Tagged: startup
30 results
Christian Ferreira
Christian Ferreira is the founder and CEO of Procurement Sciences AI, an AI-native platform built to help businesses find, win, and deliver government contracts. A former U.S. Marine Corps sergeant who deployed to Afghanistan before turning 21, he spent nearly a decade in government contracting - moving from full-stack engineer to senior solutions architect to director of business strategy - before founding the company in 2022 when generative AI matured. In November 2025 the company closed a $30 million Series B, bringing total funding to roughly $40 million, having grown to more than 300 organizations on its platform and enabled billions of dollars in customer contract wins.
Colton Pace
Colton Pace is the co-founder and CEO of Ownwell, an Austin-based proptech company that helps property owners lower the cost of real estate ownership by appealing over-assessed property taxes. A former asset manager who oversaw billions for wealthy families, Pace built Ownwell in 2020 to give everyday homeowners the same optimization tools that sophisticated investors use. The company has processed more than 1 million appeals, saved customers over $400 million, and raised a $50 million Series B in early 2026.
Conor Sheridan
Conor Sheridan is the founder and CEO of Nory, an AI-native operating system for the hospitality industry. A former quantitative trader and investment strategist, he left finance to build Mad Egg, one of Ireland's fastest-growing fried chicken chains, then created Nory to solve the operational problems he faced running restaurants. Nory now helps operators manage inventory, workforce, payroll, procurement and finance, and raised a $37m Series B in 2025 led by Kinnevik, bringing total funding to roughly $62.6m.
Daisy
Daisy is an AI-native property management company for condos, co-ops and HOAs, founded in 2020 in New York City. It replaces the manual workflows and patchwork of tools legacy managers rely on with a single platform that unifies building finances, maintenance requests, compliance, board decisions and resident communication. Pairing proactive human managers with automation and AI agents, Daisy manages more than 4,000 units across nearly 200 buildings in NYC and has begun expanding into New Jersey, with a stated goal of national and global reach by the end of the decade.
Distributed Spectrum
Distributed Spectrum builds AI-powered radio-frequency sensors and software that automatically detect, classify, and locate signals - drones, jammers, tactical radios, GPS spoofers - in real time. Founded by three Harvard engineers, the company packs commercial hardware and edge AI into sub-one-pound sensors that give soldiers and analysts persistent spectrum awareness without specialist RF expertise. It raised a $25M Series A in March 2025 and has fielded systems with US military branches and partners in Ukraine.
Switchboard
Switchboard was a cloud coworking platform built for remote and hybrid teams. Instead of screen-sharing and tab-juggling, it put video and live, editable web apps - Google Docs, Figma, Jira, Trello and more - side by side in persistent virtual rooms, so a team could return to a project exactly where it left off. Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Amir Ashkenazi, the company raised roughly $38 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Icon Ventures, Spark Capital and HubSpot Ventures, and held five patents. In late 2024 Ashkenazi wound down Switchboard and pivoted the company into Airtop, an AI web-agent and browser-automation platform.
Eitan Cohen
Eitan Cohen is the CEO and co-founder of TechSee, a Tel Aviv-based company that pioneered visual and agentic AI for customer service. Trained in computer science and psychology at Tel Aviv University, Cohen has spent two decades building and selling technology companies. He started TechSee in 2015 after realizing that voice and text support could not solve the everyday frustration of guiding someone through a technical problem they could see but not describe. Under his leadership, TechSee's computer-vision and augmented-reality platform now serves more than 1,000 customers, including Fortune 500 brands, and reports avoiding millions of technician visits each year.
Erik Bakstad
Erik Bakstad is the CEO and co-founder of Ardoq, an Oslo-based SaaS company reinventing enterprise architecture for the digital enterprise. A developer and software architect by training, he spent the company's first six years as CTO before moving into product leadership and, in February 2021, the CEO seat. Under his watch Ardoq raised a $125 million Series D, earned repeat placement in Gartner's Magic Quadrant, and now serves global brands such as ExxonMobil, MUFG, and Primark. A self-described former hockey player turned geek, Bakstad is a recognized voice on the intersection of enterprise architecture and AI.
Grzegorz Marecki
Grzegorz Marecki is the co-founder and CEO of Continuum Industries, an Edinburgh-based company whose AI platform Optioneer helps engineers design linear infrastructure - power lines, pipelines, cables and rail - in a fraction of the usual time. A civil engineer by training who grew frustrated with slow traditional practice, he channelled that impatience into a student hyperloop project and then into a software business that iterates through millions of routing options to find better, cheaper, more sustainable designs. The company has assessed tens of thousands of kilometres of infrastructure and raised roughly $15.5 million, including a $10 million Series A led by Singular in 2023.
Hani Goldstein
Hani Goldstein is the co-founder and CEO of Snappy, the corporate gifting platform she started in 2015 with Dvir Cohen. Under her leadership Snappy has delivered more than six million gifts and become a gifting partner to a large share of the Fortune 100, including Microsoft, Zoom, Comcast and Uber. She has raised roughly $130 million across four rounds through a Series D in 2024, and guided the company through a swag-and-merchandise expansion with its 2025 acquisition of Covver. Goldstein operates by a simple mantra, 'do good,' and built Snappy around the idea that small moments of recognition can change how people feel about their work and each other.
Joshua Schwadron
Joshua Schwadron is the founder and CEO of Mighty, a New York legal-technology company reworking how injured people navigate the personal injury system. A lawyer turned repeat entrepreneur, he built and sold the consumer marketplace Betterfly, co-founded a litigation-finance firm, then launched Mighty in 2015. He is known for publicly picking a fight with what he calls 'billboard lawyers,' and in 2026 Mighty launched a free, AI-driven platform that values and negotiates car-accident claims directly for consumers.
The Problem of Love
The problem of love is the question at the center of Overtone, the new AI- and voice-forward dating service from Hinge founder Justin McLeod. After more than a decade building Hinge into a $400 million business, McLeod left the CEO seat and raised $18 million to reimagine how technology helps people find a partner. His premise is simple and stubborn: as loneliness climbs, few problems matter more, and the deeper he digs, the more interesting it becomes. Overtone gets to know each person in their own voice and makes only the introductions worth making.
How Jake Built 'Early,' the Push-Up Alarm App Making $50,000 a Month
In this Starter Story episode, host Pat Walls interviews Jake, a 24-year-old self-taught developer and former accountant who built 'Early,' an iPhone alarm clock app where you must do push-ups to turn off your alarm. Launched at the end of 2025, the app went from zero to over $50,000 a month in just four months, racking up more than 200,000 downloads. Jake breaks down how he found and validated the idea, why he shipped an MVP in 19 days, how iOS 26's AlarmKit API made a reliable alarm app possible, and why influencer marketing and top-of-funnel views were the true secret to his growth.
Daytona
Daytona builds programmatic, composable computers for AI agents. Its stateful sandboxes spin up in under 90 milliseconds, run untrusted AI-generated code in full isolation, and can be started, paused, or snapshotted on demand. Founded by Ivan Burazin and Vedran Jukic, the company pivoted from developer-environment management into agent-native infrastructure in 2025 and raised a $24M Series A led by FirstMark Capital in February 2026. Customers include LangChain, Writer, Turing, and SambaNova.
Umbo Computer Vision
Umbo Computer Vision is a San Francisco and Taipei based startup building autonomous video security systems that use deep learning to watch camera feeds the way a human guard would - flagging intrusions, tailgating and wall-scaling in real time while ignoring birds, cats and weather. Founded in 2014 by Shawn Guan, Ping-Lin Chang and Tingfan Wu, the company pairs its SmartDome camera hardware with a neural-net engine called Light and a cloud platform, and has raised roughly $17.6M to sell mostly through security integrators to businesses, schools and public-safety customers.
Matias Muchnick
Matias Muchnick is the Chilean co-founder and CEO of NotCo, a food-tech company that uses a proprietary AI system called Giuseppe to design plant-based versions of dairy and meat products. Founded in 2015, NotCo became Chile's first unicorn in 2021, formed a joint venture with Kraft Heinz, and counts Bezos Expeditions among its investors.
Melissa Bridgeford
Melissa Bridgeford is CEO and cofounder of Wizard, an AI-native shopping agent she runs with Marc Lore that emerged from stealth in February 2026 after nearly five years of private development. Wizard aims to replace endless e-commerce scrolling with a chat interface that searches the web, ranks products with zero paid placements, and checks out on your behalf. Before Wizard, Bridgeford founded Stylust in Austin, a text-based conversational shopping company that was folded into Wizard as its technical and human foundation. Earlier she spent almost a decade in finance at Guggenheim Partners and at Cain Hoy Enterprises.
Michael Villar
Michael Villar is the founder and CEO of Height, a New York-based project management platform that is trying to hand the tedious parts of running projects over to an AI reasoning engine. He is Belgian, was selling forum skins at 14, sold his previous startup Kickoff to Stripe in 2013, spent years designing and coding early Stripe products, and now runs Height as a lean team with a Series A behind it.
Michelle Davey
Michelle Davey is the co-founder and CEO of Wheel, an Austin-based virtual care platform she started in 2018 with Griffin Mulcahey. Wheel powers back-end telehealth infrastructure for retailers, payers, pharma companies, and digital health brands, and connects them to a nationwide network of clinicians. Before Wheel, Davey ran talent at a telehealth company and had earlier stints in recruiting and operations at Google, Favor, and Medtronic. She has raised more than $216 million for Wheel across four rounds, including a $150 million Series C in 2022.
Nate Stewart
Nate Stewart is the CEO of Materialize, the streaming operational data warehouse based in New York. He took the role in April 2024 after seven years leading product at Cockroach Labs (CockroachDB), where he also sat on the board. He is a Michigan CS undergrad, an MIT Sloan MBA, and a former lead backend engineer at Bloomberg who won the MIT $100K entrepreneurship competition on his way out of business school.
Nico Ferreyra
Nico Ferreyra is the co-founder and CEO of Default, a New York-based B2B revenue operations platform that bundles inbound scheduling, lead capture, enrichment, qualification, and routing into one system for Series A-C go-to-market teams. Born in Córdoba, Argentina and raised in the United States, he dropped out of college, moved into a San Francisco hacker house with cofounder Victor, and launched Default in late 2021. The company raised $6.6M seed led by Craft Ventures (with Jack Altman, 8VC, BoxGroup) and has reportedly raised roughly $20M total. Ferreyra also angel-invests in ~50 companies including Anduril, Browserbase, Runway, and Wander.
Noam Schwartz
Noam Schwartz is the CEO and co-founder of Alice (formerly ActiveFence), the trust and safety company that quietly built the moderation and adversarial-intelligence pipes behind platforms serving three billion people and seven of the ten largest AI foundation models. He founded the company in 2018 after encountering child sexual abuse material while mapping the internet at his previous startup, and has led it through Series A/B rounds totaling $100M, two acquisitions (Spectrum Labs, Rewire), and a 2026 rebrand to Alice that repositions the company from social-platform moderation to securing generative AI.
Oren Friedman
Oren Friedman is the co-founder and CEO of Rally, a New York-based user research CRM that pulls participant recruiting, scheduling, incentives and consent tracking out of spreadsheets and into one workflow. A Nashville native and Vanderbilt graduate, he built the product with CTO Alec Robins after years selling enterprise research tools at Remesh and AlphaSights. Rally went through Y Combinator's W22 batch, closed an $11M Series A led by Canapi Ventures in June 2025, and counts Adobe, Sonos, MongoDB, GitLab, BILL and Monzo among its customers.
Oren Harel
Oren Ohayon Harel is the CEO and co-founder of PlainID, the Tel Aviv- and New York-based authorization company that turned policy-based access control (PBAC) from an XACML white paper into a category. He founded PlainID in 2014 with Gal Helemski and Dmitry Tuchinsky after a decade spent inside Israeli banking security, most recently as Deputy CISO at Bank Hapoalim. He raised a $75M Series C led by Insight Partners in December 2021, bringing PlainID's total funding to roughly $100M.
Paul Archer
Paul Archer is the founder and CEO of Duel, a London-based brand advocacy SaaS platform that helps global brands like Charlotte Tilbury, Lush, ELEMIS, Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch turn customers, creators and fans into a measurable growth channel. Before software, Archer drove a 1992 London black cab around the world, breaking two Guinness World Records and writing a best-selling book about it. He co-founded Duel in 2017 with viral games developer Naio Tsarouchis; the company raised a $16M Series A in September 2025 co-led by Molten Ventures and Bright Pixel.
Peter Howard
Peter Howard is co-founder and CEO of Realtime Robotics, a Boston-based company building motion-planning software that lets industrial robots plan collision-free paths in milliseconds. A serial entrepreneur with an MIT management degree, he has founded five companies, taken two public, and now runs a Series B robotics firm working with Fortune 100 automakers and manufacturers.
Pierre Hebrard
Pierre Hebrard is the CEO and co-founder of Pricemoov, a Paris-based SaaS platform that helps enterprises set, govern, and optimize prices using AI. He started the company in 2016 after a career that took him from investment banking in London and trading in Hong Kong to running Jumia's operations across Kenya and Nigeria. In April 2023 Pricemoov raised a $10 million Series A led by ISAI and Bpifrance Digital Venture.
Raad Ahmed
Raad Ahmed is the founder and CEO of Lawtrades, a New York based marketplace that connects companies with freelance lawyers and paralegals. He started the company after law school with the idea that legal work should look less like a big-firm invoice and more like a product you can order on the internet. Lawtrades has raised roughly $12M in venture funding, employs a team of about 42, and runs on a global network of vetted legal talent. Ahmed is also the founder of LeanFi and an angel investor. He records music, makes videos, and skateboards on the side.
Rodolphe Barrere
Rodolphe Barrere is the co-founder and CEO of Potloc, a Montreal-headquartered consumer research platform that pioneered survey sampling through social networks. Born in France, he moved to Quebec at 17 to study at HEC Montreal, worked briefly at LVMH in Paris and New York, and founded Potloc in 2014 with classmate Louis Delaoustre. He was named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe (Technology) list and has raised more than $90M for the company, which now serves consulting firms and private equity clients across offices in Montreal, New York, Paris, London and Dubai.
Sam Li
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.