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Jonathan Asmis Is Turning the Down Payment Into a Talent Strategy
The Landed co-founder spent a decade testing a stubborn idea: when capable workers cannot afford to live near their jobs, better financial plumbing can do more than another perk.
Lasse-Mathias Nyberg Is Teaching AI to Do the Paperwork of Buying a Car
The Stanford MBA and former BCG consultant is betting that the future of used-car retail will be won in the unglamorous space between a customer’s click and a clean title.
Naama Breckler Keeps Building for the Part Everyone Else Calls Complicated
Four companies in, the software engineer turned CEO has a durable method: get close to the customer, distrust the broad pitch, and make the tedious middle disappear.
Bruno Koba Is Building the Adviser He Wished He Had
A dinner by a BART station turned two Brazilians' investing frustrations into Astor. Now the former Nubank data scientist and Monashees investor is betting that useful financial advice can become a conversation, not a luxury.
Brian Mokoro’s Career Has One Recurring Move: Learn the System From the Inside
Before finance, private equity and technology, Brian Mokoro taught ninth-grade algebra in Washington. His career since has been a study in entering complicated systems, learning their machinery and moving closer to where decisions get made.
Brad Stroh Spent 24 Years Building the Other Half of Your Balance Sheet
He turned down Wall Street, backpacked through Kenya, and found his life’s work at two broken tables. Now Achieve’s co-founder is betting that AI can give ordinary households the sort of financial guidance once reserved for the wealthy.
Lukas Haffer Wants a Three-Day Business Loan. He Started With a Mini Cooper.
A risk-averse German banker, a competitive gamer and a freshly minted Stanford MBA drove straight from graduation to Y Combinator. Three years later, Lukas Haffer is trying to make a 90-day loan feel almost ordinary in three.
Alex Jones Put Prayer in Your Pocket
A lapsed Catholic, a meditation habit and one almost comically obvious question became Hallow. Alex Jones built the first prototype for himself, then learned that millions of other people were looking for the same quiet doorway.
Alexi Suvacioglu Learned the Business by Packing the Boxes
Before Because reached national retail shelves, its CEO answered support calls and packed orders in a garage. That close-range education still shapes how Alexi Suvacioglu builds: listen first, learn the details, then earn the right to scale.
Nicholas Hinrichsen Learned to Move Cars. Now He Moves Credit Unions.
A German golf prospect became a used-car founder, sold to Carvana, and came back for the least glamorous layer of finance: the moment a customer asks a credit union to say yes.
Ella Zhang Built the Back Room - Then Went Looking for the Next Frontier
From Tencent’s founding e-commerce team to a garage-born fashion platform, Zhang learned to prize the infrastructure nobody sees. Now she is carrying that operator’s instinct back into venture investing at YZi Labs.
Mandy Silverman and the Quiet Architecture of Getting Paid
Before founding I V Y Labs, Mandy Silverman moved from venture investing to Apple, Shutterfly, Yelp and LoopUp. The pattern behind those stops now lives inside Ivy Pay: make a complicated transaction feel like one ordinary tap.
Daniel Hawkins Is Building the MRI Department a Bigger Door
After helping turn surgical robotics, intravascular lithotripsy and operating-room telepresence into working markets, Daniel Hawkins has chosen a quieter bottleneck: the MRI scanner itself. His method is consistent - find the constraint, simplify the experience, and build until adoption feels natural.
Anu Sharma Is Building the Care Company the System Forgot to Design
She spent two decades learning why healthcare resists change. With Millie, Anu Sharma is turning that education into clinics, software and partnerships that can move together.
Patricia Spiller
The Uruguayan engineer built Livongo’s growth machine from zero, then carried a habit of patient testing, clear stories and empowered teams into the AI era at Tempus.
Tolu Alabi
Tolu Alabi is the co-founder and CEO of Cleva (YC W24), a USD banking platform that lets freelancers and businesses across Africa get paid in dollars and shield their earnings from local currency swings. Born and raised in Nigeria, she played competitive basketball before earning degrees at Grinnell College and Stanford GSB and building products at Stripe and Amazon. She also runs Next in Line Africa, a basketball nonprofit that teaches life skills to young athletes.
Sabah Oney
Sabah Oney is the president and CEO of Dispatch Bio, a Philadelphia- and San Francisco-based biotech engineering a universal treatment for solid tumors using CAR-T cell therapy. Born in Cyprus and in the U.S. since age 18, he holds a genetics degree from the University of Kansas, a PhD in genetics and genomics from Duke, and an MBA from Stanford. Across nearly two decades in biotech he helped scale Ariosa Diagnostics (acquired by Roche), took Alector public as its chief business officer, co-founded Vilya, and served as a venture partner at ARCH. Dispatch launched publicly in 2025 with $216 million behind its FLARE platform and CAR-T pioneer Carl June among its founders.
Steve Albarran
Steve Albarran is the co-founder and CEO of Confident Cannabis (now Confident LIMS), the laboratory information management software that quietly runs testing for more than 60% of the legal cannabis industry in the United States. A Mexico City native from a family of business owners, he traded a New York finance career - M&A banking at Lehman Brothers and Sawaya Partners, then his own growth-equity firm Left Lane Capital - for Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he met his co-founding team. Motivated partly by a wish to move money away from Mexican cartels and toward legal, ethical operators, he built the data backbone that lets labs, growers and buyers trust what is in a cannabis product. He is a member of the National Cannabis Laboratory Council.
Tiffany Teng
Tiffany Teng is a product and marketing executive turned strategic operator who works on Strategic Projects for the CEO (fractional) at Jump, an AI assistant for financial advisors. A Stanford-trained student of how people make decisions, she pairs go-to-market and product marketing chops with a deep interest in behavioral psychology. She was named to the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Powerlist 2020 and chairs the board of SaverLife, a nonprofit helping working families build savings.
Martin Pustilnick
Martin Pustilnick is the co-founder and CEO of Mundi, a New York-based fintech platform that fronts working capital to small and mid-sized Mexican exporters so they don't have to wait 30, 60, or 90 days to get paid by cross-border buyers. An Argentine economist and Stanford MBA who worked at BCG, OLX, PayJoy, EXOR, and FJ Labs before starting Mundi in 2020, he has raised roughly $138M in equity and debt, including a $16M Series A led by Union Square Ventures and a $100M warehouse facility from Silicon Valley Bank.
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.
Sanchit Mullick
Sanchit Mullick is the co-founder and CEO of Reveal HealthTech, a New York-based AI transformation firm for U.S. healthcare and life sciences that closed a $7.2M Series A led by Leo Capital in September 2025. Before Reveal, he spent nearly two decades at Infosys, ending as global head of sales for AI & Automation, then led private-equity sales at GlobalLogic. He built Reveal in 2023 with clinician Dr. Salim Afshar and Andrew Bravo, incubated by W Health Ventures and 2070 Health, around two products: BioCanvas for multimodal clinical AI and Prism AI for workflow agents.
Brendan Dowdle
Brendan Dowdle is the Chief Business Officer of Bonsai Robotics, a Silicon Valley company building vision-based autonomy software for agriculture. He arrived there in 2025 when Bonsai acquired farm-ng, the modular farm-robot maker he ran as CEO. Dowdle grew up in an agricultural family across Southeast Asia, watched his agronomist father work the ground, and spent a decade building computer-vision and robotics companies before turning that toolkit on farming. He co-founded Arraiy (acquired by Matterport, where he later helped scale the services business through IPO), holds an MBA from Stanford, and now argues that the future of farming will be driven by intelligence, not iron.
Godard Abel
Godard Abel is the co-founder and CEO of G2, the software review platform that brought Yelp-style peer reviews to enterprise software buying. A third-generation entrepreneur born in Germany and raised in Pittsburgh, he built and sold two SaaS companies before G2: BigMachines (acquired by Oracle for a reported $400M+) and SteelBrick (acquired by Salesforce). At G2 he has raised more than $260M, weathered a near-bankruptcy earlier in his career, and is now steering the company through the AI wave with its buying agent Monty and the 2026 acquisition of Gartner's Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice.
Janna Colucci
Janna Colucci is the CEO and co-founder of Bundle, an Oakland-based software platform that drags construction materials procurement out of the paper-and-phone-call era. After watching a construction crew print out her emails and write responses by hand while building Delos' wellness-focused NYC headquarters, she teamed up with Stanford Business School classmate Edison Ding to build a digital buying platform for small and mid-sized residential builders that promises purchasing at 10x speed and 10-20% cost savings. A Dartmouth grad and Stanford MBA who cut her teeth in green building and co-created the mindfulMATERIALS sustainability standard, she raised a $4M seed round in 2023 and runs the company on a Lao Tzu leadership philosophy.
Jessica Talbert
Jessica Talbert is the co-founder and CEO of Park Padel, a San Francisco-based padel club operator she launched in 2022 after discovering the racket sport on a summer trip through Spain. A former strategic UX researcher with a decade in tech at Chime, Lyft and Stanford's Graduate School of Business, she traded user interviews for blue glass courts and now builds membership communities around one of the world's fastest-growing sports. Park Padel raised $5M in seed funding, opened the most visible courts in the US on the Embarcadero, expanded to a six-court flagship in South San Francisco and a club in West Sacramento, and aims to put 100 courts on the ground across Northern California.
Kris Sandor
Kris Sandor is the co-founder and CEO of Readyly, an agentic AI platform automating customer support and public services for governments and enterprises. A former U.S. Navy nuclear submarine officer turned McKinsey consultant, Palantir business lead, and CEO of Citi Bike (acquired by Lyft in 2018), he now builds AI agents that replace decision-tree chatbots across voice, chat, and email.
Lauren Dachille
Lauren Dachille is the founder and CEO of Nimble, a Y Combinator-backed edtech company building data-driven applicant tracking software that helps K-12 school districts identify, hire, and retain effective teachers. A former DC Public Schools recruiter and StudentsFirst policy hand, she built the system she wished she'd had when sorting through thousands of teacher applications by hand.
Luis Voloch
Luis Voloch is the co-founder and CEO of Jimini Health, a New York mental health startup that pairs licensed therapists with a clinically supervised AI assistant called Sage. An MIT-trained mathematician and computer scientist who won the school's best-thesis prize, he previously co-founded and served as CTO of Immunai, the AI cancer-immunotherapy company that grew into a billion-dollar unicorn. He has taught entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is building toward what he calls a 'Genentech-like company in mental health, powered by AI.'
Abdulhamid Haidar
Abdulhamid Haidar is the founder and CEO of Darsel, a nonprofit that teaches K-12 math over text messages. Instead of apps and video that assume reliable Wi-Fi, Darsel runs entirely on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and SMS, using AI-powered adaptive algorithms to tutor students in Jordan, India and Nigeria. Built during the 2020 COVID lockdown by a Syrian-American who grew up in a family of teachers, Darsel has had more than 120,000 students answer over 170 million math questions. Haidar holds degrees from MIT, Harvard Kennedy School and Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and previously spent three years at McKinsey. His goal: meaningfully reach 100 million students by 2030.