Nihal Advani is the founder and CEO of QualSights, a Chicago-based insights technology platform that helps global brands decode real-world human behavior through live video, mobile ethnography, sensors and AI. A former internationally ranked junior tennis player from India who came to the US on a full scholarship, he cut his teeth at Google and Microsoft before founding the travel startup Georama in 2012, then pivoting it into QualSights in 2018. On roughly $3.5M raised over a decade, he built one of America's fastest growing market research companies, ranked by Inc. as the fastest growing company in Illinois.
The Bay Club Company is a membership-based active lifestyle and hospitality company headquartered in San Francisco. Founded in 1977 with the nation's first co-ed fitness club, it now operates a growing collection of resort-inspired clubs organized into regional campuses across the West Coast - the Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, and the Pacific Northwest. Built on four points of focus - fitness, sports, family, and hospitality - the company serves a community of 135,000-plus members with tennis, swimming, squash, golf, pickleball, group exercise, family programs, dining, and spa services. Backed by KKR, Bay Club is in an aggressive expansion phase, acquiring regional operators to scale toward 50-plus clubs and over 200,000 members.
TeachMe.To is a marketplace for booking in-person private lessons - golf, tennis, pickleball, music, yoga, and more - that matches beginners with vetted local coaches and handles scheduling, payments, and reviews in one place.
Neil Tolaney is a General Partner and Co-Head of Consumer + SME at TCV (Technology Crossover Ventures), one of the world's leading growth equity firms. Based in San Francisco, he leads a team of roughly 20 B2C-focused investors backing category-defining companies in consumer internet, digital media, subscription services, and small business software. His path from investment banking to venture associate to e-commerce operator - running PersonalizationMall.com as Managing Director - to buyout dealmaker at Francisco Partners and back to TCV gives him a rare dual lens: he has sat on both sides of the cap table. He holds board seats at LegalZoom and Strava, and has backed companies including GoodRx, ByteDance, Mercury, Hotmart, and Grow Therapy.