Tagged: techstars
30 results
Vicki Knott
Vicki Knott is the CEO and co-founder of CruxOCM, a Calgary-based industrial autonomy software company building AI-powered automation for oil and gas control rooms. A chemical engineer (P.Eng.) who started on the plant floor and trained as a pipeline control room operator at TransCanada, she left in 2017 to co-found CruxOCM with Roger Shirt. Her company's RIPA (Robotic Industrial Process Automation) technology automates the manual, high-stakes work of pipeline operators, and raised a $17M Series A led by Microsoft's M12 venture fund in 2024.
Christopher Calmeyn
Christopher Calmeyn is a New York based product designer and startup founder, best known as a co-founder of Fetcher, an AI recruiting platform that automates candidate sourcing and outreach across a database of hundreds of millions of professional profiles. He began his career in quantitative currency investing before moving into product design, and built a string of consumer and professional mobile products, including the business messaging app Caliber, before helping pivot that team into recruiting. That pivot became Scout, named after his dog, which later rebranded to Fetcher. Fetcher has raised more than $40 million and serves hundreds of corporate talent teams.
Joonko
Joonko was an Israeli-founded, AI-powered diversity recruiting platform that promised talent-acquisition teams automated access to pre-vetted candidates from underrepresented groups - women, people of color, and veterans. Founded in 2016 by Ilit Raz and named after Everest pioneer Junko Tabei, the company graduated from Techstars Atlanta and the Salesforce Incubator, and raised roughly $30 million from investors including Insight Partners, Target Global, Kapor Capital, and Vertex Ventures Israel. In 2023 the story collapsed: an investor confronted Raz over inconsistencies, she admitted to fabricating customer contracts, bank statements, revenue, and candidate counts, and she resigned. The SEC charged her in 2024 with a $21 million 'AI washing' securities fraud, and Joonko filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after shutting down and laying off all staff.
Mark Balovnev
Mark Balovnev is the CEO of CYRISMA, a Rochester, New York cybersecurity risk-management platform built for MSPs and MSSPs. A serial founder who wrote his first line of code at nine and dropped out of business school at eighteen, he scaled the digital-credentialing company EduChain to more than 1.5 million users and a private-equity exit, co-founded the non-human identity security firm Vantyr, and took the top job at CYRISMA in January 2025 just after the company closed a $7 million growth round. He describes his work as operating in the gap between technical complexity and business urgency.
Matt Barba
Matt Barba is the co-founder and CEO of Placester, a Boston-based SaaS platform that gives real estate agents and brokers websites, IDX/MLS integration, CRM, and marketing automation. He started coding as a kid, worked as a Boston real estate agent while at BU, built a widely used WordPress real estate plugin called Builder, and launched Placester in 2011 with CTO Frederick Townes. The company raised roughly $115M across rounds from NEA, Romulus Capital, and Techstars. Barba appeared on the Swanepoel POWER 200 list of top real estate industry leaders in 2015, 2016, and 2017.
Bild
Bild is a San Francisco cloud PDM/PLM platform that moves hardware design collaboration off email, spreadsheets, and shared drives and into the browser. Founded in 2021 by ex-Apple engineering program manager Pradyut Paul, it gives mechanical and hardware teams version control, check-in/check-out, bill-of-materials, change orders, and secure supplier sharing across multiple CAD formats, plus an AI suite for diffing and searching designs.
Latent Knowledge
Latent Knowledge is a New York-based AI company building LitView, a semantic search and literature-visualization tool that helps R&D teams and academic researchers discover, cluster, and map scientific literature beyond simple keyword matching. Founded in 2019 by James Reilly, the company uses applied natural language processing to surface hidden links between technical articles and speed up the research process across public and private data sources.
ModernGuild
ModernGuild is a New York-based career mentoring and recruiting company that helps early-career and college students break into finance and consulting. Founded in 2011-2012 by Adrien Fraise, it pairs online career curriculum with live 1-on-1 coaching from in-field practitioners, and has evolved into a B2B marketplace using blinded candidate dashboards and matching algorithms to reduce bias in campus recruiting.
Reportwell
Reportwell is a Detroit-based, AI-powered compliance and reporting platform built for the K-12 education world - charter school authorizers, districts, agencies, and the schools they oversee. Founded in 2023 by a team of former education agency and school leaders, it scans for new laws, board decisions, and regulatory shifts, keeps policy documents current automatically, and answers plain-language legal questions through an AI chat. The goal is simple: turn the dreaded audit scramble into a routine, so educators can spend less time on paperwork and more time on students.
Rivet
Rivet is a Boston-based, AI-powered fan engagement platform that helps musicians, creators, labels and their teams turn attention into revenue. It stitches together scattered fan signals from social, commerce, ticketing, streaming and community channels into one owned view of every fan, then automates the outreach - email, SMS, DMs and ads - that converts casual listeners into repeat buyers. Born from a musician's frustration with tracking fans in spreadsheets, Rivet gives independent artists the kind of first-party data and CRM tooling once reserved for the industry's top 1 percent.
Tellescope
Tellescope is a HIPAA-compliant digital health platform that unifies patient communication, intake, scheduling, and workflow automation into a single, developer-friendly system. Built for digital health startups and modern clinics, it lets care teams reach patients across SMS, email, chat, and video, automate repetitive workflows without code, and plug into EHRs and clinical tools through an API-first architecture - so teams can launch faster and scale personalized care without stitching together generic sales software.
Guillermo Cornejo
Guillermo Cornejo is the co-founder and CEO of Riders Share, the largest peer-to-peer motorcycle rental platform in the U.S. A Peruvian immigrant who never drove a car before he learned to ride, he crashed a Kawasaki Ninja 250 at 80 mph at age 23 and walked away with a hand full of pins and an obsession. After years analyzing high-risk auto loans at Nissan, GM and Hyundai, he built a marketplace that lets motorcycle owners rent out idle bikes to vetted riders, using credit and driving data to price crash risk. He started it during a full-scholarship MBA at UCLA Anderson, moved the company to Austin, and grew it to thousands of listings and hundreds of thousands of registered riders.
Kobby Amoah
Kobby Amoah is the co-founder and CEO of River Health, a Minneapolis-based subscription health plan built for hourly workers in the United States. Born in Ghana and educated at Wartburg College and MIT's idea-stage accelerator, he previously founded Obaa, a mobile electronic medical records venture for developing countries. River Health pairs virtual primary care, behavioral health, and prescription delivery for a flat monthly fee, and has partnered with national restaurant operators to bring coverage to employees who fall through the gaps of traditional insurance.
Adrien Fraise
Adrien Fraise is the CEO and founder of ModernGuild, a New York-based edtech company that pairs high school and college students with one-on-one career coaches and a structured online readiness program. A former Deloitte strategy consultant with degrees from Stanford and Columbia Business School, he launched ModernGuild in January 2011 after concluding that traditional early-career recruiting was broken: too many resumes, too little real review, and too much bias. He built the company into a mentoring marketplace that has served tens of thousands of students, partnered with employers like Citibank and Wells Fargo, and went through the Techstars accelerator in 2017.
Adrienne Prentice
Adrienne Prentice is the co-founder and CEO of Keep Company, a Bethesda, Maryland group-learning platform that gathers employees into coach-led peer groups to fight isolation, prevent burnout, and keep parents and caregivers from quitting. A former technology attorney at Cooley and Pillsbury who built and led a 35-person global legal team at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, she traded the partner track to build the support system she wished she'd had as a working parent. Keep Company has raised roughly $2 million in venture funding and was named by Techstars and Melinda French Gates' Pivotal Ventures among the top ten companies innovating in the care economy.
Alina Su
Alina Su is the co-founder and CEO of Generation Lab, a San Francisco longevity startup building an at-home cheek-swab test that measures biological age across organs and systems. She got her first medical device patent at 15, founded the needle-free injection company NovaXS, left a Harvard Medical School PhD to commercialize aging science from UC Berkeley's Conboy Lab, and made Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2023. Generation Lab has raised about $11M and counts geneticist George Church and Aubrey de Grey among its advisors.
Benjamin Pleat
Benjamin (Ben) Pleat is the CEO and co-founder of Cobu, a Boston-based resident-engagement platform that turns apartment buildings into actual communities. After watching his extroverted mother feel isolated in a well-appointed Manhattan building - and learning that apartment owners bleed money to roughly 50% annual tenant churn - he built a company on a simple bet: a single friend in your building makes you 30%+ more likely to renew your lease. A Harvard economics grad who passed through WeWork's growth team and Goldman Sachs' real estate private equity group, Pleat now leads a company that has powered community in tens of thousands of apartment homes by getting neighbors into the same room for poker nights, potlucks, and chef dinners.
Jacob Allen
Jacob Allen is the co-founder and CEO of Reportwell, a software startup that turns the slow, paperwork-heavy work of regulatory compliance reporting into a clean, AI-assisted portal, starting with K-12 schools and the agencies that oversee them. He came to the problem the hard way: as the co-founder and CEO of pilotED Schools, a charter network built around identity and sociology, he drowned in state and city compliance reports and decided to build the tool he wished he had. A Teach For America alum, Echoing Green Fellow, and Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education honoree, Allen has spent his career on the conviction that students do better when they understand who they are, and that the adults serving them deserve software that does not get in the way.
Perry Gershon
Perry Gershon is the CEO of FTN (For The Numbers) Network, the fantasy-sports, sports-betting and DVOA data company he bought into and now leads. A Yale-trained molecular biophysicist who spent 25 years as a heavyweight commercial real estate lender, he opened one of New York City's first sports bars in 1987, then walked away from finance to run twice for Congress in New York's 1st District. In late 2023 he took the helm of FTN and led a $3M seed round, betting that the numbers behind sports are a business as much as a pastime.
Saif Bhatti
Saif Bhatti is the founder and CEO of Renoster, an Austin-based carbon credit ratings agency that uses remote sensing and open science to grade nature-based carbon projects on whether they actually remove carbon. He started the company in 2019 as anti-poaching technology - a device that listens for gunshots on the African savanna to protect rhinos - and pivoted it into one of the sharpest, most independent watchdogs in the voluntary carbon market. A Northwestern-trained industrial engineer and philosopher turned data scientist, he has helped review hundreds of millions of credits and published deep-transparency reports that have rattled some of the world's largest carbon projects.
Sebastian Coates
Sebastian Coates is the CEO and co-founder of Tellescope, a HIPAA-compliant, API-first patient communication and CRM platform used by more than 150 digital health organizations. A Tufts computer science and mathematics graduate who once wrote software for the Apple Watch and prototyped blockchain systems for clinical trials at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, he started Tellescope in 2020 with co-founder Derek Strauss to give telehealth companies a developer-friendly tech stack for managing patients across SMS, email, voice, and secure messaging. Notably, he has kept the company lean and profitable rather than chasing oversized venture rounds.
Yunhao Jiao
Yunhao Jiao is the co-founder and CEO of TestSprite, a Seattle startup building an autonomous AI testing agent that aims to be the verification layer for AI-generated code. A competitive programmer turned AWS engineer, he left a five-year run at Amazon after a single production regression on an on-call shift convinced him that verification, not generation, had become software's weakest link. Since founding TestSprite in 2023 with Shawnie Shan and Rui Li, he has grown it to roughly 100,000 developers and raised about $8.1 million across pre-seed and seed rounds, led most recently by Trilogy Equity Partners.
Aaron Patzer
Aaron Patzer is the founder and CEO of Vital, an AI-driven software company that helps hospitals cut emergency-room wait times, flag high-risk patients, and translate medical jargon into plain English. He first made his name building Mint.com, the free personal-finance app he started in 2006 and sold to Intuit for $170 million just two-plus years later. An engineer with degrees from Duke and Princeton, Patzer has spent his career turning intimidating, regulation-heavy industries into experiences ordinary people can actually understand - first money, now medicine.
Amaury Ciurana
Amaury Ciurana is the co-founder and CEO of REEV, a wearable-robotics company building intelligent motorized orthoses for people with neurological gait disorders. A French aerospace engineer trained at ISAE-SUPAERO and the X-HEC entrepreneurship track, he relocated to Boston in 2023 to lead REEV's US expansion. The company pairs DREEVEN, an AI-powered robotic knee orthosis, with REEV SENSE, a wearable gait-analysis system, and has raised roughly $14M total including a $9.2M round in 2025.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet
Danielle Cohen-Shohet is the CEO and co-founder of GlossGenius, the all-in-one booking, payments and point-of-sale platform built for salons, spas and independent beauty professionals. A summa cum laude Princeton graduate and former Goldman Sachs analyst, she taught herself to code and wrote the first version of the product after running a freelance makeup business out of her dorm room. Founded with co-founder Karim Butt and run alongside her twin sister Leah, GlossGenius now serves tens of thousands of beauty and wellness businesses, crossed roughly $100M in revenue, and reached a $510M valuation on its 2023 Series C.
REEV
REEV is a medical robotics company building AI-powered wearable robotics to restore everyday mobility for people with neurological gait disorders after stroke, multiple sclerosis or paraplegia. Its flagship DREEVEN is a lightweight (about 3kg) motorized knee orthosis driven by electro-hydraulic actuation and real-time gait sensing, paired with REEV SENSE, an IMU wearable that turns a person's walking pattern into clinical-grade gait reports. Founded in 2021 and split between Boston and Toulouse, REEV raised $9.2M in February 2025 to finalize DREEVEN, run a clinical study at Boston University and prepare for FDA trials.
Nora Apsel
Nora Apsel is the co-founder and CEO of Morty, the New York-based online mortgage marketplace she helped build from a Techstars idea in 2016 into a full-stack platform that has facilitated over $2 billion in home loans across 45+ states. She joined as Morty's founding engineer, rose to COO, and took the CEO seat in 2020. A former nonprofit worker who retooled as a software engineer at Meetup and Flurry, she is driven by using product and technology to democratize access to financial products and make one of life's most opaque transactions - getting a mortgage - transparent and buyer-first.
Victor Lopez
Victor Lopez is the co-founder and CEO of FlexPoint, a payments-automation platform built for managed service providers and the small businesses they serve. A former finance lawyer turned private-credit principal at Owl Rock/Blue Owl Capital, he left the world of middle-market lending to attack a less glamorous problem: getting small businesses paid faster. Founded in 2022 and launched in 2023, FlexPoint raised a $12M Series A led by Foundry Group in 2025 and now handles payments for tens of thousands of businesses.
Raul Popa
Raul Popa is the co-founder and CEO of TypingDNA, a behavioral biometrics company that recognizes people by the rhythm of how they type. A self-taught coder turned sociology-and-statistics graduate, he turned keystroke dynamics into a commercial authentication API used in banking, finance, and online education. He started the company alone in 2016 in Romania, brought it through Techstars and a Google-AI-backed Series A, and relocated it to New York just before the pandemic. Beyond enterprise security, he shipped TypingDNA Focus, a free app that predicts your mood from your typing.
Will Foussier
Will Guillaume Foussier is the co-founder and CEO of AceUp, a Boston-based AI-powered team-transformation and leadership-coaching platform he launched out of the Harvard Innovation Labs. A former financial analyst who credits an executive coach with rerouting his own career, he set out to democratize coaching - turning a once-exclusive C-suite perk into a data-driven service deployed across more than 100 enterprises including LVMH, L'Oreal, IBM, BNP Paribas and John Deere. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and EHL, Harvard and Techstars alumnus, he raised a $22.5M Series A in 2024 and runs the company on the conviction that everybody deserves a coach.