Terra AI is a Palo Alto geoscience company building generative AI that turns the messy, expensive guesswork of subsurface exploration into fast, probabilistic 3D models of what lies underground. By fusing geophysics, geochemistry, and drilling data, its platform generates millions of geological scenarios in minutes, helping mining and energy teams decide where to drill, how many wells they need, and whether a project is worth the capital - shrinking exploration timelines and pointing capital at the critical minerals the clean-energy transition depends on.
Prerna Gupta is the founder and CEO of Hooked, the chat-fiction app that turned bite-sized text-message stories into a habit for over 100 million Gen Z readers and topped the App Store in 25 countries. A Stanford economics grad who once ran consulting decks before building apps, she co-created the music hits LaDiDa and Songify under her startup Khush (acquired by Smule, where she became Chief Product Officer) before reinventing fiction for the smartphone generation. She describes Hooked as 'books for the Snapchat generation' and her own role as a product CEO who would rather build with her team than work a room.
Rajen Sheth is the CEO and co-founder of Kyron Learning, a public benefit company using AI to give every student access to high-quality one-on-one teaching. Before founding Kyron, he spent 17 years at Google, where he was the original product manager behind Google Apps (now Workspace), launched Chromebooks for Education, and rose to Vice President of Google Cloud AI and Industry Solutions. A Stanford-trained engineer who once pitched enterprise Gmail to Eric Schmidt and got turned down, he has built tools used by millions of businesses and hundreds of millions of students, then walked away from big tech to chase a teacher-shaped problem he has carried since sixth grade.
Rebecca Krauthamer is the co-founder and CEO of QuSecure, a San Mateo company building software that lets governments and banks swap out their encryption before quantum computers learn to break it. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who jumped from AI to quantum in 2017, she turned a U.S. Air Force grant into a Series A-funded leader in post-quantum cryptography, counting the U.S. Army, Air Force, and Banco Sabadell among its users. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and World Economic Forum council member, she argues cybersecurity is a mission for humanity, not just a product category.
Reza Zadeh is the founder and CEO of Matroid, a Palo Alto computer vision company that lets people build and deploy AI detectors without writing code. He is an adjunct professor at Stanford, a founding team member at Databricks, co-author of Apache Spark's machine learning library MLlib, and the person who built the algorithm behind Twitter's first machine-learning product, Who To Follow. Born during the Iran-Iraq war in Ahvaz, raised in London and Toronto, he turned a Stanford PhD on large-scale graphs into a company betting that one day every camera will understand what it sees.
Ritesh Agrawal is a network-security engineer turned founder who co-founded Airgap Networks in 2019 to attack the problem most enterprises ignore: lateral movement once an attacker is already inside the building. His bet was that you do not trust any device, period. Zscaler acquired Airgap in April 2024, and its agentless, identity-based microsegmentation became the foundation of Zscaler's Zero Trust Branch, which Ritesh now leads as VP of Product Management. Before founding the company he spent nearly 18 years at Juniper Networks across engineering, product, and sales.
Roy Mill is the Co-Founder and CEO of Joshu, a no-code insurance product platform that lets carriers and MGAs launch digital distribution channels in weeks rather than years. A Stanford PhD economist who pivoted into product, he spent years at Ancestry and At-Bay before founding Joshu in 2020. The company has raised $11.7M in total funding and was named to the InsurTech100 list in 2024.
Saurabh Ladha is the founder and CEO of Doxel, the computer-vision platform often called the 'Waze for construction.' Doxel uses AI to track building sites in real time and predict delays before they derail a project. Ladha built it after a two-year construction delay nearly cost his family their home. Before Doxel, he led an eight-person team that won the AUVSI International Aerial Robotics Competition with an autonomous drone. A Stanford-trained engineer and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he has raised $56.5M from Insight Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, and Doxel has tracked more than 3 billion square feet of construction.
Sam Bhagwat is the founder and CEO of Mastra, an open-source TypeScript framework for building AI agents that pulls in millions of monthly downloads. He earlier co-founded Gatsby, the React-based web framework used by hundreds of thousands of developers and later acquired by Netlify. A Stanford economics grad and longtime open-source builder, he wrote 'Modular: The Web's New Architecture' and 'Principles of Building AI Agents,' the latter dubbed by one YC founder 'the most popular book in San Francisco.' Mastra went through Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch and raised a $22M Series A led by Spark Capital.
Sameer Al-Sakran is the co-founder and CEO of Metabase, the open-source business intelligence tool that grew into an 8-figure ARR company used by more than 70,000 organizations. He spent four years building Metabase without charging a dollar, then turned it into a product-led growth case study by burying a single call-to-action deep in the admin panel and letting the software sell itself. A career machine-learning and data person, he worked in data science, engineering, and venture before deciding the world needed a simpler way to ask a database a question.
Sarah Lamaison is the co-founder and CEO of Dioxycle, a Paris- and Bay Area-based climate-tech company building electrolyzers that turn industrial CO2 into ethylene and other chemicals using only water, electricity, and waste carbon. A chemist trained at Ecole Polytechnique, Cambridge, College de France, and Stanford, she turned her PhD on artificial photosynthesis into a company aiming to decarbonize one of the planet's dirtiest industries while staying cost-competitive with fossil feedstocks. She raised $17M in Series A funding led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital, won the L'Oreal-UNESCO Young Talent award, and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30.
Sungwoo Min is the founder and CEO of Nventric, Inc., an Arcadia, California medical device company that designs, develops, and contract-manufactures vascular devices for the neurovascular, electrophysiology, and coronary markets. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer who cut his teeth on R&D and marketing at Abbott Vascular and later led R&D programs at Johnson & Johnson, he started Nventric in 2019 to build the kind of life-saving catheters, stents, and thrombectomy systems he used to ship at the giants - this time end to end, ISO 13485 certified, with operations in the US and South Korea. He is a named inventor on multiple US patents for mechanical thrombectomy devices.
Tim Sweeney is the co-founder and CEO of Inflammatix, a Sunnyvale molecular diagnostics company that reads the immune system instead of hunting for pathogens. A surgeon-turned-entrepreneur with an MD/PhD from Duke and a biomedical informatics background from Stanford, he built TriVerity, an FDA-cleared rapid blood test that measures 29 immune-response genes and uses machine learning to score the likelihood of bacterial infection, viral infection, and severe illness. He has raised more than $200 million to bring precision medicine to sepsis and critical care.
Tudor Achim is the cofounder and CEO of Harmonic, the Palo Alto AI lab he started in 2023 with Robinhood founder Vlad Tenev to build what they call Mathematical Superintelligence. Harmonic's system Aristotle reached gold-medal performance on the 2025 International Math Olympiad while formally verifying every proof in Lean 4, a feat that put a roughly 40-person startup alongside OpenAI and Google DeepMind. A former competitive pianist turned machine-learning researcher, Achim previously cofounded the self-driving company Helm.ai and worked on ranking at Quora. He argues that mathematics is the route to AI that does not hallucinate.
Web Augustine is the founder and CEO of HiWire, a Menlo Park outfit that runs high-end executive search and fundraising help for early-stage startups at entrepreneur-friendly terms. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer turned marketer, he was the first product manager on HP's DeskJet inkjet line, Sun Microsystems' employee 152, and the founding VP of marketing who helped spin VeriSign out as a standalone company in 1995. Four decades in, he splits his time between recruiting CEOs and VPs for founders, advising on pitch decks and financial forecasts, and writing books - including a 2020 political satire and a 1,400-entry quotations collection.
Will Kim is the co-founder and co-CEO of Karat Financial, the West Hollywood fintech that treats YouTubers, streamers and TikTokers as the businesses they actually are. After watching top creators with great credit scores get rejected for ordinary credit cards because banks called their income 'risky,' Kim and co-founder Eric Wei built a credit card, then a bank, underwritten on social-media metrics instead of W-2s. Karat has issued more than $1.5 billion in credit and advances, counts Alexandra Botez, Ludwig and Nick DiGiovanni on its roster, and raised a $70M Series B in 2023 backed by Union Square Ventures, SignalFire, Will Smith's Dreamers VC, Biz Stone and Steve Chen.
Will Pacio is the co-founder and CEO of Expo, a Dallas-based AI platform that pulls a restaurant's scattered data - POS, inventory, labor, guest feedback - into one dashboard operators can talk to. A Stanford psychology grad who walked away from a planned medical career to cook on the opening team at Thomas Keller's Per Se, he ran IT for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, founded the fast-casual chain Spice Kit, then built the restaurant-staffing marketplace Pared before spinning it into Expo. His pitch: bring the 'Moneyball' approach to multi-unit restaurants so non-technical owners can make decisions with data instead of gut feel.
Will Young is the co-founder and CEO of Sana, an Austin-based tech-enabled health plan that aims to cut small-business health insurance costs by up to 30%. A Stanford and Harvard Business School graduate who passed through Google and Justworks before starting a company in an industry he had no background in, Young bet that being an outsider was the advantage. Sana launched in 2018, went fully remote from day one against investor advice, and by its $60M Series B in 2022 had raised roughly $107M total while operating across eight states.
Xiao Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Boundless Immigration, a Seattle-based legal-technology company that has helped more than 100,000 families file for green cards, visas, and citizenship at roughly a third of the cost of a traditional attorney. He came to the U.S. from Nanjing, China at age 3 and watched his parents pour months of rent into immigration paperwork - a memory that, decades later and mid-career at Amazon Go, he couldn't shake. He left to build the company in 2017. Trained at Stanford and Harvard, seasoned at McKinsey and Amazon, he runs Boundless on what he openly calls a 'black licorice' culture: love it or hate it, no middle ground.
Alex Atallah is the CEO and co-founder of OpenRouter, the unified API and marketplace that routes developer requests across hundreds of large language models. He previously co-founded OpenSea, the NFT marketplace, where he was CTO before leaving in 2022 to build from zero to one again. A Stanford computer scientist and Palantir alum, he turned a side project that connected browsers to AI models into infrastructure now routing roughly 25 trillion tokens a week, and raised a $113M Series B in 2026.
Anda Gansca is the co-founder and CEO of Knotch, the New York content intelligence company she started in 2012 after talking her way out of Transylvania and into Stanford. She built Knotch to tell brands which of their content actually works, then bet the whole company on AI: scrapping a rejected analytics product and relaunching in 2025 as AgentC, an AI-staffed marketing agency that only charges clients when results show up. A Forbes and Inc 30 Under 30 honoree, she raised roughly $48-50M and counts Zillow, Realtor.com, Chime and Zoom among AgentC's early testers.
Damaris Skouras is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Olatec Therapeutics, a New York clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company built around dapansutrile, an oral, specific NLRP3 inflammasome inhibitor she has pushed from the lab bench into Phase 2 trials spanning gout, melanoma, type 2 diabetes, and Parkinson's disease. She started in finance as a Wall Street biotech banker in 1982, founded her own investment advisory firm in 1985, and eventually crossed the table to run the kind of company she used to finance. With a Stanford degree, a Harvard MBA, and the immunologist who discovered interleukin-1 as her co-founder, she has raised over $100 million to bet that a single inflammatory switch can be turned off across a range of diseases.
Dave Icke is the CEO of Medisafe, the medication engagement platform that helps more than ten million patients stay on their treatments. A chemical engineer turned digital-health operator, he has spent two decades turning hardware and software into tools that keep people healthier: founding CEO of wearable biosensor company mc10, launcher of Becton Dickinson's digital health business, VP of Digital Health Product at Humana, and executive chair of mental-health AI company ieso. In 2025 he took the reins at Medisafe from founder Omri Shor to scale medication engagement across the global pharmaceutical ecosystem.
Dennis Chang is the co-founder and CEO of RoadFlex, a Visa fuel and expense card built for the unglamorous fleets that keep America moving - HVAC vans, landscaping trucks, delivery rigs. A Taiwanese-Peruvian who grew up in Lima and trades in three languages, he studied materials science and management engineering at Stanford, consulted at McKinsey, co-founded an AI grid-inspection startup, and spent years as a venture investor before deciding the most interesting problem in fintech was hiding at the gas pump: fuel fraud. RoadFlex pairs real-time transaction controls and telematics validation to stop a driver from filling a personal pickup on the company dime.
Elizabeth Burstein is the CEO and co-founder of Neura Health, a virtual neurology clinic she started in 2020 after a two-year fight with a trapped nerve exposed how broken specialist access is in the United States. A Stanford computer-science-and-philosophy grad who built product at LinkedIn, Blue Apron, Zocdoc and Maven Clinic before turning founder, she has grown Neura to serve tens of thousands of patients and raised $22M+ in venture funding, including a $11.4M Series A in 2025 led by the American Heart Association's Go Red for Women Venture Fund.
Ethan Chan is the co-founder and CEO of Allium, a New York and Singapore based company building the system of record for onchain finance. After leading machine learning and data engineering teams at Primer and lecturing at Stanford, he turned to the unglamorous work of cleaning up blockchain data, translating raw events from 150+ chains and 10,000 protocols into standardized, finance-ready datasets used by Visa, Stripe, Coinbase, Uniswap and Phantom. He cheerfully calls himself the Chief Data Plumber.
Gabriel Paunescu is the founder and CEO of Naologic, a no-code platform that lets companies build and customize enterprise software (ERP, CRM, workflow apps) without a development team, and now layers multi-agent AI on top of legacy business systems. A Romanian-born serial entrepreneur with seven startups and two exits behind him, he started exporting essential oils at 17 and now keynotes at Google Next, mentors at UC Berkeley, and writes about building AI agents that catch their own hallucinations. His core belief: buying software you cannot modify is like buying a horse instead of a car.
George Sivulka is the founder and CEO of Hebbia, the AI platform that turns piles of unstructured documents into answers for asset managers, banks, and law firms. He cold-called NASA as a teenager, finished a Stanford math degree in 2.5 years, then walked away from a fully funded PhD to build software that lets AI agents do the multi-step grunt work of professional analysis. By 2024 Hebbia had raised $130M at a $700M valuation on $13M of profitable revenue, with Peter Thiel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and Google Ventures behind it.
Hana Kajimura is the CEO of Trellis Group, the climate media-and-events company behind GreenBiz, Circularity and Trellis Impact. Before running the room, she built it: as Allbirds' first full-time sustainability hire she stamped a carbon footprint on every shoe, open-sourced the methodology so rival brands could copy it, and authored the 'Flight Plan' to halve the company's per-product emissions. A Stanford environmental scientist who chose business over activism because companies 'move much more swiftly,' she now runs the largest gathering of sustainability professionals in North America.
Harley Sugarman is the founder and CEO of Anagram, a New York security company rebuilding employee security training around behavior instead of boredom. A Stanford computer scientist and former Bloomberg Beta investor, he scrapped his original product and rebuilt it into a TikTok- and Duolingo-inspired microlearning platform that cut client phishing failure rates from 20% to 6% and won over Disney, Thomson Reuters, and MassMutual. Anagram raised a $10M Series A in 2025 led by Madrona.