Tarique Mustafa is a Silicon Valley cybersecurity founder, engineer and AI researcher who serves as CEO, CTO and founder of Chorology, Inc., a San Jose company applying deep AI to automate data discovery, classification, mapping and compliance enforcement for enterprises. A serial entrepreneur with two prior startups that ended in acquisitions, he previously founded GhangorCloud, a pioneer of fourth-generation data leak prevention, and held senior roles at Symantec, MCI WorldCom and others. He holds dual master's degrees and did PhD research in AI at USC, and holds multiple patents in deep AI.
Tim Lupo is the co-founder and CEO of Deeptune, a New York startup that builds high-fidelity reinforcement learning environments - which he calls 'training gyms' or 'flight simulators' - where AI agents learn to do real digital work across enterprise software like Salesforce and Slack. In early 2026 the company raised a $43M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. Deeptune started life as an AI video-dubbing tool that landed Lupo and co-founder Lukas Schmit on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, then pivoted to become RL infrastructure for frontier AI labs. A former founding engineer at Hebbia and a full-merit USC scholar, Lupo pitches the roughly 20-person, in-person team as one of the only early-stage places in New York to work on AGI.
Calcarea is a Caltech- and USC-born climate-tech company decarbonizing the shipping industry with onboard reactors that capture CO2 from ship exhaust and convert it into stable ocean bicarbonate. By speeding up the natural reaction between seawater and limestone - a process that normally takes over 10,000 years - down to about a minute, Calcarea aims to permanently and safely store roughly half of a cargo ship's emissions as slightly saltier seawater, at costs competitive with today's best carbon capture options.
Zaijun Chen is a physicist-turned-founder building light-powered computers for artificial intelligence. As co-founder and CEO of Opticore, he is developing photonic optical processing units (OPUs) that the company says are up to 100x more energy efficient and 25x denser than leading GPUs. Trained at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and MIT, and now director of the Laboratory of Intelligent and Quantum Photonics at USC, Chen turned a decade of precision-optics research into a venture-backed bet that the future of AI compute runs on photons instead of electrons.
Todd Watts is the co-founder and CEO of PatientFi, an Irvine, California fintech that lets patients pay for elective and out-of-pocket healthcare in monthly installments at the point of care. Since starting the company in 2017, he has built a platform that has helped roughly 320,000 patients qualify for more than $3 billion in care across aesthetics, fertility, dentistry, ophthalmology and audiology, reaching a $140 million annual revenue run rate and 130 employees. A former J.P. Morgan investment banker with a Yale MBA, Watts was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 Pacific Southwest winner.
Dan Calpin is a senior technology executive and founder who has spent his career at the intersection of AI, media, and enterprise strategy. As Founding Partner and General Manager of Bain Media Lab, he co-created Mensio, an AI-powered analytics platform measuring TV advertising and sponsorships. He went on to serve as President of Hive, the enterprise AI company specializing in content understanding, and later as EVP North America at Incode Technologies. He is currently launching a new stealth AI venture.
Malekeh Amini is the Founder and CEO of Trayt Health, a patient-centric behavioral health platform powering 25 statewide mental health programs and covering 10 million+ lives across the US. A Harvard MBA and USC-trained engineer with 25+ years in digital health, she built Trayt after personally navigating the fractured US mental health system with her son. The company raised $7.17M in April 2026 and was selected by Kentucky's KyCOMPASS program to power maternal mental health access statewide.

Mk.gee (Michael Todd Gordon) is a New Jersey-born musician, producer, and multi-instrumentalist whose debut album Two Star & the Dream Police (2024) became a critical phenomenon - ranking #1 album of 2024 by The New York Times, Dazed, and Clash, and earning a Metacritic score of 83. A reclusive guitar savant with an ear for lo-fi distortion and cassette warmth, he has co-produced for Omar Apollo and Dijon, co-written for Bon Iver, and collaborated with Justin Bieber, all while maintaining a fiercely independent artistic identity.