Pronto is a Bengaluru-based on-demand and subscription house-help platform that dispatches trained, background-verified cleaning professionals to urban homes in roughly 10 minutes. Founded in 2025 by Anjali Sardana, it applies a quick-commerce playbook to India's largely informal domestic-work market - transparent per-visit pricing, instant or scheduled booking, and structured shifts that give workers (about 99% of them women) predictable income. The company scaled from roughly 1,000 daily bookings to 24,000-25,000 in about a year and was valued at $200M in April 2026.
R. Scott Jones is the Chairman and CEO of Intravascular Imaging Incorporated (i3), a Wilton, Connecticut medtech startup commercializing a 3-French NIRF-IVUS catheter that lets cardiologists see both the anatomy and the biology of a diseased coronary artery in a single pass. A medical device operator with more than 25 years in the field, he once ran GE Medical Systems' cardiovascular business across the Americas and Asia and has steered companies from two-person startups to organizations of 7,000 employees. At i3 he is the commercial engine behind a technology born in the labs of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Technical University of Munich.
Bobby Farahi is the co-founder and CEO of Dolls Kill, the San Francisco alternative-fashion brand he built with his wife and co-founder Shaudi 'Shoddy' Lynn after the two met at a Los Angeles rave. A serial operator who earlier founded and sold the broadcast-monitoring company Multivision, Farahi turned a stack of foxtail keychains in an apartment into a Sequoia- and Maveron-backed e-commerce label for self-described 'misfits and miss legits.' He also invests as an angel in e-commerce and lifestyle companies.
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.
Russell Beckerman is a biotech entrepreneur and Co-Founder & CEO of Overture Therapeutics, a Cambridge-based company engineering precision antibody medicines targeting obesity and metabolic dysfunction. He previously co-founded 82VS, a venture studio embedded within Alloy Therapeutics that has launched nine drug companies since 2020. His work sits at the intersection of cutting-edge antibody biology, company creation, and the conviction that the next generation of obesity drugs will be antibodies - not peptides.
Santiago Rosenblatt broke into PayPal and NBA League Pass at age six, found a marketplace glitch at fourteen that let him buy electronics for the price of shipping, then turned that curiosity into a career defending banks and fintechs. Today he is Founder and CEO of Strike, an AI-led continuous pentesting platform that compresses vulnerability detection from months to hours, protects 120+ companies across 20+ countries, and raised a $13.5M Series A to expand across the U.S. and Brazil.
Troy LeCaire is the co-founder and CEO of GovWell, a New York startup building an AI operating system for local government - the permits, licenses, and inspections that quietly run a town. Before writing a line of code, he and CTO Ben Cohen cold-called hundreds of municipalities and lined up five paying customers. By 2026 GovWell served 130+ municipalities across 34 states and raised a $25M Series A led by Insight Partners, with zero churn on live customers and processing times cut by up to 95%.
Viveka Hulyalkar is the co-founder and CEO of Beam Impact, a New York customer engagement and loyalty platform that lets shoppers direct a slice of everyday purchases to nonprofits at no extra cost. A McKinsey alum and Brown honors graduate, she set out to fix what she calls broken retention marketing by tying brand loyalty to the causes young consumers actually care about. Beam works with 130+ mission-driven brands including Instacart, IKEA and Roots Canada, and Hulyalkar's stated goal is to shift $10 billion from brands to high-impact nonprofits. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Social Impact.
Vlad Matsiiako is the Ukrainian-born co-founder and CEO of Infisical, the open-source secrets, certificate, and access management platform that processes well over 100 million secrets a day. After studying in the Netherlands, working as one of the first data scientists at bunq, picking up a master's at Cornell, and a stint at Figma, he teamed up with two Cornell friends, cycled through ideas like a VR marketplace, and finally bet on the unglamorous problem that bites every engineer: leaked API keys and sprawling .env files. Infisical went through Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch, open-sourced its code to earn developer trust, and raised a $16M Series A led by Elad Gil in 2025.
Yoyo Chang is the Taiwan-born British founder and CEO of Kody, a payments and physical-commerce platform he started as a high-school cafeteria project to kill lunch queues. A self-taught teenage stock trader who ploughed his own trading profits into the company, he raised the business through a $20M Series A in 2024 and pushed its annualised processing volume toward $1 billion, all before turning 25.
Ahmed Khattak is the founder and CEO of US Mobile, the only American carrier built natively on the public cloud that lets customers ride and switch between all three major networks (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile) on demand. A Pakistani immigrant who landed on an F1 student visa, he spent a decade clawing US Mobile to $100M in annual recurring revenue, then doubled it to $200M in nine months. Before that he co-founded GSM Nation, a $130M unlocked-phone marketplace that taught him how the carriers really make money.
Edward Tian is the co-founder and CEO of GPTZero, the AI-detection tool he wrote in three days at a cafe over the 2023 New Year holiday while a senior at Princeton. Within days, tens of thousands of teachers swarmed the app and crashed its server. Two years on, GPTZero has raised $13.5 million, reached millions of users, turned profitable, and become a default check for educators, recruiters, and grant agencies trying to tell human writing from machine writing.
Garrison John is a chief executive associated with RateS, the Indonesia-focused social commerce platform that turns housewives, students, and small-town hustlers into online resellers. The company began life in Singapore in 2017 as the e-commerce payments startup RateX before pivoting into social commerce across Indonesia's tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Listed on LinkedIn with a Harvard education and based in the New York City metropolitan area, John sits at the intersection of Wall Street financing logic and warung-level commerce, where the whole game is shaving inefficiency out of sourcing, supply chain, inventory, and working capital for half a million resellers.
Harry Rein is the co-founder and CEO of ShopMy, the New York creator-commerce platform that turns taste into a paycheck. Trained as an AI engineer at MIT, he built ShopMy from a side project into a company valued at $1.5 billion, connecting roughly 200,000 creators with more than 1,200 brands and processing over $1 billion in annual transactions. He insists recommendations stay authentic, runs the company at profitability, and frames the next phase as a shift from the creator economy to the curator economy.
Li Haslett Chen is the founder and CEO of Howl, a New York creator-commerce platform that has driven more than $1.1 billion in creator-led sales and paid over $100 million to roughly 23,000 creators since 2022. A former biochemical engineer, Vogue intern, McKinsey analyst, and Moda Operandi marketer, she previously founded the editorial-commerce company Narrativ. She has been named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a Financial Times retail disruptor, and an Ad Age 40-Under-40, and served on the board of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Patrick Gilligan is the founder and CEO of SOMETHINGS, a New York based near-peer mentorship platform that connects youth ages 13 to 26 with trained mentors in their twenties through real-time virtual support. The service is free to teens and paid for by states, Medicaid managed care plans and school systems. In February 2026 the company raised a $19.2M Series A led by Catalio Capital with returning backers General Catalyst and Tusk Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $28.6M. SOMETHINGS has supported more than 11,000 teens and is built on Gilligan's conviction that a young person in crisis needs a person, not a chatbot.
Saad Alam is the co-founder and CEO of Hone Health, a telehealth platform built around preventative, biomarker-driven longevity care. After a year lost inside the conventional healthcare system, he set out to build the clinic he wished he'd found. Hone now counts hundreds of thousands of tested patients and closed a $33M Series A in early 2025, alongside the acquisition of in-home care company ivee. Before Hone, Alam co-founded the edtech company Citelighter and led market research for Eli Lilly's neuroscience franchise.
Steven Wang is the founder and CEO of dub, a regulated, SEC-registered copy-trading app that lets everyday investors mirror the portfolios of vetted managers, hedge funds, and members of Congress with one tap. A Detroit-area kid who opened a custodial brokerage account in second grade, he sold a VR company at 17, built Apple Watch software at 18, invested out of a Harvard dorm as a Dorm Room Fund partner, then dropped out to launch dub. The company has crossed 1 million downloads and raised about $47 million, including a $30M Series A in May 2025.
Tony Tran is the co-founder and CEO of Lumanu, the payments and financing company building the financial infrastructure of the creator economy. A Vietnamese refugee who grew up in South Carolina, he studied computer science at MIT, advised at McKinsey, and built product at Google before starting Lumanu in 2017 after watching his mother discover YouTube creators on an iPad. Lumanu now moves money for thousands of creators and brands - from Jessica Alba and Snoop Dogg to DoorDash, Pepsi, and Sony - and made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies.
Zach Lloyd is the founder and CEO of Warp, the Rust-based terminal that grew up into an agentic development environment. A former Google principal engineer who led the Docs and Sheets teams, he looked at the one tool every programmer touches and noticed it had barely changed in 40 years. Warp's answer: a command line that reads natural language, runs AI agents, and as of 2025 codes by prompt. The company has raised roughly $73-75M from Sequoia, GV, Dylan Field and Elad Gil, and went from its first $1M of ARR in 300-plus days to adding $1M every few days.
Sharath Kuruganty is a serial entrepreneur, community builder, and angel investor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Holder of an O-1/EB-1A 'Alien of Extraordinary Ability' visa, he has founded and exited two SaaS startups, is the #1 hunter on Product Hunt with 140+ launches, hosts 'The Undefeated Underdogs' podcast, and is currently building GuestLab.ai - an AI-powered research assistant for podcast hosts. Known for his 'build in public' philosophy, he grew from 200 to 22,000+ Twitter followers and advocates that no-code tools are a superpower for aspiring founders.
Pipedrive is a sales-first CRM built by salespeople, for salespeople. Founded in 2010 in Tallinn, Estonia, and now headquartered in New York, Pipedrive gives small and mid-sized businesses a visual, activity-based pipeline that keeps deals moving. With over 100,000 companies across 179 countries using the platform, Pipedrive became a $1.5 billion unicorn in 2020 after a majority investment from Vista Equity Partners. Its philosophy is simple: salespeople should spend less time in software and more time selling.
Close is a bootstrapped, profitable sales CRM built for small and mid-sized teams that want to spend less time on admin and more time actually selling. Founded in 2013 out of a San Francisco sales agency, it combines pipeline management, built-in calling, email, and SMS into one platform - no integrations required. With $17M+ ARR and a fully remote team across 40+ countries, Close has grown almost entirely without venture capital, making it one of the more unusual success stories in SaaS.
Steven Bartlett is a British entrepreneur, investor, author, and podcast host who dropped out of university after a single lecture to build Social Chain - a social media marketing company that went public at a $200M+ valuation before he turned 28. He hosts The Diary of a CEO, the second most-listened podcast globally on Spotify Wrapped 2025, with over 15 million YouTube subscribers. He is the youngest-ever Dragon on BBC's Dragons' Den and the founder of Steven.com, a creator holding company valued at $425 million.
Alan Zhang (Rongyu Zhang) is a San Francisco-based founder, aerospace engineer, and YouTube creator who built the first human-carrying eVTOL drone assembled by a high schooler — a 280kg-thrust electric aircraft completed in 327 days with 17 classmates in a Diamond Bar garage. Now at UC Berkeley's MET program (Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology), he is building Prototype 3 of his passenger drone and running a stealth startup, while his YouTube channel @alanzeekk documents his journey building interesting machines.
Alex Reibman is the Co-Founder and CEO of AgentOps (Agency), a San Francisco-based developer platform for building, testing, and monitoring AI agents. A 17-time hackathon champion with 10+ years of machine learning experience, he previously led ML engineering at Ernst & Young on $40M+ engagements for clients like Goldman Sachs and American Express, co-founded Menubites.ai (acquired by Snappr in 2023), and worked as a cybersecurity data scientist. AgentOps raised a $2.6M pre-seed in August 2024 and serves enterprise clients including Microsoft, Google, Samsung, and Meta. He studied Economics and Philosophy at Emory University and won the 2024 Emory Entrepreneur Award.
Alexi Robichaux is the CEO and Co-Founder of BetterUp, the human transformation platform he started in 2013 after a soul-searching walk along the Camino de Santiago. He built BetterUp from a two-person idea into a $5 billion company with 2,800 employees and over $628 million in total funding, pioneering digital professional coaching for enterprises including Google, Salesforce, and NASA. A former product executive at VMware who once struggled with imposter syndrome and public speaking anxiety, Robichaux turned his personal journey with coaching into a mission to make elite professional development accessible to everyone.
Andrew Rubin is the CEO and co-founder of Illumio, the company that pioneered Zero Trust Segmentation - the idea that once a breach happens (and it will), you stop it from spreading. A Brooklyn native who built his career through sales, he founded Illumio in 2013 and scaled it to a $2.75B valuation with $225M in Series F funding, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, General Catalyst, and investors including Marc Benioff and John W. Thompson. Named to Goldman Sachs' '100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs' seven times, he earned EY Bay Area Entrepreneur of the Year in 2024 and remains one of cybersecurity's most vocal advocates for rethinking how organizations think about inevitable breaches.
David 'Dave' Ripley is Co-CEO of Kraken, one of the world's largest and longest-running cryptocurrency exchanges. He joined via Kraken's 2016 acquisition of Glidera, a bitcoin wallet service he co-founded, and rose from COO to CEO to Co-CEO as Kraken expanded aggressively — completing $1.5B acquisitions, raising $800M in 2025, and filing confidentially for a U.S. IPO. A former BCG principal and electrical engineer turned crypto operator, Ripley has shepherded Kraken from a 50-person startup to a 2,600+ employee global exchange while navigating major SEC enforcement actions and a shifting regulatory landscape.
Marc Morgan is the CEO and co-founder of Braven, a San Francisco consumer venture he started after more than a decade in finance. He spent his first career reading markets, building deal structures, and forging partnerships; he is now applying that operator's playbook to building a category-defining brand from scratch.