upskilling
(10)
Sara Leoni
Sara Leoni is the founder and CEO of Ziplines Education, a Bay Area career accelerator that partners with 30-plus universities to deliver industry-recognized certificate programs in fields like AI, project management, and digital marketing. A former Division I softball player at UNLV and ex-CEO of the $50M course-materials company Rafter, she raised a $6.4M Series A in 2023-2024 to help close the digital skills gap and has helped more than 20,000 adult learners retool their careers. She frames learning as a zipline: intimidating, exhilarating, and continuous, with a clear start and a clear landing.
Karun Tadepalli
Karun Tadepalli is the co-founder and CEO of byteXL, a Hyderabad-based edtech company that partners directly with engineering colleges across India to close the gap between what students learn and what the tech industry needs. After roughly two decades in the US working for companies like Accenture, Health Management Systems and AT&T, he left a corporate career to build a B2B skilling platform now used by more than 100,000 students. Under his leadership byteXL has partnered with dozens of institutions and, in 2024, teamed with Microsoft to launch AI and machine learning B.Tech specializations at universities across the country.
Siva Lakshmanan
Siva Lakshmanan is the CEO of DeepHow, a Detroit-based AI company that turns tribal shop-floor know-how into searchable, multilingual training video. He joined in November 2024 after running Antuit.ai through its acquisition by Zebra Technologies. His pitch is unglamorous by design: preserve the expertise of the retiring half of the manufacturing workforce before it walks out the door.
Ariel Quinones
Ariel Quinones is the co-founder and co-CEO of Ironhack, a global tech bootcamp he launched in Madrid in 2013 with Gonzalo Manrique after the two met at Wharton. Raised in a Puerto Rican family of educators, he spotted a mismatch he could not unsee: youth unemployment above 50% in Spain sitting beside hundreds of thousands of unfilled tech jobs. Ironhack was his answer - short, intensive, outcomes-obsessed training that has since graduated thousands of career-changers across campuses in Europe, the Americas, and beyond. He now leads from Miami, preaching a gospel of ruthless focus on student outcomes and over-delivering on what people expect.
Kirill Makharinsky
Kirill Makharinsky is the co-founder and CEO of Enki, an AI-powered work-skills coach used by professionals at companies that want their teams fluent in data, SQL, Python and the rest of the modern productivity stack. An Oxford mathematician who graduated top of the UK, he previously co-founded Quid (now NetBase Quid) and Emerging Travel Group (Ostrovok, RateHawk, ZenHotels), two companies whose combined revenues run into the hundreds of millions. He angel-invests on the side and has been on Forbes' 30 Under 30 Europe list.
Yiorgos Nikoletakis
Yiorgos Nikoletakis is the co-founder and CEO of 100mentors, an Athens- and San Francisco-based edtech company that started as a platform connecting young people with mentors worldwide and has since pivoted into generative-AI skilling for organizations. A Fulbright scholar with degrees from AUEB, Ohio State, and Columbia, he describes his job as teaching people to ask better questions, use GenAI well, and keep humans in the loop. His personal motto: arguing like he's right, listening like he's wrong.
Steve Gilman
Steve Gilman is the co-founder and CEO of OneRange, a New York-based AI-powered upskilling platform that lets employees discover, get approval for, and buy the learning resources they need, with companies paying only when people actually learn. Before software, Gilman was drafted by the Detroit Tigers out of Yale and then served as a Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer working counterproliferation missions out of US embassies in Cairo and Abu Dhabi. He frames OneRange as importing the world-class skill-development methods of pro sports and the military into the corporate world, and the company now works with 25-plus enterprises including Google, Wasserman, and Caylent.
Bogdan Apostol
Bogdan Apostol is the co-founder and CEO of Nestor, a San Francisco-based AI-powered people intelligence platform that helps enterprises build skills-based organizations. A Romanian-born computer scientist with a PhD in Computer Vision from Gheorghe Asachi Technical University, he founded Nestor in 2018 after being accepted into Y Combinator's S18 batch. Before writing a single line of product code, he conducted over 400 customer discovery calls. Nestor has raised $6.07M in funding, serves 10,000+ employees worldwide across F500 companies, and has earned 67 G2 badges including a perfect 10/10 for quality of support.
Kian Katanforoosh
Kian Katanforoosh is the CEO and co-founder of Workera, an AI-powered skills intelligence platform that has raised $55.5M and serves enterprise clients including Samsung, Siemens Energy, and the U.S. Air Force. Born in France to Iranian immigrant parents, he came to Silicon Valley via Stanford, where he co-created the Deep Learning Specialization on Coursera with Andrew Ng, reaching over 4 million learners. He holds Stanford's Walter J. Gores Award (the university's highest teaching honor) and was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 and World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer in 2025. His mission: make elite mentorship - the kind he received from Andrew Ng - accessible to anyone through AI-powered skill assessment and personalized learning.
Mark Atkinson
Mark Atkinson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mursion, an AI-powered immersive learning platform that blends live human performers with artificial intelligence to create realistic practice simulations for professional development. An Emmy Award-winning television producer turned serial edtech entrepreneur, Atkinson has spent over two decades building technology ventures at the intersection of human capital development and innovation. Before Mursion, he co-founded Teachscape, a pioneering video-based teacher observation platform that became central to the Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching project. Under his leadership, Mursion has grown to serve more than a third of Fortune 100 companies, delivering 18 million-plus minutes of simulation-based training across healthcare, education, corporate, and hospitality sectors.