vegan
(9)
Matias Muchnick
Matias Muchnick is the Chilean co-founder and CEO of NotCo, a food-tech company that uses a proprietary AI system called Giuseppe to design plant-based versions of dairy and meat products. Founded in 2015, NotCo became Chile's first unicorn in 2021, formed a joint venture with Kraft Heinz, and counts Bezos Expeditions among its investors.
Kerry Song
Kerry Song is the founder and CEO of Abbot's (formerly Abbot's Butcher), a Costa Mesa, California plant-based meat company she launched in 2017. A Princeton economics graduate who once worked in finance at Morgan Stanley and Citigroup and spent five years as a brand strategist for Tony Robbins, she built Abbot's around a strict clean-label promise: no gluten, no soy, no gums, no synthetic flavors, no preservatives. The brand became the only Whole30 Approved plant-based meat and grew from a Venice farmers-market table into a category leader stocked in thousands of retailers including Sprouts, Publix and Target.
Sara Polon
Sara Polon is the co-founder and CEO of Soupergirl, the Washington, DC plant-based soup company she launched in 2008 with her mother Marilyn (a.k.a. Soupermom). A former stand-up comedian who once led tours through the Middle East, she turned a reading of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma into a mission to fix a broken food system one bowl at a time. Soupergirl survived a no-deal turn on Shark Tank, raised a $2M Series A from sustainability investors, became the first brand to earn Fair Food Program certification, went plastic-neutral, and now sells in hundreds of retailers including Whole Foods, Costco and Kroger.
Ashwin Cheriyan
Ashwin Cheriyan is the CEO and co-founder of Thistle, a San Francisco-based plant-forward meal delivery company he built from a cold-pressed juice pop-up in 2013 into a nationwide subscription service delivering over 20 million meals. A self-described 'recovering corporate lawyer,' he traded a career at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett doing billion-dollar M&A deals for the chance to fix how Americans eat — driven by his parents' experiences as physicians watching patients suffer from diet-related chronic disease. Thistle, which he runs alongside his wife and co-founder Shiri Avnery, has raised over $20 million and now serves the West and East Coasts with chef-designed, nutritionist-approved meals that are gluten-free and dairy-free by default.
Nathaniel Chu
Nathaniel Chu is the co-CEO and co-founder of Tezza Foods (now Plonts), an Oakland-based food company using ancient fermentation techniques and microbial science to make genuinely complex, stinky plant-based cheese from soy milk. Holding a PhD in microbiology from MIT and a BS from Brown University, Chu spent years studying gut microbiomes before pivoting to harness those same microbial principles in food. With $12M in seed funding led by Lowercarbon Capital, Plonts launched in August 2024 in New York City and San Francisco restaurants, offering a plant-based cheddar that actually ages, melts, and smells like the real thing.
Josh Tetrick
Josh Tetrick is the co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, Inc., the San Francisco-based food technology company behind JUST Egg (a mung bean-based egg substitute) and GOOD Meat (the world's first commercially sold cultivated chicken). Starting with $37,000 of personal capital in 2011, he has raised over $456 million to build a company that simultaneously cracked the plant-based egg market and won the world's first regulatory approval for lab-grown meat in Singapore in 2020. A former Fulbright Scholar, UN initiative leader, and Cornell-educated lawyer turned food disruptor, Tetrick has made it his life's work to prove that removing animals from the food system doesn't mean sacrificing flavor or scale.
Kathleen Alexander
Kathleen Alexander is co-founder and CEO of Savor, a San Jose-based food-tech startup that makes butter, palm oil, and cocoa butter alternatives from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen - no animals, no plants, no farmland. Backed by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Synthesis Capital with $33 million raised, Savor commercially launched its carbon-synthesized butter in March 2025 and was recognized in TIME's Best Inventions of 2025. Alexander holds a PhD in Materials Science & Engineering from MIT and is a 2013 Hertz Fellow who grew up in Corvallis, Oregon - famously starting college at 16, dropping out, attending community college, and ultimately earning her doctorate at MIT.
Biz Stone
Biz Stone is the co-founder and Creative Director of Twitter, the platform that redefined public discourse. Born Christopher Isaac Stone in Boston, he dropped out of college twice, designed book covers, and walked away from $2 million in unvested Google stock to help build what became one of the most influential communication platforms in history. Beyond Twitter, he co-founded Jelly Industries (acquired by Pinterest), The Obvious Corporation with Evan Williams, and in 2024 joined the board of Mastodon's U.S. nonprofit - a quiet statement about where social media should go next. His guiding philosophy: opportunity can be manufactured.
Kyle Vogt
Kyle Vogt is a Kansas-born serial entrepreneur and robotics pioneer who has founded three billion-dollar companies before age 40. He co-founded Twitch (acquired by Amazon for $970M), founded Cruise Automation (acquired by GM for $1B+), and currently leads The Bot Company, developing AI-powered household robots. Starting as a teenage BattleBots competitor who built his first self-driving car at 14, Vogt left MIT to pursue entrepreneurship, becoming one of the rare founders to create multiple unicorns across live-streaming, autonomous vehicles, and consumer robotics.