university-of-maryland
(10)
Akash Magoon
He learned how insurers deny claims from the inside. Then he built the machine that fights back for the doctors.
Adam Wenchel
He was studying how AI fails before most people believed it worked. Now he builds the guardrails that keep everyone else's models honest.
Thomas Rivas
Thomas Rivas is the founder and CEO of Vendoo, a software platform that helps online resellers list and manage inventory across marketplaces like eBay, Poshmark, Etsy, Mercari and Facebook. He started selling online as a high schooler in 2007, kept selling through college at the University of Maryland, and turned the tedium of posting the same item to a dozen sites into a company that went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. Vendoo has grown to roughly 50-60 employees, reached profitability, and has been used to create tens of millions of listings.
TJ Ademiluyi
TJ Ademiluyi is the CEO and co-founder of Alaffia Health, a New York healthcare-technology company that pairs licensed clinicians with agentic AI to review medical claims for health plans. Raised in a family that ran a medical-billing business, he traded a finance career at Goldman Sachs to build software that reads patient records, checks provider bills against policy, and flags overpayments before they are paid. He founded the company in 2020 with his older sister, Adun Akanni, was named to Forbes' 2023 30 Under 30 in Healthcare, and in February 2026 raised a $55 million Series B led by Transformation Capital, bringing total funding above $73 million.
Louis Licamele
Louis Licamele, PhD is a computer scientist turned drug developer who serves as Chief Development Officer and EVP of Clinical and Data Science at Bloom Science, a San Diego biotech building microbiome-based, ketogenic-mimicking live biotherapeutics for obesity and neurological disease. A founding team member, he oversees biostatistics, clinical data management, and data-driven trial design for the company's lead candidate BL-001. He built his career at the intersection of data and medicine - a BS in biology and computer science from Georgetown, a PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland, and senior informatics and biometrics roles at Vanda Pharmaceuticals and REGENXBIO. He also runs The Licamele Group, advising healthcare companies on data science, AI, and regulatory strategy.
Allie Janoch
Allie Janoch is the CEO and co-founder of Mapistry, a Berkeley-born software company that turns the soul-crushing paperwork of environmental compliance into maps, mobile inspections and automated alerts for industrial and manufacturing companies. A computer-vision engineer by training - MIT Lincoln Labs, IQ Engines, Yahoo's Flickr - she walked out of a comfortable Silicon Valley job in 2013 to build software for stormwater permits, of all things, alongside her husband and environmental-engineer co-founder Ryan Janoch. The bet: regulations don't have to be the enemy of either the economy or clean water.
Sang Lee
Sang Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Vibranium Labs, a New York startup building Vibe AI, billed as the first 24/7 AI site reliability engineer. A former Google and AWS engineer who lived through too many 2 a.m. outage firefights, Lee is building an agentic AI teammate that detects, triages, and resolves IT incidents before a human ever wakes up. In September 2025 the company raised $4.6M in seed funding led by Calibrate Ventures and Mirae Asset, with backing from a16z, Franklin Templeton, and others, claiming up to an 85% cut in mean time to resolution and counting Shutterstock among its clients.
Veeraj Shah
Veeraj Shah is the co-founder and CEO of Vitalize (YC W23), a San Francisco company building software to fix hospital operations, starting with staffing and scheduling. A 2021 Gates Cambridge Scholar who walked away from a Cambridge PhD to run the company full-time, he is a three-time healthcare founder whose earlier work spanned the U.S. Surgeon General's office, IBM Watson Health, and the National Cancer Institute. Vitalize is now live across more than 20 hospitals.
Mahmoud Abdelkader
Mahmoud Abdelkader is the Egyptian-American co-founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based data security platform that raised $105 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Visa. Born near the Suez Canal and raised in Brooklyn, he built high-frequency trading systems at Wachovia, was employee #4 at Milo.com before its $75M eBay acquisition, then co-founded Balanced Payments through Y Combinator (W11) before founding VGS in 2016. VGS pioneered the 'Zero Data' category of data security as a service, serving 700+ customers including Fortune 100 companies. He stepped down as CEO in late 2022 and now invests in fintech companies including Ramp, Vercel, Alloy, Mercury, and Stytch while experimenting with AI.
Debanjan Saha
Debanjan Saha is the CEO of DataRobot, leading one of the most widely deployed enterprise AI platforms in the world. A PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, he built his career across IBM, Amazon Web Services (where he launched Amazon Aurora), and Google Cloud (where he oversaw BigQuery Omni and Dataplex). He joined DataRobot in February 2022, became interim CEO in July 2022, and was formally appointed CEO in September 2022. He holds 50+ patents, is an IEEE Fellow, and a Distinguished Member of the ACM.