SOLARCYCLE is an advanced solar panel recycler turning America's mounting pile of retired solar panels into raw materials and new solar glass. Using patented technology, the company recovers more than 95% of the value in a panel - silver, silicon, copper, aluminum and glass - and feeds it back into a domestic clean-energy supply chain. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Mesa, Arizona, it runs facilities in Texas and Georgia and has signed long-term recycling deals with more than 40 of the largest solar companies in the U.S.
Spoiler Alert is a Boston-based B2B software company that helps the world's largest consumer packaged goods makers sell off excess and short-dated inventory before it ends up in a landfill. Its platform digitizes the messy, manual liquidation process - automating listings, optimizing pricing and freight, and matching surplus product to a curated network of discount retailers and food banks. Founded by MIT Sloan classmates in 2015, the company works with brands like PepsiCo, Nestle, Kraft Heinz, Campbell's, and Danone, and says it has helped divert more than 200 million pounds of food from waste.
Tenet is a New York fintech building the first lending platform designed exclusively for electric vehicles. It uses the unique attributes of EVs, chargers, and battery storage to offer lower monthly payments, fast 24-hour funding, and a path to home electrification - increasingly as a lending-as-a-service engine that powers credit unions and other lenders.
Trashie is a recycling and rewards platform that makes responsible disposal of clothing, textiles, and electronics frictionless. Customers buy a Take Back Bag, fill it with unwanted items in almost any condition, mail it back, and earn TrashieCash redeemable for rewards at hundreds of brands. Built by the team behind zero-waste fashion brand For Days, Trashie turns the chore of recycling into a rewarded habit while diverting millions of pounds of waste from landfills.
Philip Stanger is the co-founder and CEO of Olyns, a Silicon Valley startup turning recycling into a self-funding business by pairing AI-powered reverse vending 'Cubes' with retail media advertising. A classically trained musician with degrees from Johns Hopkins and Yale, he scored films before founding indoor-positioning startup Wifarer, then led Apple Maps' indoor mapping team for five years. He started Olyns in 2019 after watching wildfires and floods hit the Santa Cruz Mountains where he lives, betting that recycling fails not for lack of technology but because its business model is broken.
Rian Mc Donnell is the founder and CEO of FloVision Solutions, an AI company putting cameras and sensors on meat-processing lines so beef and poultry plants can see exactly where yield and quality slip away. He grew up around beef processing in rural Ireland, studied mechanical and manufacturing engineering at Trinity College Dublin (with a year at UC Berkeley), and built the company out of a Trinity student project before moving it to the United States via Notre Dame's ESTEEM program and SOSV's IndieBio. Now headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, FloVision has analyzed more than 23 million kilograms of food and raised an $8.7M Series A led by Insight Partners in 2025.
Acelab is a New York-based AEC technology company building an AI-powered Material Hub for the architecture and construction industry. The platform helps architects, designers, and building owners research, compare, specify, and document building products from a database of more than 250,000 products across 10,000+ brands, with native Revit integration and tools that keep a single material selection synced across every project document. Founded in 2019 by Harvard and MIT architecture graduates, Acelab is used by over 20,000 firms, including more than half of the top 100 global architecture practices.
Sarah Jahnke is the CEO and co-founder of Homecourt, the luxury fragrance and homecare brand she built with actress Courteney Cox. A former L'Oreal fragrance marketer turned operator, she treats dish soap and counter spray like fine perfume, and has doubled the company's revenue every year since its 2022 launch while keeping the core team famously tiny. Homecourt raised an $8M Series A led by CULT Capital and now sits in 300-plus retail doors including Nordstrom and Bluemercury.
Steve McGarry is the CEO of Rosaluna Mezcal, the New York-based premium spirits brand distilled from agave and water in Santiago Matatlan, Oaxaca. A mechanical engineer turned spirits executive, he spent years at Pernod Ricard running prestige sales before taking the helm at Rosaluna, where he closed a 2025 Series A led by Whispering Angel creator Sacha Lichine and steered the brand to become the first mezcal ever to earn Mexico's Distintivo Verde sustainability certification.
Hana Kajimura is the CEO of Trellis Group, the climate media-and-events company behind GreenBiz, Circularity and Trellis Impact. Before running the room, she built it: as Allbirds' first full-time sustainability hire she stamped a carbon footprint on every shoe, open-sourced the methodology so rival brands could copy it, and authored the 'Flight Plan' to halve the company's per-product emissions. A Stanford environmental scientist who chose business over activism because companies 'move much more swiftly,' she now runs the largest gathering of sustainability professionals in North America.
Leonardo Bonanni is the founder and CEO of Sourcemap, the supply chain mapping company he spun out of his PhD research at the MIT Media Lab. What began in 2008 as a 'Wikipedia for supply chains' became enterprise software that helps the world's largest brands in food, apparel, electronics, pharmaceuticals and automotive trace their products down to raw-material origins - tanneries, farms, mines and slaughterhouses. He testified before the US Senate and the French Senate on traceability, spoke at TEDxMilano, and has been named among the most influential people in business ethics.
Ezra Goldman is the co-founder and CEO of Upshift, a San Francisco-based company reinventing how city dwellers access cars. Rather than owning or leasing a vehicle full-time, Upshift members subscribe to a car that appears at their door when needed and vanishes when they don't - a fractional model that eliminates insurance headaches, maintenance costs, and the guilt of a depreciating asset sitting idle 95% of the time. Goldman brings 25+ years of shared-transportation obsession to the role, starting with a communist-themed campus bikeshare in 1999, through an MIT master's in urban planning, a PhD stint in Copenhagen studying why Danes ride bikes, and stints at City CarShare and ReachNow before building Upshift into a platform backed by MINI (BMW), Ford, and thousands of crowdfunding investors.
Blue Bottle Coffee is an Oakland-born specialty roaster and cafe chain that helped define the third-wave coffee movement. Founded in 2002 by clarinetist James Freeman, it built a reputation on freshly roasted single-origin beans, an obsessive 48-hour freshness rule, and a spare, Japanese-influenced cafe aesthetic. It now runs roughly 140 cafes across the US and Asia plus a sizable e-commerce and subscription business, and changed hands in 2026 when Centurium Capital agreed to buy its retail operations from Nestle.
Hathaway Dinwiddie is a 100% employee-owned general contractor headquartered in San Francisco that has spent more than a century building the landmarks California works, lives, and heals in - from the Salesforce Tower to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art and more than 10 million square feet of life-science space on the Peninsula. Built on planning, adaptation, and proactive partnership, the firm pairs century-old craft with advanced BIM workflows, LEED-driven sustainability, and an industry-leading safety record.
Legence is North America's largest pure-play building performance platform, providing integrated advisory, engineering, design, fabrication, installation, and maintenance services for high-performance and mission-critical facilities. Formerly Therma Holdings and backed by Blackstone, the company brands itself the world's first Energy Transition Accelerator, helping data centers, healthcare, education, biopharma, semiconductor, and commercial real estate clients cut carbon, lower utility costs, and run buildings more efficiently. Legence went public on Nasdaq under the ticker LGN in September 2025.
Levi Strauss & Co. is the San Francisco apparel company that invented the blue jean in 1873 and has spent 170-plus years turning a piece of workwear into a global wardrobe staple. Today it owns the Levi's, Dockers, Beyond Yoga and Denizen brands, sells in more than 110 countries, and is reinventing itself under CEO Michelle Gass as a direct-to-consumer denim lifestyle brand while pushing water-saving manufacturing across its supply chain.
Morpho Travel Experience is a Latin American travel-retail and food-and-beverage operator that turns airport corridors, hotels and tourist hubs into theatrical, locally-rooted stores and restaurants. From a single Costa Rican airport shop opened in 2001, it has grown into a roughly US$160 million operation with more than 2,800 employees and 300-plus commercial spaces across 11 countries, built on a 'sense of place' philosophy that puts regional craft, food and culture at the center of the traveler's journey.
Teletrac Navman is a connected mobility platform that helps companies managing vehicles and equipment run safer, leaner, and more sustainable operations. Its cloud-based, AI-driven telematics flagship TN360 pulls together GPS tracking, video safety cameras, compliance logging, asset utilization, and analytics for thousands of transport, logistics, service, and construction fleets worldwide. A Vontier company headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois, it traces its roots to 1988 and the 2015 merger of pioneer Teletrac with Navman Wireless.
Webcor is a San Francisco-based commercial general contractor and one of California's largest builders, known for self-performed concrete, finish carpentry and millwork, deep preconstruction and BIM expertise, and a portfolio of landmark projects from the California Academy of Sciences to the Salesforce Transit Center. Founded in 1971 and owned by Japan's Obayashi Corporation since 2007, Webcor pairs craft-trade self-performance with virtual-building technology to deliver complex, sustainable buildings across the state.
Williams-Sonoma, Inc. is a San Francisco-based, vertically integrated specialty retailer of premium home furnishings and cookware. From a single 1956 cookware shop in Sonoma, California, it grew into a portfolio of in-house-designed brands - Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, Pottery Barn Teen, West Elm, Williams Sonoma Home, Rejuvenation, Mark and Graham, and GreenRow - sold through e-commerce, catalogs, retail stores, and a growing B2B business. It is one of the largest digital-first home retailers in the United States, with roughly $7.7-7.9 billion in annual revenue.
Adriana Echandi Bachtold is the Group CEO of Morpho Travel Experience, a Latin American travel retail and food & beverage powerhouse with over 2,800 employees across 11 countries. Starting as a cashier-seller at what was then Grupo Britt in 2002, she rose through every rung of the organization to become CEO - overseeing 300+ commercial spaces in 23 airports serving 78 million passengers annually. Named Businesswoman of the Year 2022 by Costa Rica's El Financiero and a Moodie Davitt People of the Year honoree, she leads a company built around 'sense of place' - connecting global travelers with authentic local culture, artisan products, and sustainable practices. A fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network, she has built a company where 50% of management are women, equal pay is non-negotiable, and a kiosk in San José has become a $225 million regional retail force.
Alain Samaha is President & CEO of Teletrac Navman and President of Alternative Energy & Sustainable Fleets at Vontier, bringing over 20 years of technology leadership to the intersection of IoT, AI, and fleet management. A Stanford-trained aeronautical engineer turned enterprise software executive, he previously held senior roles at Trimble including President of the Utilities and Public Administration group. At Teletrac Navman - a global telematics SaaS leader with ~850 employees and $245M in annual revenue - Samaha is steering the company's push into AI-powered fleet safety, multi-energy transition, and a 'single pane of glass' platform vision for fleet operators worldwide.
Alex Bergonia is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Babylist, the leading baby registry and family commerce platform headquartered in Emeryville, California. With a background bridging impact investing and high-growth consumer tech, she has spent her career at the intersection of strategy, operations, and mission-driven work. Before joining Babylist, she held progressive strategy and operations leadership roles at Farmer's Business Network (FBN Financial), and earlier built expertise in impact investing through fellowships and roles at Komaza, The Nature Conservancy, DBL Partners, and RSF Social Finance. She holds an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and a BA in International Relations from Claremont McKenna College.
Derek Maunus is the President and CEO of GILLIG LLC, America's oldest surviving bus manufacturer, founded in 1890 and now headquartered in Livermore, California. He joined GILLIG in 2011 and rose through roles in aftermarket parts and manufacturing before being appointed CEO in 2018. Under his leadership, GILLIG has expanded its clean-energy portfolio - including battery electric, hybrid, CNG, and hydrogen fuel cell buses - and executed a complex relocation from Hayward to a new 600,000 sq ft solar-powered facility in Livermore. With roughly 1,100 employees and annual revenue near $325M, GILLIG holds significant market share in North American heavy-duty transit bus manufacturing.
James Reinhart is the co-founder and CEO of ThredUp, the publicly traded online resale marketplace he started from a too-small Cambridge closet in 2009. A former history major and charter-school operator turned operator-of-warehouses-full-of-other-people's-clothes, he has spent over fifteen years arguing that secondhand isn't a niche, it's the future of fashion.
Joe Vernachio is the CEO of Allbirds, the once high-flying wool-shoe brand he is now trying to put back on its feet. A 30-plus year outdoor and athletic industry veteran who started as a product manager at Chouinard Equipment and has since steered product at Patagonia, Nike, Roots, Spyder, The North Face and Mountain Hardwear, he took the top job at Allbirds in March 2024 after three years as COO. He is part product geek, part operator, and an Everest aspirant who once spent a month getting through the Khumbu Icefall.
Paul Schiefer is the CEO of Amy's Kitchen, the family-founded organic frozen food maker in Petaluma, California. He started on the canning line as a high-school intern, then spent more than two decades inside the company - in IT, international, sustainability, government affairs and Chief of Staff - before being named President in 2023 and CEO in April 2026.
Archive is the technology platform behind brand-owned resale. It builds and operates customized secondhand storefronts for fashion and lifestyle brands - including The North Face, New Balance, Oscar de la Renta and Dr. Martens - so they can keep products in circulation, capture a new revenue stream, and meet customers who increasingly refuse to buy new.
Beewise builds the BeeHome - a solar-powered, AI-driven robotic beehive that monitors and treats up to 24 honeybee colonies in real time. Founded in Israel in 2018 and now headquartered in San Ramon, California, the company is using computer vision, machine learning and precision robotics to cut annual colony losses from ~40% to under 10%, protecting the pollinators behind a third of the global food supply.
Glacier builds AI-powered robots that sort recyclables inside Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs). Their compact, conveyor-mounted robots use computer vision trained on billions of recycling images to identify and pick more than 70 material categories, while also generating real-time data on what flows through the waste stream - data that brands and recyclers use to prove and improve circularity.