university-of-pennsylvania
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Charles Sword
Charles Sword is a New York-based revenue and go-to-market executive who has spent two decades building sales organizations for enterprise and B2B SaaS companies. He has served as Chief Revenue Officer at UpMetrics, Blueprint Software Systems, and Payfone (now Prove), founded Masthead Consulting and Ready Set Track, and held VP roles at CAST and iRise. He is now associated with Mobot, the NYC robotic mobile-testing startup, and writes regularly on how mission-driven organizations can use data and AI to measure impact.
Khari Austin-Rawls
Khari Austin-Rawls is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Goldcast, a Boston-based B2B video and events software company backed by roughly $40M in venture funding. He built his early career in streaming media at Disney, where he rose to Senior Manager on ESPN+ acquisition and engagement, then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2025 before moving into a startup leadership seat. A University of Pennsylvania graduate who studied East Asian Languages and International Relations, he is known for candid reflections on being the only Black person in the room and for a personal creed about not squandering time.
Jeremy Gelbart
Jeremy Gelbart is the co-founder and CEO of Autobrain, a Boca Raton company that turns any ordinary car into a connected 'smart car' through a plug-and-play device offering GPS tracking, diagnostics, automatic crash response, and family-safety alerts. A serial entrepreneur who has been building since college, he first drew national attention as co-founder of Ultrinsic, a platform that let students legally wager cash on their own grades, and later founded the medical-notification startup BeeperMD. His through-line is a simple bet: that the right incentive, or the right piece of hardware, can change everyday behavior.
John Doherty
John 'Jack' Doherty is the Co-Founder and CEO of Forest Park Group, a San Mateo-based fintech building LoanOS - a permissioned blockchain settlement platform targeting the $1 trillion-plus syndicated loan market. With a Mathematical Economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania and stints in CLO credit research at Pretium Partners, he founded Forest Park in April 2019 to attack one of Wall Street's most persistent inefficiencies: syndicated loan settlement times averaging 23 days in North America and 6+ weeks in Europe. The company raised a $1.2M seed round in 2021 from EvoNexus and Advanced Blockchain AG, and its technology promises to compress settlement from T+21 to T+1, potentially increasing syndicate sizes by 25% and cutting credit costs by 4%.
Andrea Ashford-Hicks
Andrea Ashford-Hicks is the CEO of Cayuga Biotech, an early-stage platform biotechnology company developing biomimetic polyphosphate therapies for severe bleeding. She joined in 2022 after two decades in biopharma, including leading the FDA approval and commercial launch of RETHYMIC at Enzyvant Therapeutics and progressive roles at Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Agenus, EMD Serono and Schering-Plough. She holds dual degrees in biology and finance from the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School.
Hasti Nazem
Hasti Nazem is the Co-CEO and Head of Product and Education at Kindra, a New York-based, science-backed women's health brand building estrogen-free solutions for menopause, vaginal health and intimate care. With roughly a decade at the intersection of life sciences, consumer brand-building and wellness, she co-leads the company alongside Afshan Dosani, grounding products in 160+ clinical studies and patent-pending peptide technology. She came to the work through a winding path: a family of physicians, a pre-med start, a detour into finance before the 2008 crash, and a return to school that led her to build wellness companies focused on sleep and, later, women's health.
Max Hammer
Max Hammer is the co-founder and CEO of CrowdVolt, a Y Combinator (W24) startup building a bid-ask marketplace for live event tickets - pitched as 'what StockX did for sneakers, for tickets.' A Westport, Connecticut native and University of Pennsylvania graduate, he left an investment banking career at UBS to chase the rave-ticket resale problem he and his co-founders kept hitting after attending 80-plus shows in a single year. CrowdVolt launched in Brooklyn in early 2024, raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Brickyard VC, Goodwater Capital, Pioneer Fund and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, and is expanding from EDM into broader live-events infrastructure.
Meredith Perry
Meredith Perry is the co-founder and CEO of Elemind, a neurotech company building a wearable headband that reads your brainwaves in real time and nudges them with bursts of sound, marketed as sleep on demand. Before Elemind she was the inventor behind uBeam, the ultrasonic wireless-charging venture she dreamed up as a University of Pennsylvania undergrad and grew into a roughly $40 million, much-debated startup backed by Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Mark Cuban and Marissa Mayer. A trained paleobiologist and astrobiologist who once did research with NASA, Perry holds dozens of patents and now wants to build what she calls an app store for the brain.
Mort Fertel
Mort Fertel is the co-founder and CEO of Poplin (formerly SudShare), a nationwide peer-to-peer marketplace often called the 'Uber for laundry,' which connects customers with independent Laundry Pros across 500+ markets and 8,000 zip codes. Before laundry, he spent two decades as a globally known relationship expert and author of the Marriage Fitness system, used by millions in marital crisis and the subject of the documentary 'Back from the Brink.' He started Poplin in 2018 alongside his teenage triplet sons after his wife, drowning in laundry for their five kids, asked why she was still washing clothes like her grandmother.
Raj Amin
Raj Amin is the co-founder and CEO of Arcade Therapeutics, a New York science-first game studio building prescription digital therapeutics that embed clinically proven anxiety-reduction techniques inside mobile games. A University of Pennsylvania-trained engineer and Wharton MBA, he has spent more than two decades building venture-backed companies at the seam of healthcare, media and technology - including HealthiNation, the first on-demand consumer health video network, and Mana Health, a health-data interoperability platform later acquired by Comcast. He is a self-described #GirlDad, a drummer and aspiring guitarist, and a Broadway investor who has backed Tony Award-winning productions.
Sachin Narode
Sachin Narode is the co-founder and CEO of Xeni, a New York-based Web 3.0 operating system for travel that lets anyone launch a white-label booking platform with wholesale inventory, instant blockchain settlement, and no-code tools. A self-described serial entrepreneur with a background in medicine, molecular biology and finance, he has built and sold companies across biotech and wearables, advised technology and data teams at Morgan Stanley, and once became known as 'the Mango Man' for introducing a mango market to the United States. He preaches a single gospel: execution over ideas.
Samuel Whitaker
Samuel Whitaker is the founder and CEO of Mural Health, a Philadelphia-area clinical trials technology company building a participant-first platform that bundles fee-free payments, transportation, two-way communication, and real-time satisfaction data. He invented the original participant payment tool, the ClinCard, when he founded Greenphire in 2008 and grew it into a billion-dollar company on roughly $2.2 million of outside capital. After a stint as CTO of Signant Health, he launched Mural Health in 2022 to push the same idea further: treating the trial participant, not just the sponsor, as the customer. He also drove the creation of the Harley Jacobsen Act, federal legislation to stop taxing payments to clinical trial participants.
Sara Dwyer
Sara Dwyer (who also goes by Sara Cordrey) is the co-founder and CEO of Parambil, a New York startup building agentic AI for complex litigation. Parambil reads tens of thousands of pages of medical records, pharmacy data and legal files to tell a law firm what happened medically, why it matters legally, and what a case is worth. A University of Pennsylvania computer scientist who spent nearly four years as a McKinsey engagement manager at the intersection of AI and life sciences, she launched the company in 2023 and raised a $2M pre-seed (Daybreak Ventures, Jan 2025) followed by a $6M seed led by Bling Capital (Jan 2026).
Will Morris
Will Morris is the founder and CEO of EdConnective, a Richmond, Virginia company that delivers one-to-one virtual instructional coaching to teachers, instructional coaches, and K-12 leaders. After a year mentoring African American freshmen in a Chicago charter school and graduate research at the University of Pennsylvania on coaching as a lever of teacher quality, he built a platform that pairs educators with coaches the way a dating site pairs partners, then feeds them timely, non-evaluative video feedback. EdConnective operates across more than a dozen states, has delivered thousands of coaching sessions, and reports double-digit gains in student engagement and mastery.
Scott Greenberg
Scott Greenberg is the Chief Business Officer of Nura Bio, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in South San Francisco building small-molecule drugs to stop nerves from dying. He joined in February 2025 to steer business development and corporate strategy as the company pushes its lead SARM1 inhibitor, NB-4746, into the clinic. He arrives with more than two decades crossing the line between finance and biology - a Goldman Sachs banking start, more than a decade at Celgene, an operations leadership role at Roivant Sciences, and a stint as Chief Operating Officer at Aro Biotherapeutics. He studied both Finance and the Biological Basis of Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania before an MBA at Harvard.
Andrei Georgescu
Andrei Georgescu is the co-founder and CEO of Vivodyne, a biotech company that grows human tissues in the lab and runs drugs through them with robots and AI before any human ever swallows a pill. A University of Pennsylvania bioengineering PhD who once sent lab-grown tissue to space with NASA, he started Vivodyne in 2020 because roughly 19 of every 20 drugs that work in animals fail in people. His pitch is blunt: test human medicine on human tissue, not on mice. In May 2025 Vivodyne raised a $40 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures to scale a 23,000-square-foot fully robotic lab in South San Francisco.
Dan Baker
Dan Baker is a physician-scientist turned biotech founder who spent two decades at Johnson & Johnson's Janssen division helping bring immunology blockbusters Remicade, Simponi and Stelara to patients, before launching Brisbane-based Kira Biotech in 2019 as its founding CEO. Kira is developing KB312, a first-in-class antibody designed to selectively retrain the immune system rather than broadly suppress it, aimed at autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and type 1 diabetes. A rheumatologist who taught at the University of Pennsylvania for 18 years, Baker also advises drug-development organisations and serves as a healthcare venture partner.
David Mandel
David Mandel is a Los Angeles entrepreneur and tech investor who co-founded and chairs YEBO, a no-code platform that helps brands build and manage Web3 digital assets, NFTs and blockchain loyalty programs. He is also co-founder and chairman of Bitvore, an AI and machine-learning company whose risk and business-signal data has been used across Wall Street by firms including S&P, Moody's, Fidelity, Wells Fargo, UBS and AIG. A math graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he holds patents in data visualization and was an early seed investor in companies such as Broadcom, Access360 (acquired by IBM) and Fulcrum Microsystems (acquired by Intel).
David DeRemer
David DeRemer is the founder and CEO of Very Good Ventures (VGV), the product and venture studio that built the Hamilton app - the first large-scale commercial Flutter app shipped outside of Google. With nearly two decades spanning Accenture, frog design, Chobani, and his mobile agency Posse, DeRemer bet the company on Google's then-pre-alpha Flutter framework and turned VGV into one of the most influential consultancies in the Flutter ecosystem, helping enterprises ship high-quality apps from a single codebase.
Dongsoo Han
Dongsoo Han is the founder and CEO of z-emotion, a 3D garment simulation company building software that lets fashion brands design, fit, and render clothing entirely in 3D. A computer graphics engineer with 25+ years in simulation and gaming, he built the hair physics that became AMD's TressFX, the first playable real-time hair in a video game (Tomb Raider). He later realized a thread in 3D space moves much like a strand of hair, and turned that insight into z-emotion's products z-weave, z-fit, z-maya, and zeavric, used in projects with brands like Louis Vuitton and Nike.
Elizabeth Nammour
Elizabeth Nammour is the co-founder and CEO of Teleskope, a New York-based data security company she launched in 2022 after wrestling with petabyte-scale data sprawl as a security engineer at Airbnb. Teleskope bills itself as the industry's first agentic data security platform, autonomously scanning, classifying, and remediating sensitive data so organizations can adopt AI without losing track of their information. In late 2025 the company raised a $25 million Series A led by M13, bringing total funding to $32.2 million, on the back of 600% year-over-year growth and an 85% pilot-to-paid conversion rate.
Fernando Bleichmar
Fernando Bleichmar is the CEO of Risepoint, the online program management company formerly known as Academic Partnerships, which helps regional universities build and grow online degree programs for working adults. He joined in 2022 after running the U.S. higher education business at Cengage, serving on the leadership team at Elsevier Health Sciences, and spending his first decade in strategy consulting at Boston Consulting Group. The son of educators who founded a school in Mexico City, he frames the company's work around closing the access and affordability gap in American higher education.
Krish Ramineni
Krish Ramineni is the co-founder and CEO of Fireflies.ai, the AI meeting assistant that quietly joins calls, transcribes them, and turns an hour of talk into a five-minute read. He left one of the youngest product manager roles at Microsoft to build it with college friend Sam Udotong, pivoting five or six times before landing on meetings. Today Fireflies serves 20M+ users across 500,000+ organizations - including most of the Fortune 500 - and reached unicorn status on roughly $19M raised while staying profitable. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he now also lectures at Stanford on building AI products.
Manika Doshi
Manika Doshi is the CEO of rePurpose Global, the New York-based plastic action platform that has pulled 100 million pounds of plastic waste out of nature across 11 countries and partnered with 500+ brands. A materials science engineer turned operator, she rose from COO to chief executive in January 2026 as the company pivots toward packaging-compliance software and Extended Producer Responsibility. Her brief: make a tangled, regulation-heavy problem simple enough that brands move from intention to action at scale.
Ross Mechanic
Ross Mechanic is the co-founder and CEO of Maybern, a New York fintech building the financial operating system for private funds. A software engineer by training, he watched fund accounting teams duplicate the same capital-call and waterfall math across roughly 100 spreadsheets at Cadre, and built Maybern to automate it. The company supports more than $80 billion in assets across 150+ fund vehicles and raised a $50 million Series B led by Battery Ventures in late 2025.
Rui Jing
Rui Jing Jiang is the Founder and CEO of Avisi Technologies, a Redwood City-based clinical-stage medical device company developing VisiPlate, the world's thinnest freestanding ophthalmic implant for treating glaucoma. Built on University of Pennsylvania nanotechnology, VisiPlate is a multichannel aqueous shunt composed of alumina and Parylene-C that is 20 times thinner than a human hair. Rui Jing co-founded the company in 2017 as a junior at Penn's Wharton School, won the $100,000 President's Innovation Prize in 2018, secured FDA Investigational Device Exemption approval in October 2025 for the US SAPPHIRE trial, and closed a $10.7M Series A in February 2026 to advance pivotal clinical development.
Sam Holliday
Sam Holliday is the co-founder and CEO of Oshi Health, the first nationwide virtual GI center of excellence, built on value-based, whole-person care. A digital health operator since 2013, he scaled companies across diabetes management, patient acquisition and population health before launching Oshi in 2019. In October 2024 the company raised a $60M Series C led by Oak HC/FT, reaching all 50 states and more than 40 million in-network members.
Samuel Murphy
Samuel Murphy is co-founder and CEO of Salubris Biotherapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech in Gaithersburg, Maryland developing complex biologics for cardiovascular, oncology, and neurodegenerative disease. A Penn-trained virologist who did his postdoc in the lab that became Spark Therapeutics, he spent a decade in pharma strategy consulting and life-sciences investment banking before joining Salubris in 2017 and taking the CEO seat in 2020. His lead program, JK07, is the first clinical-stage selective ErbB4 agonist aimed at being a disease-modifying biologic for heart failure. He also runs international business development for the company's Chinese parent, Shenzhen Salubris Pharmaceuticals.
Shiva Suri
Shiva Suri is the founder and CEO of New Lantern, a San Francisco startup building an AI-native radiology platform that aims to automate roughly 90% of imaging workflows - dictation, report drafting, measurements, and worklist navigation. A University of Pennsylvania computer engineer and former Confluent software engineer, he started the company in 2021 after watching his radiologist mother burn most of her day on clerical busywork instead of reading scans. In November 2024 New Lantern raised a $19M Series A led by Benchmark's Eric Vishria, part of $22.6M total raised.
Jason Kong
Jason Kong is a General Partner at Base10 Partners, a San Francisco-based Black-led venture capital firm that backs founders automating the 'real economy' - the large, often overlooked industries that make the world run. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital in 2021 while at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Kong backed breakout companies including Attentive, Brex, Datadog, Discord, Figma, and UiPath. A Summa Cum Laude graduate of Penn's elite M&T program who qualified twice for USAMO and won the We the People national civics competition, he joined Base10 in 2023 to lead Series B+ investments, bringing a singular blend of investment banking, late-stage VC, and hedge fund analysis discipline to growth-stage bets on vertical SaaS, cybersecurity, and fintech.