Deniz Kavi is the co-founder and CEO of Tamarind Bio, a San Francisco company that turns hundreds of complex computational-biology models - AlphaFold, RFdiffusion, OpenFold and more - into a point-and-click web tool and API so scientists can design drug candidates without writing code or wrangling cloud infrastructure. A Stanford computer-science graduate who did computational-biology research and engineered software at Stanford School of Medicine, he started the company in 2023 with co-founder Sherry Liu, went through Y Combinator's W24 batch, and in February 2026 raised a $13.6M Series A led by Dimension Capital. Tamarind now serves 10,000+ scientists, including 8 of the top 20 global pharma companies, and was tapped to run the inference infrastructure behind Eli Lilly's TuneLab 2.0.
Dhruv Amin is the co-founder and co-CEO of Anything (formerly Create), a San Francisco AI app-building platform that turns plain English into working software, complete with databases, payments, and App Store submission. A Stanford computer scientist and former early YouTube product manager, he and co-founder Marcus Lowe shut down a profitable $2M-a-year freelance-developer marketplace in 2023 because they believed AI would make it obsolete, then rebuilt from scratch. The bet paid off: Anything hit a $2M annual revenue run rate within two weeks of its 2025 relaunch and raised an $11M Series A at a $100M valuation.
Dilpreet Sahota is the co-founder and CEO of Trek Health, a San Mateo-based, AI-powered platform that turns the federal price-transparency data dump into a weapon healthcare providers can use to benchmark and negotiate their payer contracts. Founded in January 2022, Trek Health landed its first paying customer two months later, crossed 100 customers by late 2024, and raised an $11M Series A led by Madrona in 2025. A Stanford and UC Berkeley graduate who cut his teeth at Health IQ and Big Health, Sahota built Trek to attack a quietly brutal problem: identical medical services can be reimbursed at rates that vary 300-500%, and the smaller players almost never know it.
Don Le is the co-founder and CEO of Everest Education (E2), a Ho Chi Minh City-based edtech company that brings blended Math and English enrichment, test prep, and college admissions help to students from Grade 1 to 12. A Stanford economics graduate who started out at Bain & Company and Red Mountain Capital, he moved to Vietnam in 2007 and helped build finance, technology, and consumer businesses, including Highlands Coffee and Pho 24 operator Viet Thai International, before turning to education. Everest has raised about $5.4M, capped by a $4M Series B in 2019, and in 2022 launched a joint venture with Spark Education to localize world-class online learning for Vietnam.
James Kanoff is the co-founder and CEO of Terradot, a climate company using enhanced rock weathering to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by spreading crushed silicate rock across farmland. He launched Terradot in 2024 with $58.2M in funding, including a $54M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins and backing from Google, Microsoft, John Doerr and Sheryl Sandberg, and has already signed some of the largest carbon-removal deals in the field's history. Before Terradot, while a Stanford undergraduate sent home during the COVID-19 pandemic, he co-founded The Farmlink Project, a nonprofit that has rescued well over 130 million pounds of surplus food for communities facing hunger.
Griffin Dunaif is the co-founder and CEO of Halliday, a San Francisco blockchain startup building the first agentic workflow protocol - infrastructure that lets developers ship onchain applications without writing smart contracts. A Stanford computer science graduate (2023) who left to build, Dunaif started Halliday in 2022 as a buy-now-pay-later tool for gamers, then pivoted to the broader bet that workflows, not contracts, are how AI agents will safely operate onchain. The company has raised $26 million total, including a $20 million Series A led by a16z crypto in March 2025.
Eugene Beh is the founder and CEO of Quino Energy, a clean-tech startup commercializing water-based redox flow batteries that store grid-scale renewable energy using quinones - organic molecules dissolved in water. A chemist trained at Harvard and Stanford, he spun the technology out of Harvard's Aziz and Gordon labs and built a single-step, zero-waste manufacturing process that turns coal-tar feedstock into non-flammable battery electrolyte. Before Quino, he was Xerox PARC's most prolific inventor two years running.
Iain Usiri is the co-founder and CEO of Ramani, a Tanzanian fintech building financial infrastructure for Africa's consumer-packaged-goods supply chains. A Stanford computer science graduate and former Salesforce product manager, he gave up his US immigration status and flew home one-way in 2019 to start the company with his brother Calvin and friend Martin Kibet. Ramani gives micro distribution centers free point-of-sale and inventory software, then monetizes through lending - and in 2022 raised a $32M Series A led by Flexcap Ventures after passing through Y Combinator's W20 batch.
Frederic Dijols is the co-founder and CEO of Mixlab, a veterinary-exclusive pet pharmacy that compounds custom medications and delivers them fast and free to pet parents and the vets who prescribe them. A French-trained engineer with degrees from Ecole Polytechnique, Stanford, and Harvard Business School, he traded a healthcare-banking seat at J.P. Morgan for a pharmacy floor after a miserable experience getting meds for his aging pug, Bob. Since 2017 he has raised roughly $46.5M and built Mixlab into a multi-state operation pairing pharmacist-grade compounding with consumer-grade delight.
Gajus Worthington is a life sciences entrepreneur, engineer, and inventor who turned an idea for circuits that move fluid instead of electrons into Fluidigm, a microfluidics company he co-founded in 1999 and led as CEO through its IPO and years as a public company. Today he is Chairman and CEO of Superfluid Dx, a South San Francisco company building a blood test that reads cell-free messenger RNA from the brain to diagnose Alzheimer's disease earlier and more precisely. Between those chapters he served as COO of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, co-founded Kaizen Therapeutics and the ML/AI healthcare company StatOS, and became a Managing Partner at WRQ Sciences.
Grant Sohn is the co-founder and co-CEO of Spoqa, the Seoul-based company behind Dodo Point, Korea's #1 offline rewards service, which grew past 20 million users and 10,000+ merchant partners. A Stanford economics graduate and former McKinsey analyst, he left consulting in the United States to build loyalty software for brick-and-mortar shops in South Korea. In 2018 he co-founded Carry Protocol, a blockchain venture aiming to give shoppers control of their own transaction data, and after selling Dodo Point to Yanolja in 2022, he refocused Spoqa on restaurants with Kitchenboard.
Greg Maged is the cofounder and CEO of SEEN Hair Care, a dermatologist-developed haircare brand he launched in 2018 with Harvard-trained dermatologist Dr. Iris Rubin. SEEN built its business on a single idea - that hair care is skin care - making shampoos and styling products engineered not to clog pores or irritate sensitive scalps. Before beauty, Maged spent decades in finance and consulting: McKinsey, then chief of staff to Charles Schwab's founder, then cofounding the online advisor Bicycle Financial. He has steered SEEN to 100% compounded annual growth, a $9 million Series A backed by marquee investors, and shelf space in every Ulta Beauty store in the country.
Hamza Alsamraee is the co-founder and CEO of NewForm, a New York based performance marketing company built around short-form content and AI. Before startups, he was a teenage math phenomenon: he self-published the #1 Amazon bestseller Advanced Calculus Explored at 16, followed by Paradoxes at 18, and built Daily Math into one of the largest math communities on Instagram with hundreds of millions of views. A 2020 Strogatz Prize winner and a Stanford dropout in math and management science, he is originally from Baghdad, Iraq, where a TV documentary once dubbed him 'Iraq's Einstein.'
Hasan Imam is the CEO of Obsidian Security, the SaaS security company protecting Fortune 1000 and Forbes Global 2000 enterprises across their cloud applications, AI agents, and integrations. He took the helm in 2021 when revenue was under $1 million and COVID had gutted the pipeline, then rebuilt the product and team and pushed Obsidian to win head-to-head customer evaluations more than 80% of the time. Before Obsidian, he grew Shape Security from under $3M to nearly $90M in revenue, ending in a $1 billion acquisition by F5. He has a master's in computer science from Stanford and a bachelor's from Wisconsin-Madison, which he finished in under three years.
Israel L'Heureux is the founder and CEO of Touchpoint Restaurant Solutions (touchpoint.io), a bootstrapped Palo Alto company that unifies the messy technology stacks of large quick-service restaurant chains under one platform built around OmniFusion and OmniLoyalty. Before restaurants, he co-founded Redline Networks, a high-performance application-acceleration company acquired by Juniper Networks in 2005 for roughly $132 million. A Stanford-trained product design engineer, he has moved from kicking off BMW's X5 program to building load balancers used by hundreds of enterprises to figuring out why a drive-thru line moves slowly.
James DeMuth is the co-founder and CEO of Seurat Technologies, a Wilmington, Massachusetts metal additive manufacturing company chasing a single audacious goal: printing metal parts fast and cheap enough to compete with mass production, then planting factories next to the customers who need them. He co-invented Seurat's Area Printing technology while working on laser fusion research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, holds a hand in roughly 145 patents, and has raised more than $181 million to reshore manufacturing and cut carbon out of how metal gets made.
James Savoldelli is the founder and CEO of Pesto, a San Francisco fintech building an asset-backed secured credit card that lets people borrow against valuables like gold and watches without selling them or needing a credit score. A Stanford Human Biology grad and NYC native, he worked inside Los Angeles's largest pawnshop during the pandemic, watched customers cycle through loans that never built credit, and turned that observation into a Mastercard issued by Continental Bank. Pesto went through Y Combinator (W21) and raised $11M in Series A funding in 2023 from investors including Activant Capital and Plural.
JB Bakst is the founder and CEO of Chief, an AI email agent he pitches as 'the first inbox with good judgment.' A Stanford computer science grad and Manhattan native now based in Los Angeles, he cut his teeth as an early engineer at Airtable - where he obsessed over fun, delightful productivity UX - after starting out building iOS and full-stack at the six-person video-messaging startup Chime. His thesis for Chief: your email is a 12-year record of how you actually make decisions, so software should play those decisions forward rather than dump everything in a feed.
Jeff Freund is the founder and CEO of Akoonu, a Salesforce-native software company that helps B2B sales teams run pipeline reviews and forecasts. A Stanford-trained engineer who studied environmental fluid mechanics, he previously spent more than a decade running Clickability, a web content management company he led from 1999 until its 2011 acquisition by Limelight Networks. He started Akoonu in 2014 around the idea that sales should be grounded in how buyers actually buy, raising an $8M Series A from Shasta Ventures in 2017 and steering the product toward AI-driven forecasting and revenue tools.
Jerming Gu is the Taiwanese founder and CEO of CANDY HOUSE, the company behind SESAME, the smart lock that clamps onto an existing deadbolt and turns a smartphone into a key. He started the company as a Stanford mechanical engineering master's student in 2014 with co-founder Jongho Shin, then turned a 3D-printed dorm-room prototype into a Kickstarter phenomenon that raised roughly $1.4 million in 2015. After a decade building a dominant smart-lock business in Japan - including funding from ITOCHU and a strategic alliance with lock maker MIWA - he relaunched CANDY HOUSE in the US and Canada in 2025 with a lineup spanning SESAME 5, face recognition, palm-vein biometrics and Matter-compatible hubs.
Jimmy Jung is the founder and CEO of BuildBlock, a cross-border real estate platform that lets Korean and Asian investors buy, build, and manage U.S. property without ever boarding a plane. A licensed professional engineer who once helped project-manage Google's new Silicon Valley headquarters, he turned the messy, intermediary-clogged process of overseas property investment into a single end-to-end pipeline: search, financing, LLC setup, construction, management, and tax. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Seoul with U.S. offices, BuildBlock has expanded from residential brokerage into industrial plant and AI-infrastructure development.
Terradot is a San Francisco and Stanford-born climate company turning Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) - one of nature's slowest permanent carbon-removal processes - into a measurable, global-scale climate solution. By spreading finely crushed basalt across tropical farmland, Terradot accelerates the natural reaction in which silicate rock binds atmospheric CO2 and locks it away for thousands of years, while improving soil health for farmers. The company pairs field deployment with rigorous biogeochemical measurement, and has signed landmark carbon-removal agreements with Google, Microsoft and Frontier totaling nearly 300,000 tonnes of CO2.
John Melas-Kyriazi is the co-founder and CEO of Standard Metrics, a San Francisco financial data platform that automates reporting between venture investors and their portfolio companies. A Stanford-trained engineer who once tinkered with guitar pedals in his basement, he spent six years investing at Spark Capital before noticing that the venture industry ran its data on spreadsheets and email. He left to fix it, building a networked system where startups and investors collaborate on the same numbers. He is also an active angel investor in 40-plus companies.
Jordi Mata-Fink is the co-founder and CEO of Gate Bioscience, a Brisbane, California biotech building an entirely new class of small-molecule drugs called Molecular Gates. The idea is deceptively simple and technically audacious: instead of chasing disease-causing proteins after they leave the cell, Gate's molecules park inside the cell's secretory channel (Sec61) and selectively stop a single harmful protein from ever getting out, while letting everything else pass. A chemical engineer trained at Stanford and MIT, Mata-Fink spent years inside Flagship Pioneering helping spin up companies like Editas and Rubius before founding Gate in 2021. The company emerged from stealth in 2023 with $60M, and in November 2025 raised an oversubscribed $65M Series B led by Forbion with Eli Lilly joining, pushing total funding to $135M as it heads toward the clinic. He coaches youth soccer on the side.
Kevin Stein is the CEO and cofounder of Delos Insurance Solutions, a San Francisco insurtech MGA that writes homeowners insurance for wildfire-exposed California properties that mainstream carriers refuse. A Bay Area native and aerospace engineer who once sold satellites at SSL/Maxar, Stein co-founded Delos in 2017 with Shanna McIntyre to apply satellite imagery, geospatial AI, and wildfire science to a problem the rest of the market treats as uninsurable. Delos accepts roughly two-thirds of the homes the standard market declines, and Stein reports it has never insured a home that later burned. He moonlights as a bassist and songwriter.
Koji Tanabe is the founder and CEO of I Peace, Inc., a Palo Alto and Kyoto biotech building an automated platform to mass-manufacture clinical-grade induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). He earned his PhD in the Kyoto University lab of Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka and was a co-author of the landmark paper that first reported the creation of human iPS cells. After postdoctoral work at Stanford, he founded I Peace in 2015 with the goal of giving every person access to their own stem cells for therapy and longevity.
Ling Wu is the founder and CEO of TBCASoft, the Silicon Valley company behind HIVEX, a blockchain-based cross-border payment network that has connected over 1.5 billion mobile payment users worldwide. A mathematician, physicist and engineer by training, Wu spent years at Oracle and BroadVision before betting that the world's telecom carriers - not banks - would become the rails for global digital money. He co-founded the SoftBank-backed Carrier Blockchain Study Group, raised $25M from Naver and SoftBank, and is now pushing regulated stablecoins into instant cross-border settlement through a 2025 partnership with Singapore's StraitsX.
Maggie Nixon is the CEO of Capstan Medical, a Santa Cruz medtech startup building a robotic platform and catheter-delivered implants for minimally invasive mitral and tricuspid heart valve replacement. A nationally ranked high-school shot put and discus thrower, she earned a Stanford athletic scholarship, designed her own biomechanical engineering major, and then spent more than two decades at Intuitive Surgical across instrument design, clinical development, quality and regulatory, and China operations and strategy. In 2022 she reunited with her first Intuitive boss, Dan Wallace, to lead Capstan, where in 2025 her team completed the world's first robotic catheter mitral valve replacements in humans after raising a $110M Series C.
Mark Ranalli is the founder, president and CEO of BioSqueeze Inc., a Butte, Montana company that uses biomineralization - natural soil bacteria that grow limestone - to seal microscopic leaks in oil and gas wells and stop fugitive methane. A serial entrepreneur who previously built and led companies in publishing and telecommunications with workforces topping 700, he holds an electrical engineering and computer science degree from Stanford and an MBA from Dartmouth's Tuck School, and has served as a business-school dean. After scaling consumer-internet ventures, he turned to the unglamorous, high-stakes problem of leaky wellbores, backing a decade of Department of Energy and Montana State University research with a $7.4 million Series A.
Mark Russell is the founder and CEO of HyperSciences, a Spokane, Washington company turning a piece of aerospace exotica - the ram accelerator - into a tool that drills through rock up to ten times faster than a conventional rig. A former Blue Origin lead engineer on the crew capsule and a self-described third-generation miner, Russell fires projectiles at hypersonic speed every few seconds to crack rock for geothermal energy, mining and tunneling, and to lob payloads toward space through his sister venture Pipeline2Space. He raised roughly $9.6 million from thousands of small investors and won early backing from NASA and Shell.