance and clinical risk. A former NASA JPL and Langley engineer, he traded interplanetary robotics simulations and severe-weather prediction for one of healthcare's least glamorous frontiers: the survey deficiency. Clearpol's AI now acts as a 'co-pilot' for skilled nursing facilities, drafting Plans of Correction, monitoring clinical data, and flagging regulatory risk before it escalates - trusted by 900+ facilities, with 3,000+ Plans of Correction written.
Bruno Lecoq is the French-born co-founder, CEO and Chief Information Security Officer of BEMO, a Redmond, Washington cybersecurity and compliance company built for small and mid-sized businesses living inside the Microsoft cloud. After roughly two decades at Microsoft - working across MS-DOS, Windows, Exchange, Office and the hardware supply chain before becoming a director of business processes - he left to fix a gap he kept seeing: real, affordable security for companies too small for an enterprise security team. Since 2010 BEMO has grown into a Microsoft Direct CSP and US Partner of the Year, a back-to-back Inc 5000 honoree, and the maker of a SaaS platform that automates Microsoft 365 security and compliance for over a thousand businesses.
Aayush Ghosh Choudhury is the Co-Founder and CEO of Scrut Automation, a SaaS-based GRC platform that automates compliance and risk management for mid-market and enterprise companies. A former McKinsey consultant and IIT Ropar / ISB graduate, he co-built Scrut after experiencing firsthand how compliance bottlenecks stall enterprise sales - discovering the solution while trying to sell a different product entirely. Under his leadership, Scrut has grown to 800+ customers globally, raised $20.5M from Lightspeed, MassMutual Ventures, and Endiya Partners, earned a LinkedIn Top 20 Startup 2024 ranking, and been recognized by G2 as a fastest-growing and highest-satisfaction product in security compliance.