university-of-chicago
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Samuel Adeyemo
Samuel Adeyemo is the co-founder and CEO of Duranta, a Seattle software company building AI tools that help landscapers and lawn care businesses measure properties, design projects, and win contracts. Born in Nairobi and trained in finance at JP Morgan before pivoting to climate tech, he previously co-founded Aurora Solar, the solar design platform that grew to a reported $2 billion valuation and powers a large share of the U.S. residential solar market. In 2025 he raised a $7 million seed round for Duranta, backed by Base10 Partners, Pear, and angels including GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. His through-line is taking the unglamorous back-office work of physical-world trades and turning it into software.
Alex Niemczewski
Alex Niemczewski is the co-founder and CEO of BallotReady, the nonpartisan online voter guide that covers every race and referendum on the ballot across all 50 states. She built the first version for herself before the 2014 midterms because she didn't know how to vote for the down-ballot offices nobody talks about - water reclamation commissioner, judges, mosquito abatement boards. A University of Chicago philosophy graduate who taught coding and ran a research-design consultancy, she turned a personal frustration into a civic engagement platform that informs millions of voters and powers tools for campaigns and advocacy groups.
David Haisha Chen
David Haisha Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Strikingly, a Y Combinator-backed website builder that lets anyone publish a mobile-optimized site in minutes. He left the University of Chicago in 2012 to move to Silicon Valley with co-founders Dafeng Guo and Teng Bao, was rejected by Y Combinator on the first try, got in on the second, and built a company that became the first Chinese startup to graduate from YC. He runs Strikingly with a product-first, superfan-driven philosophy from offices split between Shanghai and San Francisco.
David Stoffel
David Stoffel is the Chief Business Officer of RapidAI, the clinical-AI company whose stroke-imaging algorithms helped rewrite the rules of how strokes get treated. A medical doctor who chose boardrooms over bedsides, he has spent more than two decades turning ambitious medical technologies into standards of care - from the da Vinci surgical robot at Intuitive Surgical to mobile cardiac telemetry at iRhythm and point-of-care EEG at Ceribell. At RapidAI he runs the commercial engine: marketing, clinical affairs, education, customer success, corporate development, and finance.
Dylan Massey
Dylan Massey is the co-founder and CEO of Interchecks, a New York-based instant-payment platform that moves deposits and withdrawals for sportsbooks, lenders, fintechs and banks. A former Goldman Sachs analyst and University of Chicago economics grad, he started the company in 2016 and has built it into infrastructure that has processed more than $50 billion, powering money movement for names like FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM and Credit Karma Money. In 2022 Interchecks raised a $16M Series B co-led by Senator Investment Group and Standard Investments.
Hyesung Kim
Hyesung Kim is the founder and CEO of Mineis, the Seoul company behind Charan, a full-service fashion recommerce platform that collects, inspects, cleans, photographs, prices, sells, and ships used clothing on the seller's behalf. A University of Chicago economics grad who started his first ad-tech company as an undergrad and later worked as a venture investor, Kim built Charan to remove the friction that keeps closets full of unworn clothes. The platform passed 400,000 users within a year of its 2023 launch, was named to Forbes Asia's 100 to Watch in 2024, and raised a 16.8 billion won Series B in 2025, bringing total funding to 32.2 billion won.
Jeff Elton
Jeff Elton, Ph.D., is the founding CEO and now Vice Chairman of ConcertAI, a Cambridge-based company building generative and predictive AI on the world's largest multi-modal oncology dataset. He grew the company from a 2017 startup into a roughly $1.9 billion business with about 1,300 employees, acquiring TeraRecon's imaging technology and ASCO's CancerLinQ network along the way. A former Accenture managing director, Novartis research COO, and McKinsey partner, he co-authored the widely cited book Healthcare Disrupted and chairs the MassBio board.
John Simpson
John Simpson is Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Digital Health Strategies (DHS), a Washington, D.C.-based data and technology company he started in 2014 with Ben Texter after both worked at Blue State Digital, the agency behind Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 digital campaigns. DHS builds the Share of Health patient loyalty platform, using propensity modeling and precision marketing to help large health systems - including Scripps Health, Providence, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Geisinger and Hackensack Meridian Health - deepen patient relationships, close care gaps and turn grateful patients into donors. A McGill and University of Chicago graduate who spent two decades in media and digital fundraising at Digitas and Deep Focus, Simpson closed a Series A round in December 2023 and has landed DHS on the Inc. 5000.
Sage Wohns
Sage Wohns is the CEO and Co-Founder of Jericho Security, a New York-based AI cybersecurity company that trains humans and AI systems to defend against AI-powered attacks including hyper-realistic phishing, deepfakes, and voice cloning. A Seattle native and 10-year AI industry veteran, Wohns previously built and led Agolo, a Google- and Microsoft-backed NLP summarization company, before co-founding Jericho Security in 2023. The company made history by winning the Pentagon's first-ever generative AI defense contract through AFWERX in December 2023, and has since raised $18M in total funding, including a $15M Series A in April 2025. With 39 employees and 30+ enterprise clients, Jericho Security is at the frontier of AI-versus-AI cyber defense.
Austan Goolsbee
Austan Goolsbee is the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, one of the most closely watched voices on U.S. interest rates and inflation. A longtime University of Chicago Booth economist who chaired Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, he is equally known for empirical research on the internet and taxes and for being the rare central banker who once won Washington's funniest celebrity contest.
Abhishek Jha
Abhishek Jha is the Co-Founder and CEO of Elucidata, a San Francisco-based AI company making biomedical data AI-ready for drug discovery and pharmaceutical R&D. A trained physical chemist with a PhD from the University of Chicago and postdoctoral work at MIT, he spent years at Agios Pharmaceuticals contributing to four FDA-approved first-in-class therapies before co-founding Elucidata in 2015. Under his leadership, the company has raised over $22.7M in funding, grown to 170 employees, and achieved $22.2M ARR, while evolving from a data-curation platform into an AI company solving out-of-distribution (OOD) problems in biomedical research - work that earned Elucidata recognition as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2024.
Matt Levin
Matt Levin is the CEO of Modern Health, a leading global workplace mental health platform. A serial CEO with two decades of leadership across HR technology, health care, and benefits, Levin has helmed Benefitfocus (sold to Voya Financial), People 2.0 (a 50-country HR platform), and held C-suite roles at ADP and Aon. He was part of the core team that engineered the landmark $4.9 billion Aon-Hewitt merger and was recognized as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2013. A Chicago-based operator and longtime lecturer at both Northwestern and the University of Chicago, he now leads Modern Health's mission to bring proactive, globally equitable mental health care to the world's workforce.
Maxwell Blumenfeld
Maxwell Blumenfeld is the Co-Founder, COO, and Head of R&D at SentiLink, a San Francisco-based identity verification and fraud prevention company he co-founded in 2017 with Naftali Harris after both worked as risk leaders at Affirm. Discovering that synthetic identities with real 750+ credit scores were slipping through the financial system, they built SentiLink into a platform now serving 300+ financial institutions - including three of the top 10 US banks - having verified several hundred million applications. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2020, Blumenfeld holds a mathematics and economics degree from the University of Chicago and operates from Austin, Texas.
Rick Kimball
Rick Kimball is a Founding General Partner at TCV (Technology Crossover Ventures), the growth-equity firm he co-founded with Jay Hoag in 1995. Over four decades as a technology investor, he backed category-defining companies including Netflix, GoDaddy, Spotify, and eHarmony. Before TCV, he spent more than a decade at Montgomery Securities as a Managing Director covering telecommunications and data communications. He has appeared multiple times on the Forbes Midas List as one of the top technology investors in the world, and currently serves on the UC San Francisco Board of Trustees and the Ohana Foundation board.
Stuart Peterson
Stuart Peterson is the Founder and Managing General Partner of ARTIS Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm he launched in 2001 that coined and trademarked the term 'TechBio.' A 2017 Forbes Midas List honoree, Peterson led early-stage investments in YouTube (acquired by Google) and StemCentrx (acquired by AbbVie for $10.2 billion - the largest-ever venture-backed life sciences acquisition), and has since focused ARTIS at the convergence of computer science and life science, closing a $200 million TechBio II Fund in December 2023 to back next-generation health and medicine companies deploying AI, machine learning, and deep learning to transform human health.
Olgica Bakajin
Olgica Bakajin is the CEO and Founder of Porifera Inc., a San Leandro, California-based company pioneering forward osmosis membrane technology for the food, beverage, and industrial water sectors. A physicist by training - B.A. from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. from Princeton - she spent nearly a decade at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory developing carbon nanotube membranes that move water 1,000x faster than conventional materials. Her 2006 Science paper on carbon nanotube desalination became the most-cited chemistry article in the journal. In 2009 she spun Porifera out of LLNL, and the company now serves 100+ customers across 20+ countries, helping breweries, coffee roasters, and winemakers concentrate their products without heat, preserving flavor, aroma, and nutrients while slashing energy use by up to 80%.
Corinne Riley
Corinne Riley is a Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where she focuses on early-stage B2B enterprise software, data infrastructure, and AI companies. Before joining Greylock, she worked at Morgan Stanley on IPOs for Uber, Zoom, and Palantir. At Greylock she launched both the Scout Program - growing it to 35 scouts investing in 100+ startups - and the Edge Program, a founder-support initiative that provides pre-idea and pre-seed founders with resources and mentorship without taking upfront equity. She is known for her go-to-market expertise and her hands-on approach to helping founders land their first enterprise customers.
Agnes Callard
Agnes Callard is a philosopher at the University of Chicago whose work sits at the rare intersection of rigorous academic thought and genuine public provocation. Author of 'Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming' (2018) and 'Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life' (2025), she argues that Socratic open inquiry - the willingness to be persuaded by better reasons - is not just for intellectuals but for everyone. A Guggenheim Fellow and Lebowitz Prize winner, she writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Point Magazine, runs the Night Owls public debate series in Chicago, and co-hosts the 'Minds Almost Meeting' podcast with economist Robin Hanson. Known for contrarian takes ('The Case Against Travel'), deeply personal essays, and a living arrangement that keeps her ex-husband as a co-resident, Callard treats philosophy not as a career but as a way of life.