startup-ceo
(123)
Jenny Shao Left a White Coat for a Memory Machine
She spent years studying how people remember, then walked away from a mapped-out medical career to ask a stranger question: what would software become if it could carry the history of a relationship?
Mikkel Wad Thorsen Is Teaching AI to Notice What Care Teams Cannot Always See
A design-trained founder spent months close to the hospital floor, then built Teton around a stubborn idea: useful AI should understand the work before it tries to automate it.
Florian Hillen Put AI in the Dentist's Chair - Then Made It Scale
A medical student turned MIT researcher found his company in a place almost everyone visits. Videa grew by making the machine useful to clinicians, legible to patients, and repeatable across thousands of practices.
Adit Jain
He turned a failing chatbot app into an AI platform for 400 of the world's biggest companies. The pivot started with one number he could not ignore.
Sam Lambert
Sam Lambert is the CEO and President of PlanetScale, the database company built on Vitess, the MySQL scaling technology that once powered YouTube. A database engineer by trade, he started as GitHub's first DBA in 2013 and spent roughly eight years there, rising to VP of Engineering leading a 350-person infrastructure and platform organization through the era GitHub scaled to tens of millions of users. After a short stint at Facebook working on internet-scale video infrastructure, he joined PlanetScale as an investor and advisor, became Chief Product Officer, and was named CEO in July 2021. He is known for a product philosophy centered on databases that 'just work' and never go down, a bias toward taste and craft, and blunt views on leadership.
Sebastian Gabor
Sebastian Gabor is the co-founder and CEO of Digitail, an AI-native, cloud-based practice management platform for veterinary clinics. A serial entrepreneur from Romania, he previously built the development studio ITGambit to nearly 100 engineers and co-founded the civic-tech non-profit Code4Romania. He started Digitail in 2018 with Ruxandra Pui after a vet handed him his dog's vaccination schedule on an illegible sticky note - a moment that led him to discover most animal hospitals still ran on software from the 1990s. Today Digitail serves more than 10,000 veterinarians and millions of pets, and in November 2025 raised a $23M Series B led by Five Elms Capital.
Sudheesh Nair
Sudheesh Nair is the cofounder and CEO of TinyFish, a Palo Alto company building enterprise web agents that let AI navigate, research, and extract data from the web at scale. He grew up in a lower-middle-class family in a small town in India before a teacher's nudge toward a campus interview set him on a path to the United States. He was an early employee and president of Nutanix, where he helped scale the company from zero to more than $1 billion in revenue and a 2016 IPO, then served as CEO of ThoughtSpot, steering it from on-premises BI to a cloud-native AI analytics platform. In 2024 he cofounded TinyFish, which launched publicly in 2025 with $47 million in funding and counts Google among its early customers.
Timothy Barat
Timothy Barat is the co-founder and CEO of Gridware, a San Francisco climate-tech company that builds pole-mounted sensors to detect power grid failures before they cause outages or wildfires. A former electrical lineworker from Victoria, Australia who lived through the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, Barat moved to the United States, earned bachelor's and master's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley, and founded Gridware in 2020 with Hall Chen and Abdulrahman Bin Omar. His Gridscope device, described as a 'Fitbit for power poles,' listens to the mechanical and electrical signals of the grid to pinpoint hazards. Gridware has raised roughly $97 million to date, including a $55 million Series B in November 2025, and its co-founders were named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 Social Impact list.
Tony Owens
Tony Alika Owens is the Chief Executive Officer of Amperity, the AI-powered lakehouse customer data platform, a role he took in November 2024. A veteran enterprise software operator with more than 20 years of experience, he spent a decade at Salesforce running field operations in the Americas as the company grew from $1.4 billion to well over $20 billion in revenue, held a group vice president role at Oracle, and served as president of worldwide field operations at LivePerson. He also sits on several boards and is known for a relentless focus on customer value.
Tracy MacNeal
Tracy MacNeal is a chemical engineer turned healthcare executive who serves as President and CEO of Materna Medical, a women's health technology company in Mountain View, California. With more than 25 years across pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, digital health and medical devices, and six transactions to her name, she has built a career on commercializing hard-to-define products and opening markets that others overlook. She sits on the board of AdvaMed and chairs its Women's Executive Network, and she is known for pairing engineering rigor with a storyteller's instinct for building trust with clinicians, investors and customers.
Vu Van
Vu Van is the Vietnamese-born co-founder and CEO of ELSA (English Language Speech Assistant), an AI-powered app that gives non-native speakers instant feedback on English pronunciation, fluency and intonation. She built the idea out of her own struggle to be understood as a Stanford graduate student, teamed up with speech-recognition scientist Xavier Anguera, and has grown ELSA into one of the world's largest AI language platforms, with tens of millions of users across roughly 190 countries. She is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and Endeavor entrepreneur.
Cameron Howieson
Cameron Howieson is the co-founder and CEO of Opencare, a Toronto-based digital health company that connects patients with a curated network of top-rated dentists across North America. A computer engineer by training, he co-founded the stock-research startup Vuru (acquired by Wave Accounting in 2012) before helping build Opencare, where he moved from CTO to COO to CEO. His work centers on making preventive dental care transparent, convenient and comfortable for patients.
Briggs Elwell
Briggs Elwell is the co-founder and CEO of RLTYco, a New York-based specialty finance and services firm built for independent (1099) real estate agents. After more than 15 years in real estate - from sales and asset management at The Related Companies to building the Northeast business for OPTIMAR International - he co-founded RLTYco in 2021 with attorney Daniel Kennedy. The company started by advancing agents their commissions within 24 hours and has grown into a one-stop platform spanning commission funding, tax and financial tools, legal formation, healthcare, and rewards. In January 2025 RLTYco raised a $20 million Series A led by Altriarch and acquired the rewards technology of Zurp.
Ziv Attar
Ziv Attar is the co-founder and CEO of Glass Imaging, a California startup building GlassAI, a neural image processing system that corrects optical aberrations and sensor imperfections to pull sharper, more detailed pictures out of small cameras. An optical engineer trained at the Technion, he founded LinX Imaging in 2011 and sold it to Apple in 2015, then led computational photography work at Apple including the Portrait Mode that shipped on the iPhone 7+. In 2025 Glass Imaging raised a $20M Series A led by Insight Partners.
Daragh Murphy
Daragh Murphy is the Irish-born co-founder and CEO of Imprint, a New York fintech that builds co-branded credit card and loyalty programs for consumer brands like Rakuten, Booking.com, Turkish Airlines and H-E-B. A former corporate lawyer and WeWork operator, he started Imprint in 2020 and grew it to unicorn status, reaching a $1.2 billion valuation in a $150 million Series D in December 2025.
Dave Feldman
Dave Feldman is the co-founder and CEO of Greenboard, a New York-based company building an AI-native operating system for financial compliance. A Johns Hopkins-trained engineer who previously led product work at Guideline and a Hive AI joint venture with Bain & Company, Feldman started Greenboard in 2023 with college friend Ed Schembor after seeing how badly financial firms struggled with fragmented, dated compliance tools. Greenboard went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch and has raised $20 million total, including a $15.5M Series A led by Base10 Partners, with more than 500 financial institutions running their compliance programs on the platform.
Eyal Feder-Levy
Eyal Feder-Levy is the co-founder and CEO of Zencity, a govtech company that uses AI to turn millions of resident interactions into actionable insight for local governments. An urban planner by training who came up through nonprofit community work in South Tel Aviv, he started Zencity in 2015 to give cities a routine 'finger on the pulse' of their communities. Under his leadership the company has raised roughly $93M, works across six countries, and serves hundreds of government agencies reaching hundreds of millions of residents.
FX Leduc
François-Xavier (FX) Leduc is a French serial entrepreneur and CEO who builds AI companies that turn technical breakthroughs into products for large enterprises. He is currently co-founder and CEO of DeepIP, a New York-based AI patent assistant used by law firms and in-house IP teams, which he started in 2024 with longtime partner Edouard d'Archimbaud. The two previously built Kili Technology, a data-labeling platform for enterprise AI that raised over $30M and served customers like Airbus, SAP and Louis Vuitton. Across ventures, Leduc pairs a commercial, go-to-market instinct with a conviction that AI should augment expert professionals rather than replace them.
George Eliadis
George Eliadis is the co-founder and CEO of Probook, a New York based company building an AI operating system for home services businesses such as HVAC, plumbing, and electrical contractors. A 24-year-old Wharton graduate who spent six summers pressure washing homes in upstate New York with his father, he started Probook to fix the operational problems he lived through in the field. In June 2026 the company raised a $40 million round, combining a $34 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and a $6 million seed led by Sequoia Capital, and it now serves hundreds of clients across more than 35 states.
James Reinstein
James Reinstein is the President and CEO of Conformal Medical, a New Hampshire medical device company building next-generation left atrial appendage occlusion (LAAO) technology to reduce stroke risk in patients with atrial fibrillation. A three-decade medtech operator, he spent 17 years at Boston Scientific in commercial leadership across Asia, Europe and Latin America before running a string of device companies as CEO, including Cutera, Drawbridge Health, Aptus Endosystems and Saranas. Known for insisting that a device company think commercially from day one, he took the helm at Conformal in 2022 to guide its foam-based CLAAS system through pivotal trials toward market.
Jay Bhatia
Jay Bhatia is the founder and CEO of Agilis Commerce (Agilis Chemicals), a Newark, New Jersey software company that builds cloud-based, branded e-commerce and AI-enabled customer engagement platforms purpose-built for the chemical industry. A chemical engineer and MBA with more than two decades at global players like BASF and Shell Chemicals, he launched Agilis in 2016-2017 to bring the digital tools of modern commerce to an industry long defined by manual, relationship-heavy processes. Under his leadership, Agilis has raised roughly $3.65M and rolled out its Alchemist AI solutions with pilot customers including Evonik.
Maor Levran
Maor Levran is the co-founder and CEO of Slice, an AI-powered global equity platform that helps finance and legal teams issue, track, and stay compliant with equity compensation across roughly 60 countries. A corporate lawyer for over a decade who was repeatedly ranked a Top Tech Attorney by The Legal 500, Levran started Slice in 2022 after watching companies struggle - and sometimes face six-figure fines - when granting stock options and RSUs to international employees. Slice has raised $32 million total, including a $25 million Series A led by Insight Partners in early 2026, and manages equity for more than 70,000 employees at companies such as Wiz, Wayve, and Aidoc.
Laura Katz
Laura Katz is the founder and CEO of Helaina, a New York biotech company that uses precision fermentation to produce human-identical bioactive proteins. Its first product, effera, is the world's first commercially available human lactoferrin made through yeast fermentation. A food scientist by training and once NYU's youngest adjunct professor in Food Science, Katz started the company in 2019 from her Lower East Side kitchen after hearing a podcast about the black market for breast milk. She has raised more than $80 million to move Helaina from research into a commercial ingredient business.
Mamoun Benkirane
Mamoun Benkirane is the co-founder and CEO of MarketLeap, an AI-driven operating system that helps direct-to-consumer brands sell and scale across global online marketplaces. A former Amazon and Jumia executive who built and expanded marketplaces across Europe and Africa, he started MarketLeap after realizing that even the biggest platforms left independent sellers drowning in fragmented data and complexity. Backed by an $8M Series A led by Smedvig Ventures in 2025, MarketLeap now operates across 30+ countries and is expanding into Madrid and New York.
Matthew Levin
Matthew Levin is the co-founder and CEO of Lariat, an AI-native sales platform built to prospect into brick-and-mortar businesses. A UC Berkeley alum based in Brooklyn, he's a career B2B go-to-market operator whose past stops include Global Head of Marketing at Nosto and VP of Marketing at mParticle, plus early co-founding runs at Plenishable and the Switchboard project.
Matthieu Hafemeister
Matthieu Hafemeister is the co-founder and CEO of Concourse, a New York startup building AI agents for corporate finance teams. A former fintech partner at Andreessen Horowitz and head of growth at Jeeves, he started Concourse in 2023 with Ted Michaels and raised a $12M Series A led by Standard Capital in early 2026, bringing total funding to about $27M.
Nick Macario
Nick Macario is co-founder and CEO of Verifiable, an Austin-based healthcare credentialing platform that replaces weeks of paperwork with API-driven verifications and, more recently, an autonomous AI agent called CredAgent. A multi-time founder (Branded.me, Remote.com, Dock.io), he raised a $27M Series B from Craft Ventures in 2023 and is backed by Sam and Jack Altman.
Noam Awadish
Noam Awadish is the co-founder and CEO of imper.ai, a cybersecurity company that launched in December 2025 with $28 million in funding to detect AI-driven impersonation and social engineering attacks in real time. Before imper.ai, Awadish spent more than a decade in Israel's elite Unit 8200 as Head of Initial Access, then served as Chief of Staff for Autonomous Vehicle Programs at Mobileye. He founded imper.ai with two other 8200 veterans, Anatoly Blighovsky and Rom Dudkiewicz, to build a platform that scans device telemetry and network diagnostics rather than trying to out-detect generative models.
Rajesh Narasimha
Rajesh Narasimha is CEO and co-founder of Edgetensor, a Dallas-based startup building a multi-camera, edge-AI video telematics platform for fleets, insurance, and automotive OEMs. A Georgia Tech ECE PhD with 16+ years in computer vision and machine learning, he previously worked at Texas Instruments, Samsung Research America, and helped stand up US R&D at metaio (later acquired by Apple).
Sagar Khatri
Sagar Khatri is the co-founder and CEO of Multiplier, a global employment platform that lets companies hire, onboard, pay, and comply with local labor law across 150+ countries. An IIT Bombay graduate and former Nomura investment banker, he started Multiplier in 2020 with Vamsi Krishna and Amritpal Singh after living through the pain of setting up international entities as a corporate development executive at Singapore-based co-living startup Hmlet. Multiplier raised a $60M Series B led by Sequoia Capital India in 2022 at a reported $400M valuation, and Khatri, a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia honoree, now splits his time between Singapore and New York.