Tagged: venture-backed
30 results
Scorpion Therapeutics
Scorpion Therapeutics was a Boston-based, clinical-stage precision oncology company built to advance what it called "Precision Oncology 2.0" - pairing cancer biology, computational chemistry, medicinal chemistry and genomics to design small-molecule drugs against cancer targets that had resisted earlier approaches. Founded in 2020 by a group of prominent scientists and biotech operators, it raised more than $440 million and built a pipeline of mutant-selective inhibitors, most notably the PI3K-alpha inhibitor STX-478 and a franchise of fourth-generation EGFR inhibitors. In January 2025 Eli Lilly agreed to acquire the company and its PI3K-alpha program in a deal worth up to $2.5 billion, while Scorpion's remaining pipeline and staff were spun into a new independent company, Antares Therapeutics.
Jennie Moser
Jennie Moser is the founder and CEO of Stagetime, a networking and portfolio platform built for performing arts professionals. A coloratura soprano trained at Northwestern and Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music, she spent years running Jennie Moser Design, building hundreds of websites for artists before turning that insight into a venture-backed company. Stagetime lets singers, instrumentalists, agents and composers build multimedia profiles, showcase performance video and audio, and connect with opportunities without maintaining separate websites. Moser has raised roughly $1.5 million in seed funding from investors including Hyde Park Angels, M25, Elevate Ventures and the IU Angel Network, reframing the messy gig economy of the arts in terms venture capitalists could understand.
Jon Carr-Harris
Jon Carr-Harris is the Founder & CEO of CRED, a San Francisco-based AI-powered predictive intelligence platform that raised $15M in seed funding in June 2025. CRED unifies data from 200+ integrations and 10,000+ external sources to deliver business predictions 60-90 days in advance with 92% claimed accuracy - giving enterprises the kind of forward-looking intelligence once reserved for hedge funds. A serial entrepreneur who advised Airbnb, Kik, and Khan Academy early in their growth, Carr-Harris built and exited Swish Labs (a global tech consulting ecosystem spanning 30+ countries) before founding CRED in 2023, which emerged from stealth with 25 enterprise clients and $100M+ in documented customer revenue impact.
Gordian Biotechnology
Gordian Biotechnology is a South San Francisco in vivo drug discovery company building a high-throughput screening platform that tests hundreds of gene therapies simultaneously inside animals that naturally develop age-related diseases. By pairing 'patient avatar' models with single-cell transcriptomics and machine learning (a stack the company calls Mosaic Screening + Pythia), Gordian aims to predict human clinical outcomes earlier and cure complex diseases of aging.
Caroline Spiegel
Caroline Spiegel is the founder and CEO of Quinn, a Santa Monica-based audio erotica platform built around female-centered, imagination-first storytelling. She started the company in 2019 as a Stanford senior after her own recovery experience convinced her that the mental, non-visual side of intimacy was a market nobody served well. Quinn has grown into a creator marketplace and celebrity-voiced studio with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, more than $12 million in annual recurring revenue, and a roster of name actors lending their voices to original audio.
Rebecca Alvarez Story
Rebecca Alvarez Story is a sexologist turned founder and CEO of Bloomi, the sexologist-led clean intimacy brand she launched in 2018. A first-generation daughter of Mexican immigrants, she built her own undergraduate major at UC Berkeley, earned a master's in Sexuality Studies, and turned a decade of clinical practice into a category-defining consumer company. In 2022 Bloomi became the first Latina-founded brand to land nationwide in the sexual wellness aisle at Target, and the company has since expanded to Saks Fifth Avenue and boutiques. She is among the few Latinas in the U.S. to raise multi-million-dollar venture capital, and her stated mission is to bring quality, shame-free intimacy education to a billion people.
Gate Bioscience
Gate Bioscience is a Brisbane, California biotech building a brand-new class of medicines it calls Molecular Gates: oral small molecules that stop disease-causing proteins from ever leaving the cell. Instead of chasing proteins after they are secreted into the body, Gate's drugs bind Sec61, the single channel every one of the roughly 4,000 human secreted and membrane proteins must pass through, and selectively block a target protein so the cell degrades it. Founded in 2021 and emerged from stealth in 2023 with $60M, the company has raised about $135M total and is pushing its lead programs toward IND-enabling studies and Phase 1 trials.
John Bowman
John Bowman is a co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Maybern, the New York fintech building fund management software for private markets. After more than two decades inside Goldman Sachs' Merchant Banking Division and a stint as CFO of Periphas Capital, he switched sides: instead of suffering through spreadsheet-driven fund accounting, he helped build the tool that replaces it. Maybern raised a $50M Series B led by Battery Ventures in November 2025.
Mark Gaffney
Mark Gaffney is the Chief Executive Officer and Board member of Calluna Pharma, an Oslo-based clinical-stage biopharma chasing inflammatory and fibrotic disease by tuning the body's innate immune system. A mechanical engineer turned lawyer turned dealmaker, he spent two decades building and selling biotechs - Oxular went to Regeneron, Vedere Bio to Novartis - before taking the helm of a company born from the merger of Oxitope Pharma and Arxx Therapeutics and freshly backed by a 75 million euro Series A.
Joe Murad
Joe Murad is President and CEO of Vida Health, a San Francisco-based virtual care company. A two-decade healthcare technology operator, he previously ran WithMe Health and PokitDok (acquired by Change Healthcare), with earlier leadership roles at Willis Towers Watson, Extend Health, and eHealth.
Homebound
Homebound is a tech-enabled homebuilder headquartered in San Francisco that manages the entire home construction process from design to move-in. Founded in 2018 in the wake of the devastating California wildfires, the company combines a proprietary software platform with a vetted trade partner network to offer semi-custom homes at fixed prices. Homebound handles everything from lot sourcing and permitting to interior design and construction management, compressing what typically takes years into an industry-leading timeline. With over $308 million raised and 500+ homes built across markets in California, Texas, Colorado, and Florida, Homebound is rewriting the rules of residential construction for a new generation of homebuyers.
Jing Liu
Jing Liu is the Founder and CEO of SIMO (formerly Skyroam), the AI-driven cloud connectivity platform that lets devices roam across 300+ mobile carriers in 145+ countries without a physical SIM card. She founded the company in 2008 in Silicon Valley, pioneered patented virtual SIM (vSIM) technology, raised $63.5M in funding including a $20M Series C2 in 2019, and has built SIMO into a platform serving over 15 million users and 6+ million connected IoT devices. Under her leadership, SIMO extended its reach from travel hotspots to enterprise IoT, automotive, and mission-critical connectivity.
Aaron Katz
Aaron Katz is the Co-Founder and CEO of ClickHouse, the world's fastest OLAP database company, which he has built from a 12-person open-source project into a $15 billion enterprise serving 4,000 customers including Tesla, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI. A veteran of Salesforce (12 years, from $20M to $4B in revenue) and Elastic (CRO, $5M to $500M), Katz assembled a founding team mid-pandemic, relocated engineers from Russia to Amsterdam, and raised over $1 billion in funding. In January 2026 ClickHouse closed a $400M Series D; by May 2026 the company surpassed $250M ARR, growing 250% year-over-year.
Anil Dharni
Anil Dharni is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sense, a San Francisco-based AI-powered talent engagement platform that serves over 1,000 organizations. Before reshaping how companies hire, he co-founded Funzio, the mobile gaming studio behind 'Crime City' and 'Modern War,' which sold to GREE for $210 million in 2012. At Sense, backed by SoftBank with $106 million raised and a $500M valuation, he is on a mission to humanize the contingent workforce and make candidates feel genuinely valued through AI, automation, and omnichannel communication.
Brad Kittredge
Brad Kittredge is the co-founder and CEO of Brightside Health, a San Francisco-based telemental health platform serving 135 million covered lives across commercial insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid. Driven by his father's decade-long struggle to find effective depression treatment, Kittredge built Brightside from a two-day old Stripe notification into the first telepsychiatry company to achieve 100% national Medicare Part B coverage. Before Brightside, he led product teams at 23andMe and Lantern, and built ComplexDx - later acquired by 23andMe. He holds an MBA, MPH, MA in International Affairs, and a BA in Psychology, all from UC Berkeley and UC San Diego.
Dan Adler
Dan Adler is the CEO of Sourcegraph, the code intelligence platform powering search and AI across 54 billion lines of code for companies like Uber, Stripe, and Atlassian. A Rice computer science graduate and Stanford MBA, Adler joined Sourcegraph in 2016 as an early employee - writing infrastructure code, selling the first contracts, and building every major business function from scratch - before being elevated to CEO in December 2025 when co-founder Quinn Slack spun out Amp Inc. He has shepherded the company from zero revenue to $50M ARR and a $2.6B valuation, and believes agentic AI will only amplify the need for enterprise-grade code context.
Dan Lee
Dan Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nooks, an AI Sales Assistant Platform that automates the manual busywork of sales development reps so they can focus on the human side of selling. Born in Manhattan and raised in New Jersey, Lee studied AI at Stanford (BS '21, MS '22), did ML stints at Scale AI and Cerebras Systems, and co-founded Nooks in 2020 with Stanford classmates Rohan Suri and Nikhil Cheerla. The company has raised $70 million in total funding, including a $43M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins in October 2024, and was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 AI honoree in 2025.
Danny Shader
Danny Shader is the founder and CEO of PayNearMe, a Santa Clara-based fintech platform that processes over $50 billion annually for more than 20,000 businesses. A serial entrepreneur whose previous ventures were acquired by Amazon, Motorola, and Netscape, Shader built PayNearMe from a niche cash-payment network into PayXM, the industry's first full-stack Payment Experience Management platform. Backed by $245 million in total funding including a $50M Series E in September 2025, he has spent 15+ years turning a deceptively simple problem - helping the cash-dependent and underbanked pay their bills - into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise payments category.
Derek Smith
Derek Smith is a four-time serial entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Mimic, a Palo Alto-based cybersecurity company building ransomware detection and deflection technology that operates at the kernel level. He previously co-founded Oakley Networks (the first data leakage prevention company, acquired by Raytheon in 2007) and Shape Security (the first bot-defense company, acquired by F5 for $1 billion in 2020), and served as Senior Advisor for Cyber-Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. Mimic has raised $77 million in total funding, including a $50M Series A led by GV and Menlo Ventures.
Ishaan Bhola
Ishaan Bhola is the Co-Founder of SuperAGI, a Palo Alto-based AI company building full-stack autonomous agent infrastructure and a next-generation AI-native CRM. A serial entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded six ventures across consumer apps, home decor e-commerce, fintech lending, account-based marketing, and now AGI infrastructure, Bhola has scaled teams to 200+ employees and built products used by millions. SuperAGI raised a $10M Series A led by WhatsApp founder Jan Koum's Newlands VC in March 2024, and has grown to $9.9M in revenue with an open-source platform boasting 15,200+ GitHub stars.
Jessica McKellar
Jessica McKellar is the CEO of Pilot.com, the largest accounting firm for startups in the US, which she co-founded in 2017 alongside longtime collaborators Waseem Daher and Jeff Arnold. A MIT computer science alumna, she previously co-founded Zulip (acquired by Dropbox) and served as Director of Engineering at Dropbox. Beyond building companies, she has been a transformative force in the Python open source community, growing Boston's Python user group to the world's largest, and teaching Python inside San Quentin State Prison. Pilot reached unicorn status in 2021 with a $1.2B valuation and over $222M raised from Sequoia, Index Ventures, and Bezos Expeditions.
Michael Gilson
Michael Gilson is the CEO of Conversica, the San Francisco-based conversational AI company behind over 1.5 billion automated customer conversations. Appointed in April 2025, he has repositioned Conversica as 'The Conversation Company,' expanding its AI agent platform from sales automation into automotive data intelligence, sports and entertainment ticketing, and enterprise customer lifecycle management. A Princeton graduate with a background spanning enterprise SaaS, media technology at Telestream, and data analytics at Wiser Solutions, Gilson brings operator instincts to a company that pioneered AI-to-human conversation at scale.
Micah Rodman
Micah Rodman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kojo, the leading AI-powered construction procurement platform processing over $5 billion in annual materials orders for 600+ contractors across the US and Canada. A Yale alumnus who cut his teeth as a manager on Ray Dalio's team at Bridgewater Associates, Rodman co-founded Kojo in 2018 to digitize the paper-and-phone world of construction materials procurement. He transitioned from COO to CEO after founding CEO Maria Davidson stepped back, steering the company through a $94M fundraise and partnerships with industry giants like Wesco International.
Mike Sroka
Mike Sroka is the CEO and co-founder of Dealpath, the leading deal management platform for institutional real estate investors. Founded in 2014 alongside Andy Lee and Kenter Wu, Dealpath has grown to support over $10 trillion in real estate transactions, raised $75M in total funding including a Morgan Stanley-led $43M Series C, and counts Blackstone, Nuveen, UBS, and MetLife among its clients. Sroka's background spans real estate finance at Hudson Advisors and growth roles at venture-backed software companies including Zynga and Fanhood, giving him a rare dual fluency in capital markets and product development. He serves on Blackstone's PropTech Advisory Board and is a vocal advocate for AI-powered deal workflow automation in commercial real estate.
Nikki Pechet
Nikki Pechet is the Co-Founder and CEO of Homebound, a tech-enabled homebuilder she launched in 2018 after wildfires devastated thousands of homes in Northern California. A veteran of Bain & Company and Thumbtack, she has built Homebound into a platform that digitizes every step of construction — from custom home design to permitting to build tracking — and has raised over $400 million in equity and real estate capital. She closed her Series A days after giving birth to her third child and has expanded Homebound across California, Colorado, Texas, and Florida, with aspirations to become the Amazon of homes.
Osama Elkady
Osama Elkady is the Co-Founder and CEO of Incorta, an enterprise data platform that eliminates the traditional ETL pipeline by mapping directly to systems of record for real-time analytics. After 20 years at Oracle - where he rose from junior engineer to VP of Applications Development and invented XML Publisher - he co-founded Incorta in 2014 with the conviction that businesses deserve instant access to their data. The company has since raised $192.6 million in total funding, counts Broadcom, Starbucks, and Hormel Foods among its enterprise clients, and has been recognized for delivering sub-second analytics at massive scale.
Pranay Kapadia
Pranay Kapadia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Notable, an AI-powered automation platform for healthcare that eliminates administrative burden for clinicians and health systems. Founded in 2017 after dinner-table conversations with six physician family members - including his psychiatrist wife who called herself 'the highest paid data collector in the world' - Notable has grown to serve 32 million patients across 12,000 sites of care, raised $119.2M in funding including a $100M Series B in 2021, and now automates over one million repetitive healthcare workflows daily. Before Notable, Kapadia helped build Mint.com at Intuit and was on the founding team at Blend, the mortgage fintech unicorn.
Ryan Pandya
Ryan Pandya co-founded Perfect Day in 2014 with the audacious goal of making dairy without cows. Using precision fermentation, the Berkeley-based biotech raised nearly $800 million, built partnerships with Fortune 500 food companies, and proved that animal-free whey protein could reach global markets across dozens of product categories. After a decade at the helm, Pandya stepped down as CEO at the end of 2023 to pursue future ventures, leaving behind a company that had fundamentally shifted the conversation around sustainable dairy.
Saar Safra
Saar Safra is the CEO and Co-founder of Beewise, the company behind the BeeHome - the world's first AI-powered autonomous robotic beehive. A serial entrepreneur with three prior exits, Safra pivoted from digital advertising tech to saving the global food supply when he returned to Israel and met a beekeeper who asked a deceptively simple question: could a computer do this better? Since founding Beewise in 2018, the company has deployed 1,240+ robotic beehives pollinating over 300,000 acres annually, raised nearly $170M in total funding including a $50M Series D in June 2025, and earned Safra a spot on Forbes' 2025 Sustainability Leaders list.
Sam Hodges
Sam Hodges is co-founder and CEO of Vouch Insurance, a tech-enabled insurance platform built specifically for high-growth startups and venture-backed companies. A serial fintech entrepreneur with 20+ years at the intersection of technology and financial services, Hodges previously co-founded and led the U.S. operations of Funding Circle to a 2018 London Stock Exchange IPO. He holds an MBA and MS from Stanford and a magna cum laude degree from Brown University, and is a Fellow of the inaugural Finance Leaders Fellowship at the Aspen Institute. Under his leadership, Vouch has raised over $229M in total funding, serves 6,000+ companies, and completed a Series D round in early 2025 alongside its acquisition of StartSure Insurance Services.