Philippe Noël is the co-founder and CEO of ParadeDB, an open-source Postgres extension that brings Elasticsearch-grade full-text search and analytics directly into the database, eliminating the brittle ETL pipelines companies build to sync Postgres with a separate search engine. A Harvard computer science and economics graduate raised in rural Quebec, he previously co-founded the cloud-browser startup Whist before pivoting into ParadeDB during a contracting stint. In 2025 ParadeDB raised a $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures, with customers including Alibaba, Modern Treasury, and Bilt Rewards.
Sahil Hasan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Dots, a developer-friendly global payouts platform that has processed over $1 billion to more than 1 million gig workers, creators, and contractors in 190+ countries. A UC Berkeley EECS grad with a CMU master's degree, Sahil spent time as a Research Engineer at Google X before co-founding Dots through Y Combinator's S21 batch. The company raised an $8.9M Series A in February 2026 led by DCM Ventures, is profitable, and growing revenue 400% year-over-year.
Tomer Aharoni is the co-founder and CEO of Nagish, a New York startup using AI to caption phone calls in real time so Deaf and hard-of-hearing people can place and receive calls by typing and reading, with no human operator in the loop. The idea began with a phone ringing during a class at Columbia and a question he couldn't shake: how do you take a call if you can't hear or speak? Nagish (Hebrew for 'accessible') is now FCC-certified, offered free to users through federal subsidies, and has raised $16 million. Aharoni builds the product hand-in-hand with the Deaf community and is now pushing into AI sign-language translation.
Tom Bilyeu is a serial entrepreneur, media founder, and podcast host who co-founded Quest Nutrition - achieving 57,000% growth in three years before selling for $1 billion - then pivoted to build Impact Theory, a media company generating over 1 billion views through content centered on entrepreneurship, mindset, AI, and geopolitics. A USC-trained filmmaker turned business builder, Bilyeu channels his obsession with human potential into daily content, courses, live events, and a graphic novel series, positioning himself as one of the most prolific voices in the creator-entrepreneur space.
Jonathan Vlock is Vice President of Marketing, Demand Generation and Enablement at Amazon Web Services (AWS), bringing over two decades of B2B marketing leadership across cloud, cybersecurity, ESG, and enterprise technology. Before AWS, he held senior marketing roles at PwC, S&P Global, NetApp, and Wipro, and earlier co-founded Cooking Planit, a patented personal cooking assistant app. A Cornell MBA, Jeet Kune Do practitioner, and self-styled 'mad scientist' of integrated marketing, Vlock blends data-driven pipeline strategy with a restless entrepreneurial streak.
Ross Ortega is VP of Product Management at Microsoft, currently leading Discovery and Communications initiatives. He previously built a $1 billion portfolio of Azure networking services - including ExpressRoute, Virtual WAN, Application Gateway, and Web Application Firewall - and then led Azure for Operators, Microsoft's 5G and edge computing platform for telecommunications providers. Before Microsoft, he co-founded Consystant Design Technologies and served as President and CTO of GraniteEdge Networks. A career technologist with roots in embedded systems and networking, Ortega has spent over two decades at Microsoft shaping how enterprises and telecoms connect to the cloud.
Austin Russell founded Luminar Technologies at 16, built lidar hardware in his parents' garage, dropped out of Stanford after three months on a Thiel Fellowship, and briefly became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 25 when Luminar went public in December 2020. His company's 1550nm lidar sensors were integrated into production vehicles from Volvo and Mercedes-Benz, representing a rare case of autonomous vehicle hardware reaching mass-market cars. After a highly publicized attempt to acquire Forbes magazine fell through in 2023, Russell resigned as Luminar's CEO in May 2025 following a board ethics inquiry, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025.
Cali Tran is CEO of Simpli.fi, a programmatic advertising platform backed by Blackstone and GTCR that runs 140,000+ ad campaigns monthly for 40,000 advertisers. Born in a Vietnamese refugee camp at Camp Pendleton and raised as the youngest of six in a family restaurant, he built a career spanning investment banking, venture capital, startup co-founding, and C-suite leadership at Ancestry, Valassis, Centerfield, Brandwatch, and Cision. At Valassis, he engineered a 5x expansion of digital revenue for a $2 billion company. He is an advisor at SignalFire, a board member of OneVietnamNetwork, and a Bowdoin College alumni council member who graduated cum laude in History before earning his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Abhinav Asthana is the co-founder and CEO of Postman, the world's leading API platform used by over 35 million developers and 500,000 organizations. Growing up in small-town Uttar Pradesh, India, he taught himself programming as a child, built virtual tour software before finishing college, and turned a side project Chrome extension into a company valued at $5.6 billion. He moved Postman from Bangalore to San Francisco in 2017 and has raised $433 million in total funding, including a $225M Series D in 2021.
Abhishek Choudhary is the Co-Founder and CTO of TrueFoundry, a Series A-backed AI infrastructure platform that helps enterprises deploy, manage, and govern machine learning models at scale. A former Senior Staff Engineer at Meta — where he worked on infrastructure serving over a billion users — he left to build the platform he wished had existed at Facebook: one that brings Meta-level AI automation to every enterprise. An IIT Kharagpur alumnus, he co-founded TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside batchmates Nikunj Bajaj and Anuraag Gupta, and has since grown it to serve clients like NVIDIA, Siemens Healthineers, and ResMed, raising $21.3M in total funding.
Alex Robinson is the CEO and Co-founder of Juniper Square, a San Francisco-based private markets software platform serving 2,000+ GPs managing over $1 trillion in investor equity. Founded in 2014 after Robinson spent years at Microsoft and building GreenDoor (a PACE clean energy lending platform that collapsed when federal regulators abruptly ended the subsidy program), Juniper Square has grown into a $1.1 billion unicorn after a $130M Series D in June 2025. Robinson's singular focus: digitizing the paper-and-spreadsheet world of private equity partnerships and making private markets infrastructure as reliable as the public markets infrastructure that came before it.
Anant Bhardwaj is the founder and CEO of Instabase, a San Francisco-based AI platform that helps enterprises extract intelligence from unstructured data - PDFs, images, emails, and documents of every kind. He dropped out of a PhD at MIT in 2015 to build what has become a $1.24 billion company with $277M in total funding, serving clients like NatWest, AXA, Uber, and four of the five largest U.S. banks. Born in Bihar, India, he studied at Pune, Stanford, and MIT before pioneering the idea that the enterprise's biggest untapped asset is the data it can't yet read.
Andre Ferraz is the co-founder and CEO of Incognia, a Palo Alto-based privacy-first location identity company that uses passive behavioral signals - where your phone goes, how it moves, what Wi-Fi networks it trusts - to verify users without passwords or biometric friction. Before Incognia, Ferraz co-founded In Loco Media in 2011 at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, building it into a company that mapped 6 million indoor venues and captured 250 billion location data points monthly, before selling it to Brazilian retail giant Magazine Luiza in 2020. With Incognia, he pivoted that location intelligence from advertising into fraud prevention, raising $46.5M total (including a $31M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners in 2024), deploying technology on over 200 million smartphones, and pioneering what he calls zero-factor authentication - security that works without the user doing anything at all.
Andrew Butt is the co-founder and CEO of Enable, the San Francisco-based B2B rebate management platform that reached unicorn status in 2023 with a $1.12 billion valuation after raising $120 million in Series D funding. A UK-born entrepreneur who left school at 15 and became the youngest qualified helicopter pilot in his region at 17, Butt built his first software business from a flying school in Coventry and has spent over two decades turning overlooked operational problems in distribution and manufacturing into category-defining software companies. Enable now serves over 10,000 brands across 50+ industries and has raised more than $275 million total, with Butt positioning it as the system of record for all B2B rebate and trading agreements between manufacturers, distributors, and retailers.
Andrew Lacy is the Founder and CEO of Prenuvo, the company making proactive whole-body MRI scanning a mainstream healthcare tool. A Melbourne-born, Stanford-trained entrepreneur, he previously co-founded Tapulous - the mobile gaming company behind Tap Tap Revenge, acquired by Disney in 2010 - before pivoting to healthcare. At Prenuvo, he has raised $177M in total funding (including a $120M Series B in 2024), grown the company to 110,000+ members across 17 North American clinics, and secured FDA clearance for AI-powered body composition analysis, with plans to expand into Europe and Australia.
Bask Gill is the Co-Founder of Power (withpower.com), a San Francisco-based clinical trial platform that uses AI to match patients with clinical trials. After watching his father struggle to navigate a broken clinical trial discovery system following a multiple myeloma diagnosis, Bask co-founded Power in May 2021 alongside Brandon Li. The platform has connected over 600,000 patients to trials across 10,000+ medical conditions, with 40% being non-white patients - a deliberate focus on diversity and access. Power has raised $19M in funding including a $12M Series A in early 2024, and grown to 230 employees.
Daniel Yousefian is a co-founder of Clubhouse, the voice-based social networking platform that captured the world's attention during the pandemic. Built under Alpha Exploration Co. and backed by $112M from Andreessen Horowitz, Clubhouse pioneered drop-in audio rooms before boldly pivoting toward intimate friend-to-friend voice messaging - complete with AI-powered custom voice cloning. Based in Yerevan, Armenia, Yousefian is part of the founding trio alongside CEO Paul Davison and co-founder Rohan Seth.
Brendan O'Connor co-founded AppOmni in 2018 after a decade as Salesforce's Chief Security Officer and a stint as Security CTO at ServiceNow. Frustrated by the lack of proper tooling to secure enterprise SaaS environments, he built the solution he wished he'd had. AppOmni pioneered the SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) category, raised over $202 million in funding, protects more than 100 million SaaS user accounts, and counts 25% of the Fortune 100 among its customers. O'Connor now serves as Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder.
Brett Adcock is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company valued at $39 billion after a $1B+ Series C in September 2025. Raised on a third-generation farm in central Illinois, Adcock built his first web companies at 16, co-founded and sold talent marketplace Vettery to Adecco for ~$100M in 2018, took eVTOL company Archer Aviation public on the NYSE at a $2.7B valuation, then pivoted to what he calls the hardest problem: building general-purpose humanoid robots. Figure's robots now work autonomously on BMW's production floor and have logged over 30,000 vehicles built. In 2025-2026, Adcock simultaneously launched Hark (personal AI hardware, $700M Series A at $6B valuation) and Cover (school weapon-detection tech). He is currently running three companies at once while publicly estimating his net worth at ~$19 billion.
Chad Powell is the CEO of FLOWER CO. (Flower Company Cannabis), a members-only cannabis delivery service operating in California. He co-founded BloomThat, a Y Combinator-backed same-day flower delivery startup that was acquired by FTD Companies in 2018. After honing his product and growth chops at startups like Nebia and Boosted, Powell joined FLOWER CO. as Head of Growth, rose to VP of Product Development, and eventually became CEO. Under his leadership, FLOWER CO. has scaled to $53.4M in annual revenue with a lean team, offering 40-50% discounts vs. traditional dispensaries through a Costco-style membership model sourcing directly from California cannabis farms.
Chase Kim is a startup founder who spent years deep inside Sendbird, the messaging infrastructure company powering conversations for DoorDash, Reddit, and Hinge, where he led the forward deployment team during Sendbird's critical 2024 pivot into AI agents for customer experience. In 2026, he co-founded Light Anchor (YC P26) with Sangha Park to build fully autonomous e-commerce brands run entirely by AI agents, betting that the future of consumer business is capped by compute, not headcount.
Erez Cohen is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of August Health, a San Francisco-based healthtech company building the modern EHR platform for senior living communities. A serial founder and former Apple engineering leader, Cohen sold his first company, Mapsense, to Apple for approximately $25-30 million in 2015. He founded August Health in 2020 after meeting physician co-founder Dr. Justin Schram at a San Francisco playground - both pushing their two-year-olds on the swings - and the company has since raised $44 million in total funding, with a $29 million Series B led by Base10 Partners in August 2025.
Ian Christopher is the Co-Founder and Chief Engineer of Qventus, the AI-powered hospital operations platform backed by KKR and Bessemer Venture Partners. A Stanford-trained computational engineer, he co-built Qventus from a 2012 YC startup into a $400M+ company that automates how hospitals manage patient flow, surgical scheduling, and care coordination - reducing staff burnout and cutting length of stay for major health systems across the US.
John Martin co-founded Level Home in 2016 with the idea that the best technology is invisible - literally. After a snowstorm stranded him and his family at Lake Tahoe without keys, he set out to reinvent the deadbolt from scratch. The result: Level Lock, a smart lock engineered to hide entirely inside the door, preserving home aesthetics while adding full smartphone control. Martin spent decades across Microsoft, Starbucks, Apple, and Nokia before building Level into a $171M-funded company that was ultimately acquired by ASSA ABLOY in 2024 - a hardware giant recognizing that the future of the lock is invisible.
JT Giri is the CEO and Founder of nOps, a San Francisco-based AI-powered cloud cost optimization platform that helps companies manage and reduce their AWS spend. After discovering Amazon EC2 in beta in 2006 and spending years as a hands-on DevOps consultant, he co-founded nClouds in 2012 - which grew into an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. In 2017 he spun out nOps to productize the cloud management tooling he'd built internally. In August 2024, nOps secured a $30M Series A led by Headlight Partners, with the platform now managing over $1.5 billion in AWS spend across a customer base that grew 450% in 18 months.
Julio G. Cotorruelo is the co-founder and CEO of Domestika, the global online learning community for creative professionals. Starting in 2002 as a modest Spanish-language forum for designers in Madrid, Domestika grew under his leadership into a unicorn valued at $1.3 billion, with over 8 million members, 2,000+ courses, and a presence in six languages. A notoriously press-shy entrepreneur, Cotorruelo built one of the world's largest creative education platforms by championing affordable, pay-per-course learning and the belief that creativity is best learned through doing - not just reading.
Kaushik Arakalgud is a technology entrepreneur and builder based in Bengaluru, India, currently working in AI at Domestika - the global creative learning platform that reached unicorn status with a $1.3B valuation in 2022. As Co-Founder and CTO of Aimwiser, an AI and neuroscience-powered people and wellness intelligence SaaS platform, he brings together his passion for education technology, artificial intelligence, and human development. Trained as a computer science engineer at PES College of Engineering, Kaushik has spent his career at the intersection of technology and meaningful societal impact.
Kurt Ruppel is the Co-Founder and CTO of Middesk, the business identity platform that helps financial institutions, fintechs, and marketplaces verify and onboard businesses in seconds rather than weeks. A UC Berkeley cognitive science alumnus turned engineer, he built his technical chops at Zendesk and Checkr before co-founding Middesk with Kyle Mack in 2018. The company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch, secured a $4M seed led by Accel and Sequoia before Demo Day ended, and raised a $57M Series B in 2022—bringing total funding to over $77M. Ruppel leads Middesk's technical vision, focusing on primitives and forward concepts that transform raw business data into actionable intelligence for the financial ecosystem.
Kyle Moore is co-founder and Software Fellow at Pyka, the Alameda, California company building the world's largest commercially-approved autonomous electric aircraft. A self-taught programmer who started writing code at age 11 from rural Washington, Moore brought firmware and robotics expertise from Google X to help design Pyka's Pelican — a 1,320-lb autonomous electric aircraft now spraying crops across four continents and delivering cargo for the U.S. Air Force. Pyka has raised $95M in total funding and achieved back-to-back FAA authorizations for the largest uncrewed aircraft systems in U.S. commercial history.
Manu Sharma is the CEO and Co-founder of Labelbox, the leading AI data infrastructure platform that powers training data pipelines for frontier AI models. Born in Roorkee, India, he studied aerospace engineering at Embry-Riddle and Stanford before building CoPilot at DroneDeploy and leading data analytics at Planet Labs. In 2018, he co-founded Labelbox with former colleagues Brian Rieger and Daniel Rasmuson, raising $188.9M through a Series D led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Labelbox now serves as the command center for AI teams building and scaling production machine learning systems, from annotation and RLHF to evals and synthetic data generation.