virginia-tech
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Maceo Cardinale Kwik and the Trouble With a Good Idea
Datost was finding customers. Maceo Cardinale Kwik was still looking for the computer he wanted to build. His route from a Brooklyn coding blog to camera-free AI glasses includes one profitable detour and two coolers on a sidewalk.
TJ Jermoluk and the lightbulb that needed a password
After helping build 3D graphics and cable broadband, Thomas (TJ) Jermoluk returned to a smaller problem with a long reach: proving who you are online. His next company began with the absurdity of logging in to turn on a light.
Mike Henry Is Building the Air-Traffic Control for AI Compute
After a decade spent trying to make one chip do more, the Parasail co-founder is taking a wider view: connect the scattered machines, hide the plumbing, and let builders ask for tokens instead of servers.
Dipti Desai
Dipti Desai is the co-founder and CEO of Crstl, a San Francisco startup rebuilding B2B commerce around the decades-old EDI standard that quietly governs how brands sell to retailers. A Virginia Tech electrical engineer and Uber data-platform veteran, she stumbled into the problem while volunteering to sell PPE online during the pandemic and discovering that the plumbing of wholesale was stuck in the 1980s. She has raised over $10 million from Target, Shopify Ventures, Cohen Circle, and Village Global to make EDI usable by people who are not developers.
Sarah Franklin
Sarah Franklin is the CEO of Lattice, the people-management platform headquartered in San Francisco. A Virginia Tech-trained chemical engineer and biochemist, she spent 15+ years at Salesforce, where she built Trailhead into a movement and later served as President and Chief Marketing Officer before stepping into Lattice's top job in January 2024 to rewire HR for the AI era.
Jonathan Ebinger
Jonathan Ebinger is a General Partner at BlueRun Ventures and Co-Founder of Transform Capital, a late-stage growth fund built on an unprecedented philanthropic model that donates half the traditional GP carry to universities and nonprofits. With nearly 25 years in venture capital, he backed PayPal as one of its first institutional investors, led Series A investments in Kabbage (acquired by American Express), Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP), and Waze (acquired by Google for $1.15B), and championed the thesis that real-time data would reshape lending, payments, and enterprise procurement. His four-factor investment framework - team, market, technology, and whether the company actually matters - reflects a philosophy that has made him one of Silicon Valley's most recognizable early-stage fintech investors.