Sahil Hasan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Dots, a developer-friendly global payouts platform that has processed over $1 billion to more than 1 million gig workers, creators, and contractors in 190+ countries. A UC Berkeley EECS grad with a CMU master's degree, Sahil spent time as a Research Engineer at Google X before co-founding Dots through Y Combinator's S21 batch. The company raised an $8.9M Series A in February 2026 led by DCM Ventures, is profitable, and growing revenue 400% year-over-year.
AJ Herrera is the VP of Corporate Marketing at Cloudflare, where he leads the brand narrative that recast a CDN company into the world's connectivity cloud. With over 30 years in high-tech marketing spanning Silicon Graphics, a decade running his own agency, and seven years shaping VMware's global brand, he brings both the craftsman's instinct and the operator's eye to one of the internet's most consequential infrastructure companies.
Alan Zhang (Rongyu Zhang) is a San Francisco-based founder, aerospace engineer, and YouTube creator who built the first human-carrying eVTOL drone assembled by a high schooler — a 280kg-thrust electric aircraft completed in 327 days with 17 classmates in a Diamond Bar garage. Now at UC Berkeley's MET program (Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology), he is building Prototype 3 of his passenger drone and running a stealth startup, while his YouTube channel @alanzeekk documents his journey building interesting machines.
Eric Foster spent 42 years at Swinerton - one of the largest 100% employee-owned construction companies in the US - rising from project engineer in 1982 to CEO in January 2020, the company's 12th chief executive in its 132-year history. A UC Berkeley civil engineering graduate, he led Swinerton through the COVID-19 pandemic, oversaw the launch of mass timber subsidiary Timberlab, and expanded the firm to $4.3 billion in revenue across 20 locations before retiring on January 11, 2024. His career touched landmark San Francisco structures including SFMOMA and the historic Monadnock Building.
Perry Patel is President and CEO of Radiate Hospitality (formerly BPR Properties), the Palo Alto-based hotel management and development company his father founded with a single motel in 1973. Under Perry's leadership, the firm now operates a portfolio of branded and lifestyle hotels across the West Coast - from the Crowne Plaza Cabana in Palo Alto to the Hi-Lo Autograph Collection in Portland - with 500+ employees and a reputation for restoring historic properties.
Adnan Iqbal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Luma Health, a San Mateo-based healthcare technology company that has built an AI-native Patient Success Platform used by 750+ healthcare organizations, 100 million patients, and 500,000+ providers. A second-generation Pakistani-American and serial entrepreneur, Iqbal studied environmental biology at UC Berkeley, earned an MPhil in BioScience from Cambridge University, and an MS/MBA from Stanford GSB. Before Luma, he spent five years in management at Genentech and co-founded AutoTB, a tuberculosis diagnostic startup that won both Cambridge and UC Berkeley entrepreneurship competitions. Luma Health has raised $160 million in funding and enabled $3.2 billion in healthcare revenue.
Alex Mashrabov is the CEO and co-founder of Higgsfield AI, a $1.3B AI video generation unicorn that went from $0 to $50M ARR in five months. A 2x ACM ICPC World Finals competitive programmer who began coding at 10, he previously co-founded AI Factory — acquired by Snap for $166M in 2020 — and later served as Snap's Head of Generative AI. Born in Andijan, Uzbekistan, and trained at Moscow's elite MIPT, he is now building Higgsfield into the infrastructure layer for AI video creation, targeting the moment when most social media video is AI-generated.
Danny Shader is the founder and CEO of PayNearMe, a Santa Clara-based fintech platform that processes over $50 billion annually for more than 20,000 businesses. A serial entrepreneur whose previous ventures were acquired by Amazon, Motorola, and Netscape, Shader built PayNearMe from a niche cash-payment network into PayXM, the industry's first full-stack Payment Experience Management platform. Backed by $245 million in total funding including a $50M Series E in September 2025, he has spent 15+ years turning a deceptively simple problem - helping the cash-dependent and underbanked pay their bills - into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise payments category.
Erez Cohen is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of August Health, a San Francisco-based healthtech company building the modern EHR platform for senior living communities. A serial founder and former Apple engineering leader, Cohen sold his first company, Mapsense, to Apple for approximately $25-30 million in 2015. He founded August Health in 2020 after meeting physician co-founder Dr. Justin Schram at a San Francisco playground - both pushing their two-year-olds on the swings - and the company has since raised $44 million in total funding, with a $29 million Series B led by Base10 Partners in August 2025.
Hubert Palan is the Czech-born founder and CEO of Productboard, the AI-powered product management platform used by 5,400+ companies including Salesforce, Zoom, and Microsoft. After earning an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and spending nearly four years as VP of Product at GoodData, he founded Productboard in 2014 with co-founder Daniel Hejl to solve a problem he'd lived firsthand: the disconnect between customer feedback, product strategy, and what actually gets built. The company reached unicorn status in 2022 with a $1.725B valuation following a $125M Series D, and Palan has since led a bold AI-first transformation of the platform with products like Productboard Spark and Productboard Pulse.
Jason Lopatecki is the co-founder and CEO of Arize AI, a leading AI observability and evaluation platform that has raised $131M including a $70M Series C in 2025. A serial entrepreneur and UC Berkeley EECS graduate, he previously co-founded TubeMogul and scaled it from a garage startup to a NASDAQ-listed public company before Adobe acquired it in 2016. At Arize, he is building the infrastructure layer that helps engineering teams test, evaluate, and troubleshoot AI models and LLM-powered agents in production - a market that has exploded with the rise of generative AI.
Kourosh Zamani is the Co-Founder of Laurel, the AI-native time platform automating timesheet creation for professional services firms. Starting as Ping Inc. in 2016 alongside co-founder Ryan Alshak - a fraternity brother from UC Berkeley - Kourosh shepherded the company from bootstrapped startup through five funding rounds to a $100M Series C in June 2025, with investors including IVP, Google Ventures, Alexis Ohanian, and Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI). Before building Laurel, he ran VP of Business Development at Bailard Inc. and founded the Young Professionals of San Francisco, a non-profit that grew to 8,000+ members. His career arc from investment management to COO to Head of Sales to Strategic Partnerships lead mirrors the evolution of Laurel itself: from scrappy time-tracking app to a platform processing over $5B in gross market value for 100+ enterprise clients.
Robert Nishihara is a co-founder of Anyscale, the company commercializing Ray - the open-source distributed computing framework powering AI workloads at OpenAI, Apple, Uber, and thousands of other organizations. A Harvard math grad and UC Berkeley PhD, he built Ray during his doctoral research to solve the tooling bottlenecks he personally experienced doing AI research. Anyscale has raised $259.6M and reached a $1B+ valuation under his leadership before he transitioned from CEO to a product-focused role in mid-2024.
Tony Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Sunday, a Mountain View-based robotics company building Memo - a home robot trained on 10 million episodes of real household routines. A Stanford PhD dropout and UC Berkeley EECS alum, Zhao invented ALOHA and ACT during his doctoral research, open-source frameworks that became foundational to modern robot manipulation. Sunday reached unicorn status in March 2026 with a $165M Series B led by Coatue, putting the company at a $1.15B valuation with a mission to put a helpful robot in every home.
Yinon Weiss is a serial entrepreneur, decorated military veteran, and the Founder and CEO of Stress-Free Auto Care - a tech-enabled auto repair chain with 30+ locations across California and Texas. Before Stress-Free, he co-founded RallyPoint (the 'LinkedIn for the military') and CarDash (a transparent auto repair marketplace that went through Y Combinator S17 and was acquired). A UC Berkeley bioengineering grad with a Harvard MBA, Weiss served 10 years on active duty as a Marine Corps Scout/Sniper Platoon Commander and Army Special Forces officer, earning the Bronze Star before transitioning to Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.
Divakar Tantravahi is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Innominds, a San Jose-based AI-first digital product engineering company with 1,400 employees and $80M in annual revenue. Starting his career at Visakhapatnam Steel Plant in 1987, he moved through Informix and a startup called Everypath before founding Innominds in 2003. Under his leadership, Innominds has become a full-cycle product engineering partner helping technology companies build products that land in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Recognized for his employee-centric leadership style, Tantravahi was named one of India's Best Leaders in Times of Crisis 2021 by Great Place to Work India and received ET Now's 'CEO with HR Orientation' Award in 2019.
Irana Wasti is the CEO of Thought Industries, the AI-powered customer learning and engagement platform trusted by 99 of the Fortune 100. A product leader who scaled GoDaddy's EMEA business past $500M and helped take BILL to $1B in annual revenue, she now leads Thought Industries through its transformation into an agentic AI intelligence platform that connects learning, customer behavior, and business outcomes. With a CS degree from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard Business School, she has spent 20+ years at the intersection of technology, product, and growth.
Jorge Torres is the Co-Founder and CEO of MindsDB, an open-source AI data platform headquartered in Berkeley, California. He is a Visiting Research Scholar at UC Berkeley focused on machine learning automation and explainability. Torres built MindsDB to democratize AI—letting any developer query AI models directly from databases using plain SQL or natural language. Under his leadership, MindsDB has raised over $77 million in funding from investors including Benchmark, NVIDIA, Mayfield, and Y Combinator, garnering recognition from Forbes as one of America's most promising AI companies and from Gartner as a Cool Vendor for Data and AI.
Amit Narayan is the Co-Founder and CEO of GridCARE, a Redwood City-based generative AI company that unlocks hidden power grid capacity to slash data center connection timelines from 5-7 years to 6-12 months. A serial entrepreneur with a PhD from UC Berkeley and a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur, he previously founded AutoGrid (acquired by Schneider Electric in 2022) and Berkeley Design Automation (acquired by Mentor Graphics in 2014), and holds 7 U.S. patents across semiconductor design and energy software. GridCARE emerged from stealth in May 2025 with a $13.5M seed round led by Xora and backed by Tom Steyer, Ram Shriram, and Breakthrough Energy, targeting what Narayan calls the defining constraint on AI: immediate access to power.
Anand Kulkarni is the CEO and co-founder of CoreStory, a Berkeley-based AI company that decodes legacy enterprise codebases - turning decades-old COBOL and other ancient software into living, queryable specifications. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and NSF PhD fellow out of UC Berkeley, he previously co-founded LeadGenius (Y Combinator S11) and built Crowdbotics into a platform serving Fortune 500 companies and U.S. government agencies. In October 2025, CoreStory raised a $32 million Series A to modernize the world's mission-critical legacy software.
Gani Jusuf is the CEO and Co-Founder of AXONNE, a Silicon Valley fabless semiconductor startup reshaping how data moves inside vehicles. A UC Berkeley PhD with 25+ years in semiconductor engineering - including nearly 15 years as VP of Engineering at Marvell Technology - Jusuf co-founded AXONNE in 2018 to solve one of automotive's trickiest problems: getting massive streams of sensor data from cameras, radar, and LiDAR to compute units at multi-gigabit speeds over a single twisted-pair cable. Backed by Intel Capital, AXONNE's Cyton PHY and automotive Ethernet bridge products are used in next-generation ADAS and software-defined vehicle architectures.
Jared O'Leary is the Co-Founder and CEO of SirenOpt, a deep-tech startup commercializing PlasmaSens - a manufacturing intelligence platform that uses cold atmospheric plasma and AI to perform real-time, non-destructive materials characterization. A Stanford Chemical Engineering graduate with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, O'Leary spun SirenOpt out of his doctoral research with advisor Professor Ali Mesbah in 2022. The platform can generate 213,000 data points per measurement in milliseconds without destroying the sample, targeting battery manufacturing, aerospace, semiconductors, and other advanced manufacturing sectors. SirenOpt has raised $16.1M total, including a $6.5M strategic round led by Hitachi Ventures and JLR's InMotion Ventures in 2025, plus a $2.4M California Energy Commission BRIDGE grant for battery electrode applications.
Jerry Qian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Reacher, an AI-powered creator marketing platform headquartered in San Francisco. After stints at Meta and NASA and graduating from UC Berkeley, Qian co-founded Reacher in 2024 with Bora Mutluoglu to automate influencer discovery, outreach, and campaign management for brands on TikTok Shop, Instagram, YouTube Shopping, and Amazon. The company is a Y Combinator S25 alum, holds the #1 spot on the TikTok Shop App Store, serves 1,000+ brands including Under Armour and Logitech, and has crossed seven figures in ARR.
Jonathan Spier is a serial entrepreneur and CEO with 20+ years of experience building AI-driven B2B technology companies. He currently leads Rev Intelligence (formerly LeadCrunch), a San Diego-based platform that uses exegraphics and machine learning to help enterprise sales teams identify and prioritize their best-fit accounts - claiming 3x higher win rates and 50% faster sales cycles. Previously, he co-founded NetBase, a natural language processing pioneer that became the category leader in social media analytics before its acquisition and rebrand as NetBaseQuid. He holds a BS in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard Business School, and has shepherded companies from founding through tens of millions in revenue.
Julian Park is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bezi, a San Francisco-based AI assistant for Unity game developers that helps with debugging, code generation, shader creation, and prototyping through deep project-level context. A UC Berkeley computer science grad, Park cut his teeth at Facebook building WebGL design tools and then at Oculus leading VR multitasking and UI framework projects before co-founding Bezi in 2021. The company raised $13M across Seed and Series A rounds, with Benchmark leading the Series A, and has evolved from a collaborative 3D design tool into a powerful AI coding companion purpose-built for Unity pipelines.
Kun Gao is a serial entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and original CEO of Crunchyroll, the platform that turned anime from a niche US curiosity into a billion-dollar streaming giant (acquired by Sony/AT&T WarnerMedia for $1.2 billion). Now he's doing it again as Co-Founder and CEO of Forge (forge.gg), a San Francisco-based game marketing and loyalty platform that hit 1 million users within its first year. Alongside co-founders Dennis 'Thresh' Fong (the world's first professional esports player) and George Ng, Gao is building the infrastructure layer that indie game developers desperately need: no-code loyalty programs, player analytics, and direct community channels - without the walled gardens.
Neil Tewari is the 24-year-old co-founder and CEO of Conversion (conversion.ai), an AI-native B2B marketing automation platform based in San Francisco. A UC Berkeley dropout at 19, he and co-founder James Jiao built Conversion from their dorm room into a company serving 4,000+ businesses with nearly $10M ARR and $30M in total funding, including a $28M Series A led by Abstract Ventures announced in 2025.
Rupa Chandra Gupta is the cofounder and CEO of Sown To Grow, a K-12 edtech platform that puts students in charge of their own learning through goal-setting, progress tracking, and structured reflection. A former Bain consultant turned school administrator, she co-founded the company in 2015 after witnessing firsthand the gap in tools that gave students genuine ownership over their education. Sown To Grow has raised over $5M in venture funding and serves districts across the United States, with measurable outcomes including record-breaking graduation rates in Stockton Unified School District.
Ryan Buckley is the Co-Founder and CEO of Shovels, a Lafayette, California-based startup that turns fragmented government building permit records into a searchable intelligence layer for the construction and climate tech industries. Armed with degrees from UC Berkeley, MIT Sloan, and Harvard Kennedy School, Buckley spent years building parallel B2B ventures before co-founding Shovels in 2022 with Luka Kacil. The company now processes 180+ million building permits, covers 30 million US addresses, and raised a $5M seed round in June 2025 led by Base10 Partners. A prolific blogger, part-time college professor, and author of 'The Parallel Entrepreneur,' Buckley is building what he calls the 'Pitchbook for the construction industry.'
Sriharsha 'Sai' Guduguntla is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hyperbound, a YC S23-backed enterprise AI platform that pioneered AI sales roleplay. A self-taught full-stack engineer with 12+ years of software development experience and a UC Berkeley CS graduate (2022), he previously worked at Salesforce's Einstein AI Chatbots team and as a founding engineer at Bloom (YC W21). After conducting 2,000+ user interviews, he and co-founder Atul Raghunathan pivoted Hyperbound from email automation into the first scalable AI sales practice arena - trusted by IBM, LinkedIn, Monday.com, Bloomberg, and Autodesk. In September 2025, Hyperbound raised a $15M Series A led by Peak XV Partners.