Leise Sandeman is the CEO and co-founder of Pathways, a climate-tech startup building the data layer for sustainable manufacturing. Pathways uses AI to automate the creation of Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for building-material makers - concrete, steel, cement, glass - turning a months-long consultant slog into a process that takes weeks. A Copenhagen native and former McKinsey sustainability consultant who scaled a recycling venture before studying at Harvard and MIT, Leise co-founded Pathways in 2022 with Alex Cooper after meeting in an MIT entrepreneurship class. The company raised an oversubscribed $2.5M seed round in February 2024 and now serves manufacturers across hundreds of plants.
Felux is a Cleveland-based software company building the operating system for the steel industry. Its AI-powered platform reads request-for-quote (RFQ) emails straight out of a sales team's inbox, structures them automatically, and turns fragmented steel sales workflows into a unified dashboard for demand analytics, pricing intelligence, and deal tracking. Paired with a B2B marketplace connecting buyers and suppliers, Felux helps steel service centers, mills, brokers, and manufacturers see the demand they have been missing and modernize a trade that still largely runs on phone calls and spreadsheets.
Dallas Hogensen is the co-founder and CEO of Felux, a Cleveland-based digital marketplace and operating platform for the steel and metals industry. A ranch-raised Oregonian and former college football player turned serial startup operator, he scaled Lyft Business toward $1 billion in revenue and co-founded two companies (Liveli and Signal HQ) before relocating his family to Ohio to digitize a $2 trillion industry famous for handshakes and fax machines. Under the irreverent banner #makingsteelsexy, he has grown Felux's platform volume from roughly $10M to hundreds of millions in transactions, raised more than $24M in venture capital, and set out to put Cleveland back on the map as a hub for industrial technology.

Steven Jepeal is the co-founder and CEO of Allium Engineering, a Massachusetts deeptech startup making bridges last 100 years instead of 30. An MIT nuclear-engineering PhD who once worked on fusion reactor materials, Jepeal pivoted from the physics of plasma to the unglamorous economics of rebar, inventing a way to clad ordinary steel reinforcing bar in a thin layer of stainless so it stops rusting. The trick: the process slots into existing steel mills without changing how they operate. Allium's clad rebar is already in bridges in California and Florida, and Jepeal was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Manufacturing & Industry.