BetterUp is a San Francisco-founded human transformation company that pairs certified human coaches, behavioral science, and AI to deliver personalized professional and leadership development at enterprise scale. It coaches employees at hundreds of companies and government agencies, blending one-on-one coaching, assessments, and data-driven insights, and has increasingly moved toward AI-powered coaching that runs around the clock.
Alexi Robichaux is the CEO and Co-Founder of BetterUp, the human transformation platform he started in 2013 after a soul-searching walk along the Camino de Santiago. He built BetterUp from a two-person idea into a $5 billion company with 2,800 employees and over $628 million in total funding, pioneering digital professional coaching for enterprises including Google, Salesforce, and NASA. A former product executive at VMware who once struggled with imposter syndrome and public speaking anxiety, Robichaux turned his personal journey with coaching into a mission to make elite professional development accessible to everyone.
Heather Conklin is CEO of Torch, a San Francisco-based digital coaching platform that pairs leaders with expert coaches to drive measurable behavior change at scale. A Salesforce veteran who spent nine years there - culminating as SVP & GM of Trailhead - she joined Torch as COO in 2022 before being elevated to CEO in August 2024. Her philosophy blends behavioral science, data-driven measurement, and the radical idea that vulnerability is a leadership strength, not a weakness.
Bogdan Apostol is the co-founder and CEO of Nestor, a San Francisco-based AI-powered people intelligence platform that helps enterprises build skills-based organizations. A Romanian-born computer scientist with a PhD in Computer Vision from Gheorghe Asachi Technical University, he founded Nestor in 2018 after being accepted into Y Combinator's S18 batch. Before writing a single line of product code, he conducted over 400 customer discovery calls. Nestor has raised $6.07M in funding, serves 10,000+ employees worldwide across F500 companies, and has earned 67 G2 badges including a perfect 10/10 for quality of support.
Iliana Montauk is the Co-Founder and CEO of Manara, a social-impact edtech platform that connects software engineers from the Middle East and North Africa with global tech jobs at companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon. A Harvard grad and Fulbright Fellow who speaks five languages, she built Gaza's first startup accelerator before co-founding Manara with Laila Abudahi in 2020. Backed by Y Combinator, Stripe, Reid Hoffman, and Paul Graham, Manara has trained engineers who achieve 86% job placement within five months, and in 2025 inked a $3.6M AWS partnership to upskill 2,500 engineers in cloud and AI — on a mission to reach 1 million learners by 2027.