unicorn-founder
(10)
Minna Song
Minna Song is the cofounder and CEO of EliseAI, a New York company that builds conversational AI for property managers and, more recently, healthcare providers. She started the company in 2017 after taking a front-desk job at a real estate firm to see the workflow up close, and in 2025 raised a $250 million Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.2 billion valuation. EliseAI now serves roughly 70-75% of the fifty largest U.S. rental operators and crossed $200 million in annual recurring revenue.
Spencer Hewett
Spencer Hewett is the founder and CEO of RADAR, a New York retail-technology company that wires store ceilings with RFID and computer-vision sensors to locate inventory in real time. He dropped out of Washington University in St. Louis to take the Thiel Fellowship in 2012, spent years building and rebuilding the idea, and has since taken RADAR through Old Navy and American Eagle rollouts to a $1 billion valuation on a $170 million Series B closed in May 2026.
Steven Schwartz
Steven Schwartz is the co-founder and CEO of Whop, a New York-based digital marketplace where people buy and sell software, courses, communities, and other digital products. He started building and selling iOS sneaker bots from his bedroom at 13 with future co-founder Cameron Zoub, ran through roughly two dozen side hustles, and launched Whop in 2021. The company reached a reported $1.6 billion valuation, processes billions in annual commerce, and Schwartz says it has minted over 650 millionaires. Backed by Peter Thiel, Insight Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Tether, he pitches a future where work is fun and money worries are obsolete.
Cameron McCord
Cameron McCord is the co-founder and CEO of Nominal, a defense-tech software company modernizing how the world tests and validates mission-critical hardware. A former US Navy nuclear submarine officer who logged 484 days underwater, he studied physics and nuclear engineering at MIT and earned an MBA at Harvard before building product at Anduril and investing at Lux Capital. Founded in 2022, Nominal reached a $1 billion valuation after raising $155 million in ten months, counting four of the five largest US defense contractors among its customers.
April Koh
April Koh is the co-founder and CEO of Spring Health, a New York-based mental health company that uses machine learning to match people to the right care instead of leaving them to trial and error. She started it as a Yale senior in 2016 after reading a research paper that suggested algorithms could outperform the average psychiatrist at picking treatments. By 2021, at 29, she became the youngest woman to lead a unicorn; by 2024 the company raised a $100M Series E at a $3.3 billion valuation, serving employers and health plans across more than 200 countries. She was a 2025 TIME100 Next cover star.
Chris Altchek
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.
Edward Woodford
Edward Woodford is the co-founder and CEO of Zero Hash, the Chicago-based crypto and stablecoin infrastructure company that quietly powers digital-asset features inside Stripe, Interactive Brokers, Franklin Templeton, BlackRock and Shift4. A Goldman Sachs commodities alum who bought his first Bitcoin from an ATM as an MIT grad student, he built and sold a regulated derivatives venue before turning Zero Hash into a billion-dollar 'plumbing' business that has settled more than $45 billion in volume and onboarded over five million people to crypto.
Vadim Vladimirskiy
Vadim Vladimirskiy is the co-founder and CEO of Nerdio, a Chicago software company that automates and cuts the cost of running Microsoft cloud desktops for thousands of organizations across more than 50 countries. He emigrated from Ukraine at 13, started his first IT consultancy in high school, and spent fifteen years running an MSP before turning his internal tooling into a product. In March 2025 Nerdio raised a $500 million Series C from General Atlantic at a valuation above $1 billion, and the company crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue by mid-2025.
Evan Smith
Evan Smith is the co-founder and CEO of Altana, a New York company that turns the world's public and non-public trade data into a shared, AI-driven model of the global supply chain. Under his leadership Altana reached a $1 billion valuation in 2024 on a $200 million Series C, and its platform is now used by enterprises like Maersk and BASF and by government agencies including U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Smith frames the work as building 'Globalization 2.0' - rebuilding global commerce to be more resilient, secure, and fair rather than retreating from it.
Mukul Dhankhar
Mukul Dhankhar is the co-founder and CTO of Mashgin, the AI-powered self-checkout company that uses 3D computer vision to ring up items in under 10 seconds - no barcodes needed. Founded in 2014 out of Y Combinator, Mashgin reached unicorn status in May 2022 with a $62.5M Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation led by NEA. Dhankhar built the core computer vision technology drawing on his background at Toyota's humanoid robotics lab and Bell Labs. As of April 2025, Mashgin has processed over 1 billion transactions across 3,000+ convenience stores, 150 sports venues, 50 airports, 50 college campuses, and 100 hospitals.