Joanna Strober is the co-founder and CEO of Midi Health, the first menopause startup to achieve unicorn status, raising $100M in Series D funding in February 2026 at a $1B+ valuation. A former Bessemer Venture Partners general partner and Sterling Stamos managing director turned entrepreneur, she built Midi Health after her own year-long struggle to get a perimenopause diagnosis in her late 40s. Midi now serves 230,000+ patients across all 50 states through a network of 500+ clinicians, with care covered by approximately 80% of PPOs. Named to TIME100 Health 2025, CNBC Changemakers 2025, and Forbes 50 Over 50 2023, Strober is also a published author (Getting to 50/50) and a former founder of Kurbo Health, the first digital therapeutic for childhood obesity, which she sold to WW.
Theo Von is a comedian, podcaster, and storyteller from Covington, Louisiana, whose show 'This Past Weekend' ranked as the 4th biggest podcast globally on Spotify in 2024. Known for his absurdist Southern wit, deeply personal storytelling, and a gift for finding humor in unlikely places, he has built one of the most loyal audiences in independent media — interviewing everyone from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders while remaining stubbornly, disarmingly himself.
Chris Mansi is a Cambridge and UCL-trained neurosurgeon turned AI entrepreneur, and the Co-founder and CEO of Viz.ai - the company that puts an AI brain between a CT scanner and a surgeon so that patients who are about to die of a stroke stop dying from delays. Named to TIME100 AI in 2024, Mansi built Viz.ai from a Stanford dorm-room insight into a platform covering nearly 2,000 U.S. hospitals and 230 million lives, reducing stroke diagnostic timelines by more than an hour - one patient at a time, every ten seconds.
Andre Esteva, PhD, is the co-founder and CEO of ArteraAI, a medical AI company whose test for personalizing prostate cancer therapy is included in NCCN clinical guidelines, reimbursed by Medicare, and deployed internationally. A Stanford-trained AI scientist whose Nature cover paper first demonstrated that AI could match dermatologists at diagnosing skin cancer, Esteva has co-founded four companies with a combined market cap of $2.2B. Named to TIME100 Health 2025 and Modern Healthcare's 40 Under 40 for 2025, he leads a company that raised $175M total and was named a TIME 2024 Best Invention.
Ziad Obermeyer is a physician-scientist and professor at UC Berkeley whose 2019 Science paper exposing racial bias in a healthcare algorithm used by millions changed how the world thinks about AI fairness. An emergency medicine doctor who moonlights as a machine learning researcher, McKinsey alum, and serial founder, Obermeyer co-founded Dandelion Health and Nightingale Open Science while testifying before Congress and earning a spot on TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI.
Dr. Katelyn Jetelina is an epidemiologist, data scientist, and one of America's most influential science communicators. She founded Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) in March 2020 as a few sentences to update her UT Health students about COVID-19 - and somehow that turned into a 365,000-subscriber newsletter reaching people in 133 countries with over 500 million total views. Named a TIME100 Most Influential Person in Health, she translates complex public health science into actionable insights twice a week, covering everything from vaccines and bird flu to gun violence and federal health policy. She holds a PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics, consults with the CDC, and serves as an adjunct professor at Yale School of Public Health - all while raising two daughters and having visited 50+ countries.