Valentin Ruest is the co-founder and US co-CEO of Classtime, a Zurich-born edtech company building a formative and summative assessment platform used by educators and learners in more than 90 countries. A University of St. Gallen and Harvard-trained economist who once ran mortgages at a Swiss fintech, he traded banking for classrooms, splitting his life between Santa Barbara and Zurich while teaching personal finance in public schools and arguing that software should help teachers decide, not decide for them.
Stämm is a deep-tech biomanufacturing company building a desktop-scale, 3D-printed, bubble-free bioprocessor that replaces the giant stainless-steel tanks of conventional pharma. Founded in Buenos Aires and headquartered in San Francisco, the company is pursuing a vision of decentralized, AI-driven production of biologics and cell therapies.
Hermann Tribukait is the co-founder and CEO of Atinary Technologies, a Lausanne- and Silicon Valley-based deeptech startup that built SDLabs — a no-code AI/ML platform compressing years of R&D into days. A Harvard-trained economist who helped coin the term 'Self-Driving Labs®' in 2017, Tribukait has channeled a career spent brokering $200M+ in global R&D partnerships into software that lets machines design experiments, learn from results, and iterate without human bias getting in the way. Atinary's tools are now used in pharma, biotech, chemicals, and climate tech, with a physical self-driving lab open in Boston since early 2026.
Leah Tharin is a Swiss product management veteran, solopreneur, and one of the most influential voices on Product-led Growth (PLG) in B2B SaaS. With 25+ years of operator experience — scaling Smallpdf to 50M monthly active users and GotPhoto to 20M+ ARR — she left full-time employment in November 2023 to build an independent advisory and content business. Her newsletter 'Leah's ProducTea' on Substack, her podcast, and her 58,000+ LinkedIn followers have made her a go-to resource for product and growth leaders navigating the shift from sales-led to product-led business models.