startups
(70)
Sam Blond
Sam Blond is a go-to-market operator turned founder who built his reputation scaling startup sales teams. He was VP of Sales at Zenefits and Chief Revenue Officer at Brex, where he helped drive revenue from near zero to roughly $400M ARR. After an 18-month run as a partner at Founders Fund, he decided investing was not his fit and went back to operating. In 2026 he co-founded and now leads Monaco, an AI-native sales platform for startups, alongside his brother Brian Blond.
Zouhair Belkoura
Zouhair Belkoura is the founder and CEO of Keepsafe, a San Francisco company that builds a family of consumer privacy apps used by tens of millions of people worldwide. A former electrical engineering PhD who researched mobile video coding, he has built Keepsafe around the idea that privacy is a form of freedom and that ordinary people deserve simple tools to control their personal photos, messages, and browsing. He is a frequent writer and speaker on the difference between abstract data privacy and the content privacy that actually matters to people's daily lives.
Cristina Vila Vives
Cristina Vila Vives is the founder and CEO of Cledara, a SaaS spend-management platform that gives companies visibility and control over their software subscriptions. After more than a decade running operations teams in the financial industry, she launched Cledara in 2018 to solve a problem she kept seeing firsthand: companies losing money and time to a sprawling, unmanaged stack of software. Cledara now serves over a thousand customers across Europe and the United States, and Forbes has named her among the business leaders changing the world.
Fez Zafar
Fez Zafar is Chief of Staff at Mercor, the AI talent marketplace that vets, matches, and pays experts powering frontier AI labs. A 2024 Harvard graduate who was elected First Marshal of his class, he helped scale Mercor through one of the fastest revenue ramps on record and now leads hiring and cross-functional operations across its San Francisco and New York teams. Before Mercor he was an analyst at Village Global, a research assistant to economist Larry Summers, and a campus builder known for comedy, community events, and a student interview podcast.
Jonathan Cornelissen
Jonathan Cornelissen is a Belgian entrepreneur, PhD in financial econometrics, and the co-founder and founding CEO of DataCamp, the online data science education platform he started in 2013. Frustrated while teaching himself R during his doctorate, he built DataCamp to make data skills accessible through interactive, browser-based courses. Over six years as CEO he grew it to more than 10 million learners, 200,000 paying subscribers, 2,500 enterprise customers and over $50 million in annual recurring revenue. He authored an introductory R course completed by over a million learners. Since stepping back from the CEO role he has focused on angel investing across education, AI and crypto, and writes about company building, hiring and startup equity.
Michael Hershfield
Michael Hershfield is the founder and CEO of Accrue, a New York fintech that lets retailers embed FDIC-insured, brand-customized savings wallets inside their shopping experience. He built the company around a simple flip of buy-now-pay-later: save first, then spend. Before Accrue, he was SVP of Sales at WeWork and COO at Nucleus, with earlier operating stints across Kitchensurfing, Sailthru, Howcast, and his own ticketing startup LiveStub.
Nima Roohi Sefidmazgi
Nima Roohi Sefidmazgi is co-founder and CEO of Blooming Health, a New York City startup that uses AI to automate outreach, screening, and referrals for social care - the food, transportation, and support services that sit outside the doctor's office but often decide how a person actually fares. He is a former global data science lead with a decade in machine learning for healthcare and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He started the company in East Harlem in 2020 after becoming a full-time caregiver for his mother-in-law during the pandemic; it has since raised $32.5M, including a $26M Series A led by Insight Partners in April 2025, and operates across 25 states.
Ray Dargham
Ray Dargham is the co-founder and CEO of Step, the Dubai-born media and events company behind the Step Conference, a startup and tech festival that grew from about 100 people in a co-working space in 2012 into an 8,000-plus attendee gathering that now travels between Dubai, Riyadh and San Francisco. He also runs the digital publishers StepFeed and YallaFeed, founded the brand-tech shop Spiderfrogs, and hosts the Maté podcast for MENA founders. Forbes put him on its 30 Under 30 cover in 2018.
Sam Seely
Sam Seely is the co-founder and CEO of Knock, a New York-based notification infrastructure company that turned the tedious plumbing of transactional email, push, SMS and in-app messages into an API and workflow engine used by Vercel, Amplitude and others. He and CTO Chris Bell, who met at Frame.io, launched Knock in 2021 and raised a $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures in February 2024, bringing total funding to $18M.
Kamir Kothari
Kamir Kothari is the co-founder and CEO of Inspira Education, an admissions platform pairing students with top-tier consultants for medical, legal, and business school applications. Before starting Inspira in 2020 with Arush Chandna, he held investing and operating roles at Social Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, LendingHome, and The Parthenon Group, after studying finance and economics at Oxford.
Josh Payne
Josh Payne is a builder and musician based in the Bay Area, founder of Coframe, an AI company building 'living interfaces' - websites that rewrite and redesign themselves in real time via a single script tag. Before Coframe he co-founded Autograph, a $2B+ company backed by a16z, and AccessBell, acquired by Tata Group. He holds 20+ patents and papers across AI, quantum computing, and information security, created the early coding agent GPT-Migrate that briefly topped GitHub trending, and guest-lectures on LLM code generation at Stanford, where he earned three degrees. He is also a working timpanist and jazz drummer who has performed with Josh Redman and So Percussion.
Hikari Senju
Hikari Senju is the founder and CEO of Omneky, a San Francisco generative AI platform that creates, analyzes, and optimizes personalized ad creative at scale. A Harvard computer scientist and son of celebrated Nihonga painter Hiroshi Senju, he began building in generative AI in 2018, five years before ChatGPT made the field mainstream. His mission is to lower the cost of effective advertising so that any founder with a compelling idea can reach customers without a million-dollar budget. Omneky has raised over $13 million from investors including SoftBank and AIX Ventures, and in 2024-2025 Senju pivoted the company toward agentic AI that autonomously plans and runs campaigns across Meta, Google, and TikTok.
Robert Schiller
Robert Schiller is the CEO of Impairment Science, Inc., the Cambridge, Massachusetts company behind DRUID, a smartphone app that measures cognitive and motor impairment in under three minutes through four game-like tasks. A repeat startup operator who has taken two high-tech companies public, Schiller runs a business built on a simple idea: instead of testing what is in your blood, test how your brain and body are actually performing right now. Under his leadership, DRUID has grown from a viral consumer download into Druid Enterprise, a workplace-safety platform used to gauge readiness for duty across fleets, public-safety departments, and employers.
Sebastian Cwilich
Sebastian Cwilich is the founder and CEO of Tertulia, a book-discovery company that uses machine learning to surface the books people are actually talking about online. An Argentine-born physicist who spent years at AT&T Labs before reinventing himself in the art market, he co-founded Artsy and built it into the world's largest online fine-art marketplace as its president and COO. With Tertulia he set out to do for books what Artsy did for art: turn scattered conversation into discovery. The company launched in 2022 with $6M in seed funding led by AlleyCorp and, by 2025, pivoted toward author services with a popular automated website builder.
Ross Kennedy
Ross Kennedy is the Global Vice President of AI Startups & Emerging Growth at Microsoft, based in New York. With two decades of experience scaling technology organizations from startup to hyperscale, he leads Microsoft's efforts to help AI startups innovate, grow, and become market makers. Before Microsoft, he was a key force behind Google Cloud's expansion from $5.8B to over $30B in revenue, leading the global Strategic Deal Pursuit division for four years. Earlier, he scaled Liferay's international operations from 200 to 900 employees across 30+ countries. His guiding philosophy: culture beats strategy.
David Haisha Chen
David Haisha Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Strikingly, a Y Combinator-backed website builder that lets anyone publish a mobile-optimized site in minutes. He left the University of Chicago in 2012 to move to Silicon Valley with co-founders Dafeng Guo and Teng Bao, was rejected by Y Combinator on the first try, got in on the second, and built a company that became the first Chinese startup to graduate from YC. He runs Strikingly with a product-first, superfan-driven philosophy from offices split between Shanghai and San Francisco.
Jordan Birnholtz
Jordan Birnholtz is a serial founder turned intellectual-property litigator who keeps building at the seam between law, finance, and technology. He co-founded PawnGuru, a marketplace that brought 1.5M+ underbanked Americans online to pawn shops; helped progressives organize through The Tuesday Company's Team app; and as co-founder and CMO of Neon put the world's first NFT vending machine on a New York sidewalk. After earning his J.D. cum laude from Northwestern, he now practices IP litigation at Kirkland & Ellis while co-founding Trarian, a venture underwriting patent-invalidity risk across what he calls the trillion-dollar patent asset class.
Raheel Zubairi
Raheel Zubairi is a Pakistani-born, Malaysia-based technology founder and product builder who has bounced from mobile games to fintech to deep-tech medical imaging. He is the CEO of Pixelence, a Cyberjaya startup using AI to produce contrast-like brain scans without injected dyes, which won the Deep-X track of the 2025 Selangor Twin Accelerator. Before that he founded the mobile gaming studio The Game Loop and led BMN Enterprise Solutions, and he has logged stints around Antler, MYPINPAD, EBP and GoodCore Software as an AI/ML product manager working across the Web2 and Web3 worlds.
Sage Wohns
Sage Wohns is the CEO and Co-Founder of Jericho Security, a New York-based AI cybersecurity company that trains humans and AI systems to defend against AI-powered attacks including hyper-realistic phishing, deepfakes, and voice cloning. A Seattle native and 10-year AI industry veteran, Wohns previously built and led Agolo, a Google- and Microsoft-backed NLP summarization company, before co-founding Jericho Security in 2023. The company made history by winning the Pentagon's first-ever generative AI defense contract through AFWERX in December 2023, and has since raised $18M in total funding, including a $15M Series A in April 2025. With 39 employees and 30+ enterprise clients, Jericho Security is at the frontier of AI-versus-AI cyber defense.
Jeffrey Finkle
Jeffrey Finkle is the CEO of The Arcview Group, the vertically integrated firm that has bankrolled and brokered the legal cannabis, hemp, and psychedelics industries for over a decade. A software entrepreneur turned venture investor since 1999, he co-founded the $115M Odeon Capital Partners during the dot-com peak, spent years as a fixture of New York's angel scene, and now runs Arcview's events, capital, ventures, consulting, and research arms with social equity written into the charter.
Jake Winebaum
Jake Winebaum is an American serial entrepreneur who has spent more than three decades turning observations into companies. He built the business plan for Disney's first internet push and ran Disney Online, co-founded the dot-com incubator eCompanies with EarthLink's Sky Dayton, founded and sold Business.com for $345 million, launched the healthcare marketplace Brighter (acquired by Cigna), and now serves as Executive Chairman of Applied Cognition. A self-described accidental entrepreneur, he is also a serious endurance athlete and the author of a business strategy and growth newsletter, the Strategy Letter.
Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis is a Brooklyn-born angel investor, serial entrepreneur, and podcaster who turned a $25,000 check into Uber into a roughly $100 million windfall. He hosts This Week in Startups, co-hosts the chart-topping All-In podcast, runs the LAUNCH accelerator and Founder University, and invests in roughly 100 startups a year. A former dot-com journalist who founded Silicon Alley Reporter and sold Weblogs, Inc. to AOL, he wrote the bestselling playbook 'Angel' and is one of the most visible bridges between scrappy founders and the venture world.
Moses Lo
Moses Lo is the co-founder and CEO of Xendit, the Southeast Asian payments infrastructure company that became Indonesia's first Y Combinator unicorn. He runs it from San Francisco and Jakarta, and built it after pivoting away from a bitcoin remittance idea six weeks into YC.
Ryan Pandya
Ryan Pandya co-founded Perfect Day in 2014 with the audacious goal of making dairy without cows. Using precision fermentation, the Berkeley-based biotech raised nearly $800 million, built partnerships with Fortune 500 food companies, and proved that animal-free whey protein could reach global markets across dozens of product categories. After a decade at the helm, Pandya stepped down as CEO at the end of 2023 to pursue future ventures, leaving behind a company that had fundamentally shifted the conversation around sustainable dairy.
Shawn Mullahy
Shawn Mullahy is the Chief Executive Officer of Zumper, North America's largest privately-held rental marketplace. Promoted to CEO in March 2026 after serving as Chief Revenue Officer and before that General Manager and SVP of Sales, Mullahy brings a rare combination of legal training, real estate brokerage experience, and tech-company operational chops. He leads a company that has raised $178M+ in funding and is pushing the rental experience toward a future where finding an apartment feels as seamless as booking a hotel.
Tom Eliaz
Tom Eliaz is the Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at Bedrock Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup building autonomous systems for heavy construction equipment. With over two decades of software engineering leadership spanning robotics, cloud infrastructure, and AI, he previously led 100+ engineers at Twilio Engage, directed engineering at Segment through its $3.2B acquisition, and was an early cloud platform engineer at Anki. Before Bedrock, he also founded a healthcare technology company. At Bedrock - a $1.75B-valued company that raised $270M in Series B funding in February 2026 - Eliaz applies engineering depth to the problem of retrofitting excavators and heavy machinery with LiDAR, GPS, and AI software to run autonomously on construction sites 24/7.
Asher Siddiqui
Asher Siddiqui is a General Partner at Sukna Ventures, a Riyadh-based early-stage venture fund backing software and data-infrastructure startups across MENA. He spent a decade running global M&A and corporate venture at Etisalat (around $15bn in deals), then joined 500 Startups as a partner and investment committee member before settling into the GP role at Sukna. He advises a constellation of funds from Palo Alto to Pakistan and splits time between the San Francisco Bay Area, Dubai, and Riyadh.
Elad Gil
Elad Gil is a Silicon Valley polymath - biologist-turned-Googler-turned-Twitter VP-turned-solo venture capitalist - who has backed 40+ unicorns including Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Pinterest, and OpenAI. Managing $3+ billion as one of the largest solo GPs in venture history, he also co-founded Color Genomics, wrote the 'High Growth Handbook' (published by Stripe Press), and co-hosts the No Priors AI podcast with Sarah Guo. His blog (Elad Blog) reaches tens of thousands of readers on startups, AI, and longevity.
Florian Leibert
Florian Leibert is a German-born software engineer turned venture capitalist who co-founded 468 Capital, a Berlin-based VC firm managing $1.3 billion across 100+ technology companies. Before VC, he co-founded Mesosphere (later D2iQ), which raised $252M and built the infrastructure layer for companies like Apple, Netflix, and SAP - and before that, he was the engineer at Twitter who helped slay the Fail Whale by architecting the distributed systems that kept the platform from collapsing under its own weight.
Alyssa Bernstein
Alyssa Bernstein is the co-founder, President, and CEO of wrrk, an Austin-based company that provides fully managed, fractional customer support solutions for fast-growing brands and startups. With a background in product management at RetailMeNot and Main Street Hub, she launched wrrk in 2016 to give entrepreneurs access to experienced, embedded support teams without the overhead of building in-house. Under her leadership, wrrk has grown to serve 125+ brands including Bombas, Taylor Stitch, and Supergoop, offering omnichannel support via US-based and offshore teams in the Philippines.