Daragh Murphy is the Irish-born co-founder and CEO of Imprint, a New York fintech that builds co-branded credit card and loyalty programs for consumer brands like Rakuten, Booking.com, Turkish Airlines and H-E-B. A former corporate lawyer and WeWork operator, he started Imprint in 2020 and grew it to unicorn status, reaching a $1.2 billion valuation in a $150 million Series D in December 2025.
Nudge is a San Francisco neurotechnology company building non-invasive, whole-brain interfaces powered by focused ultrasound. Founded in 2024 by Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam alongside Jeremy Barenholtz and Quintin Frerichs, the company aims to stimulate and image deep brain circuits with millimeter precision - no surgery required. Its first human-ready system, Nudge Zero, is being used in research studies today, with a long-term goal of a headphone-like consumer device that lets people shift their brain state - sleep, focus, mood, habits - at the press of a button. Nudge raised a $100M Series A in July 2025 led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks.
Sahir Jaggi is the founder and CEO of Forus, an AI-powered network (formerly known as Tandem) that automates the paperwork sitting between a doctor's prescription and a patient actually getting the drug. Forus emerged from stealth in May 2026 with $160M in funding at a $1B valuation from Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, and Accel. Before Forus, Jaggi spent six years as a product leader at Oscar Health after studying biomedical engineering and computer science at Columbia.
Zach Dell is the co-founder and CEO of Base Power, an Austin battery-and-electricity company he started in 2023 with former SpaceX and Anduril manufacturing leader Justin Lopas. Base sells homeowners a leased backup battery for a one-time $695 plus a $19 monthly membership and retail electricity, then knits those household batteries into a distributed grid that charges on cheap overnight power and discharges at peak. In under three years the company raised a $1 billion Series C at a roughly $4 billion valuation and, by mid-2026, was in talks to raise again near a $12 billion valuation. The son of Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell, Zach traces his energy obsession to college experiments that included trying to lease a Hawaiian lava field for solar and building anaerobic digesters in India.
Doji is a New York-based AI fashion startup building an app that turns a handful of selfies into a photo-realistic personal avatar, then lets people try on real clothing from anywhere on the web. Founded in 2024 by Dorian Dargan and Jim Winkens - the name is a mash-up of their first names - Doji uses its own diffusion models to make virtual try-ons feel less like a gimmick and more like a fun, social way to shop. The company raised a $14M seed round led by Thrive Capital with participation from Seven Seven Six in May 2025, days after launching on the App Store in more than 80 countries.
Dorian Dargan is the co-founder and CEO of Doji, an AI fashion app that turns selfies into a photorealistic digital likeness so people can try on real clothes from across the web and actually have fun doing it. An MIT-trained designer-engineer who built avatars at Meta on Oculus Quest and shaped visionOS at Apple, he teamed up with former DeepMind researcher Jim Winkens - the name Doji is literally Dorian plus Jim - and within days of the app's 2025 App Store debut raised a $14M seed round led by Thrive Capital with Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six. He treats the creative process as something close to sacred, and is betting that the most personal way to shop online is to first fall a little in love with the image of yourself.
Chris Altchek is the founder and CEO of Cadence, a New York health-tech company that runs remote patient monitoring and virtual care for chronic conditions on behalf of large U.S. health systems. He built the company after selling his first venture, the millennial media brand Mic, which he co-founded at 23 with high-school friend Jake Horowitz. A Harvard social studies graduate and former Goldman Sachs analyst who also worked in the Bloomberg administration and the White House, Altchek pivoted from media to medicine through an entrepreneur-in-residence stint at Thrive Capital. Cadence reached a reported $1 billion valuation in 2021 after a $100 million Series B led by Coatue, and now monitors tens of thousands of patients across more than 20 states.
Modern Life is an AI-powered, tech-enabled life insurance brokerage that gives financial advisors a single platform to quote, underwrite, and manage life insurance policies. Founded in 2021 by Michael Konialian and Jack Arenas and backed by Thrive Capital, it replaces a stack of 10+ fragmented legacy tools, compares quotes across 30+ carriers, and uses accelerated underwriting to cut policy cycle times from roughly six months to minutes. Licensed in all 50 states, the company raised a $20M Series A in November 2025, bringing total funding to $35M.
Gabriel Stengel is the co-founder and CEO of Rogo, a generative AI platform built for investment banks, private equity firms and hedge funds. A 2020 Princeton computer science graduate who did stints at J.P. Morgan and whose co-founder came from Lazard, Stengel turned a clunky senior-thesis econometrics chatbot into a company that, by April 2026, raised a $160 million Series D at a roughly $2 billion valuation. Rogo's AI agent Felix now serves more than 35,000 finance professionals across 250-plus institutions, automating the grunt work of benchmarking, earnings analysis and pitch decks that once kept junior bankers awake at night.
Kate Adamson is the CEO and co-founder of Folio, a financial operations platform built for hotels. A former pre-professional ballet dancer who studied engineering at Princeton before switching to economics, she spent five years at Plaid scaling sales and product teams, where she once shipped a Paycheck Protection Program product from idea to market in about eight days. In 2023 she teamed up with Plaid's founding designer Al Hertz to build Folio, which turns the messy world of hotel purchasing, invoices, and payments into one procure-to-pay platform. Folio won the E20X Judge's Choice Award at HITEC 2024 and raised a $14M Series A led by Thrive Capital and Construct Capital in July 2025.
Michael Konialian is the founder and CEO of Modern Life, an AI-powered life insurance brokerage built for financial advisors. After a winding path from aerospace structures at NASA to nuclear diplomacy at the U.S. State Department to scaling CoverWallet's advisor business into an Aon acquisition, he was floored by how confusing, invasive, and outdated it was to buy life insurance for his own family. Modern Life is his answer: a single dashboard that lets advisors pull instant quotes from 30-plus carriers and compress a process that once took six months into minutes. In November 2025 the company raised a $20M Series A led by Thrive Capital, bringing total funding to $35M.
Nico Simko is the co-founder and CEO of Clair, a New York fintech that lets hourly workers tap their earned wages the moment a shift ends, with no interest and no mandatory fees. A former Swiss national-team fencer who captained the U17 squad before fencing at Harvard, he studied economics, worked an hourly campus job, then ran M&A due diligence on payments fintechs at J.P. Morgan. He founded Clair in 2019 after becoming obsessed with the idea that any employer should be able to pay people instantly. Clair embeds inside HR and payroll platforms and earns most of its money from debit-card interchange rather than worker fees. The company has raised hundreds of millions in equity and debt, including a $23.2M Series B in 2025 led by Upfront Ventures with Thrive Capital. Simko is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
Joe Gebbia co-founded Airbnb in 2008 out of a San Francisco living room - air mattresses, breakfast included - and turned a half-crazy idea into an $85B company. His current venture, Samara, builds factory-assembled, solar-ready backyard homes (ADUs) that go from permit to move-in in under seven months. In early 2025 he became America's first Chief Design Officer, tasked with redesigning the federal government's 27,000 websites. A Rhode Island School of Design graduate with dual majors in graphic and industrial design, Gebbia approaches every problem - housing affordability, government UX, refugee shelter - through the lens of democratic, empathetic design.

Josh Kushner is the founder and managing partner of Thrive Capital, a New York-based venture firm he started at age 24 with $5 million and has since grown to $50+ billion in AUM across 10 funds. He made one of the most consequential single bets in VC history by providing the only term sheet OpenAI received in 2022 at a $29 billion valuation. Co-founder of Oscar Health and Cadre, minority owner of the Miami Heat and San Francisco Giants, and husband of supermodel and media entrepreneur Karlie Kloss, Kushner operates from the Puck Building in Manhattan where his apartment and office share the same address. Known for his low-key demeanor, obsessive work ethic, and a hiring process that famously takes eight months.