
After 25 years at GSK and more than 100 transactions, the Philadelphia biotech executive made a founder's bet: the next leap in genetic medicine may depend less on the cargo than on the way it travels.
Jessvin Thomas is the CEO of Auguria, a cybersecurity startup building what it calls the first SIEM designed from the ground up for AI - a 'Security Knowledge Layer' that curates the flood of security logs before analysts ever see them. A Cornell-trained operations researcher who started his career hand-inspecting firewall logs during the dot-com boom, he has spent two decades across Nokia, Blackstone, Optiv, SKOUT/Barracuda, and Adlumin. He is also a Venture Partner at SYN Ventures and, in a twist, the owner of Tenn Street Coffee & Books in Denver.
Kimberly Nearing is the Chief Business Officer of MaveriX Oncology, a Palo Alto biotech building tumor-selective small molecule drug conjugates. She is a Venture Partner at BVCF (Bioveda China Fund) and spent over a decade as Managing Director and Head of Life Sciences at the Hong Kong-based Cedrus Group, building bridges for capital and deals between the U.S., Europe, and Greater China. With early operating years at Amgen, Merck, and IBM Healthcare and a master's from Harvard, she pairs deep biotech operating experience with the relationships that move money across the Pacific.
Kevin H. Johnson is the CEO of Focal Systems, an AI-powered retail operations company deploying shelf-scanning cameras across brick-and-mortar stores worldwide. A 30-year veteran of building and scaling tech businesses, he grew Ebates forty-fold before selling it to Rakuten for $1 billion, then led Udemy as a publicly-traded company, and now applies that commercial track record to the frontier problem of putting real-time AI intelligence into every grocery aisle.
Ogi Kavazovic is the co-founder and CEO of House Rx, a San Francisco-based specialty pharmacy platform that enables clinical practices to dispense specialty medications directly to patients in-house. A serial operator who helped scale Opower (acquired by Oracle) and Flatiron Health (acquired by Roche), Ogi pivoted to fix a problem he kept seeing: patients leaving the doctor's office only to get lost in a broken specialty pharmacy system. House Rx has raised $100 million in total, including a $55 million Series B in November 2025, and now processes approximately $1.5 billion in specialty scripts annually across 80+ clinic sites.
Robert Potter is the CEO of Oomnitza, a San Francisco-based enterprise technology management (ETM) platform that gives IT teams a single pane of glass across their entire asset portfolio. Appointed in September 2024, Potter brings over 25 years of executive leadership in technology and cybersecurity, including tenures at Mandiant, RSA/EMC, Symantec, Lancope/Cisco, and IBM. A venture partner at SYN Ventures and a Quinnipiac University board member, he is also the co-founder of the Robert & Kathryn Potter Charitable Foundation supporting mental health, cancer research, and military families. Under his leadership, Oomnitza was named one of The Information's 50 Most Promising Startups of 2024.
Jack Porter is a serial entrepreneur, multi-time CEO, and co-founder of Cognizer Inc, an AI-powered contract intelligence company based in Pleasanton, California. With a career spanning decades and leadership of more than seven software companies, Porter has worked on AI projects for clients including American Express, Discover Card, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline. At Cognizer, he is building a platform that uses knowledge graphs, graph neural networks, and large language models to help enterprise legal, sales, and procurement teams extract intelligence from contracts at scale. Cognizer has raised over $16M in funding and is recognized for its Genius AI platform, which achieves 97% accuracy in extracting contract terms and clauses.
Dan Ashton is the CEO and Co-Founder of Brain Co., a San Francisco-based AI company that builds applied intelligence platforms for the world's most complex institutions - from government permit offices to hospital systems. He brought his AI startup Serene AI into Brain Co.'s orbit and now leads a company backed by $30M in Series A funding from Elad Gil, Affinity Partners, Patrick Collison, Reid Hoffman, and Andrej Karpathy. Before Brain Co., he was an early operator at three unicorns - Opendoor, Faire, and Clubhouse - and a McKinsey consultant before that. Brain Co. has already deployed AI that unlocks $375M annually in permitting value and mitigated $100M+ in supply chain losses.
Gregory L. Verdine is a Harvard-trained chemical biologist who coined the phrase 'drugging the undruggable' and built an empire around it. The Erving Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, he co-invented stapled peptides, pioneered the field of chemical biology, and founded or co-founded more than a dozen biotech companies - several of which reached the Nasdaq and three of which produced FDA-approved drugs. In July 2023 he joined Andreessen Horowitz as a Venture Partner on the Bio + Health team, bringing his rare combination of deep scientific discovery, serial entrepreneurship, and capital deployment to one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture firms.
Levi Malott is a Missouri-native software engineer turned startup operator and venture capitalist who tested Falcon 9 rocket systems at SpaceX, built ML infrastructure at BetterUp, scaled Pachama's engineering team from 7 to 40 people as VP of Engineering through a $700M valuation, then co-founded Weave Bio as CTO - an AI platform accelerating pharmaceutical regulatory filings that raised a $10M seed round in 2023. Today he serves as Venture Partner at Redbud VC in Columbia, Missouri, backing early-stage tech founders from the heartland.

Logan Green co-founded Lyft in 2012 after being inspired by Zimbabwe's crowdsourced carpool networks, transforming it from a college carpooling experiment called Zimride into one of the world's largest ride-hailing companies. After stepping down as CEO in 2023, he now serves as a venture partner at Autotech Ventures, focusing on the future of mobility and sustainable transportation. Born in LA and educated at UC Santa Barbara, Green was the youngest director of the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District and created campus car-sharing programs before revolutionizing urban transportation for millions.

Brian Balfour is the founder and former CEO of Reforge, the professional development platform for experienced product, growth, and marketing practitioners that grew to 100,000+ alumni before being acquired by Miro in March 2026. Now Chief Growth Officer at Miro, he is best known for the Four Fits Framework - the thesis that Product-Market Fit alone cannot drive $100M+ growth, and that market, product, channel, and model must all interlock. A former VP of Growth at HubSpot, serial entrepreneur, and Venture Partner at Long Journey Ventures, Balfour is one of the most influential thinkers in the product-led growth movement.

Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport, the technology-driven freight forwarding company he built from a Y Combinator batch into an $8 billion global logistics giant. A serial entrepreneur who started importing goods from China at 17, he previously co-founded ImportGenius and has become one of the most influential voices in supply chain and trade policy - most famously by renting a boat to tour the LA port congestion in 2021 and posting a viral Twitter thread that prompted California's governor to call him directly. He is also a venture partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.