Tagged: startup-accelerator
9 results
Techstars
Techstars is a global pre-seed investor and startup accelerator founded in Boulder, Colorado in 2006. It runs three-month, mentorship-driven accelerator programs that give early-stage founders capital, a dense mentor network, and lifelong connections in exchange for equity. Since its first class in 2007, Techstars has backed more than 10,000 founders across programs in dozens of cities and 150+ countries, producing companies such as SendGrid, DigitalOcean, ClassPass, PillPack and Remitly.
Harshita Arora
Harshita Arora is General Partner at Y Combinator - the youngest in the organization's history - having dropped out of school at 15 in Saharanpur, India, taught herself to code, built and sold a crypto app featured by Apple at age 16, won India's Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Shakti Puraskar, moved to San Francisco on an O-1 visa, co-founded AtoB (the 'Stripe for Trucking' valued at ~$800M), and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 before joining YC as a Visiting Partner in 2025 and ascending to General Partner in April 2026 at age 25.
Ankit Gupta
Ankit Gupta is a General Partner at Y Combinator, bringing a rare fusion of academic machine learning research, startup founding, and biotech industry leadership. He co-founded Reverie Labs (YC W18), an AI-driven drug discovery company that raised $31M and was acquired by Ginkgo Bioworks in 2024. A Harvard magna cum laude CS grad who taught three courses and won three Derek Bok Awards, Ankit now helps the next generation of founders navigate the same inflection points he once faced.
David Lieb
David Lieb is a General Partner at Y Combinator who co-founded Bump - the app that let phones share data by physically bumping together, reaching 150 million users before being acquired by Google in 2013. After the acquisition, his team's unreleased photo-sharing project became Google Photos, which Lieb led as Senior Director for nine years until it reached over 1 billion users. Now at YC, he mentors early-stage founders drawing on his rare trifecta of experience: consumer hit, big-tech product leadership, and venture capital.
James Evans
James Evans is a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and the co-founder and former CEO of Command AI (YC S20), a user-assistance platform he built with Richard Freling and Vinay Ayyala and sold to Amplitude in October 2024 for north of $45 million. A Princeton CS graduate who detoured through private equity at Bain Capital before going all-in on startups, Evans scaled Command AI to 25 million end-users across hundreds of enterprise clients before the acquisition. Now advising the next wave of YC founders, he brings rare firsthand experience from both sides of the table - founder and investor.
Grey Baker
Grey Baker is a Cambridge-educated mathematician turned software entrepreneur best known for bootstrapping Dependabot to $14k MRR before selling it to GitHub in 2019, then growing GitHub Advanced Security to $140M ARR. A former McKinsey consultant who taught himself to code in six months, cycled 30,000km around the world between startups, and co-founded YC S23 company Pincites (AI contract negotiation, acquired by Filevine in 2025), he now serves as a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator.
Ellie Bof
Ellie Bof is the Director of Finance at Forum Ventures, a leading pre-seed venture capital fund and B2B SaaS accelerator based in New York. A Commerce graduate of Ryerson University's Ted Rogers School of Management, she spent 13 years mastering accounting and operations at Canadian Iceberg Vodka Corporation before pivoting to the fast-paced world of venture capital. At Forum Ventures - which backs over 100 companies annually - Ellie keeps the financial engine running: closing books, ensuring accurate LP reporting, and processing invoices across a 30+ person team. Her promotion to Director of Finance recognized her as, in the firm's own words, 'a warrior in closing our books, ensuring accurate reporting to our LPs, processing invoices, and ultimately keeping the lights on.'
Pejman Nozad
Pejman Nozad is the Founding Managing Partner of Pear VC, a $800M+ AUM seed-stage venture firm he co-founded in 2013. Born in Tehran, he arrived in Silicon Valley in 1992 with $700 and no English, worked as a car washer, lived in a yogurt shop attic, then became the top Persian rug salesman on University Avenue in Palo Alto — selling $8M in a single year to the Valley's most powerful VCs and founders. Those relationships became deal flow. He backed Dropbox, DoorDash ($1.9M seed → $440M), AppLovin, and Andy Rubin's pre-Android company Danger. Forbes ranked him #1 on its Midas Seed List three consecutive years (2023, 2024, 2025). He has no CS degree, no MBA, and never worked in tech — yet built one of the highest-performing seed funds ever and joined the board of Sheffield United FC in 2025.
Adeo Ressi
Adeo Ressi — full name Adeodato Gregory Ressi di Cervia — is an Italian-American entrepreneur, systems architect, and the man who has been manufacturing founders and venture capitalists at scale for over two decades. Born in New York City in 1972, he co-founded one of the internet's first commercial websites (Total New York, sold to AOL), built and sold methodfive for $88 million, created TheFunded to democratize VC transparency, founded the Founder Institute (7,000+ companies across 250+ cities), launched VC Lab (responsible for ~50% of all new VC firms in 2023), and now leads Decile Group as CEO. He pioneered free legal frameworks used by millions of founders (FAST Agreement, Class F Shares, Convertible Equity). He was Elon Musk's college roommate at Penn, tried and failed to talk him out of SpaceX, and has been publicly wrong about exactly one thing. He calls himself a 'societal engineer.' He means it.