wearable
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Tony Verutti
Tony Verutti is the CEO of Betterguards Technology, a German sports-tech company whose adaptive ankle brace uses a micro-hydraulic piston that stays loose during play and locks in a split second when the ankle rolls, then releases. A lifelong athlete who tore his ACL four times and grew up in a physical therapist's household, he took the top job in April 2023 and pushed the product into the NBA, NFL, NCAA and Olympic teams, backed by the NBA's Launchpad program. His pitch: athletes shouldn't trade mobility for protection, and gear should be built on science, not tradition.
Konrad Morzkowski
Konrad Morzkowski is the Swedish-born co-founder and CEO of WearLinq, a San Francisco medtech company commercializing eWave, an FDA-cleared 6-lead wireless ECG monitor that ships heart data from a patch on the chest to a smartphone in your pocket. A Chalmers and Stanford engineer named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 in Healthcare (2024), he traded a plan to build AI for healthcare for the harder problem of getting clinical-grade cardiology out of the hospital and onto the patient.
Ami Lebendiker
Ami Lebendiker is the founder and CEO of Roga, a neurotech company that makes a discreet behind-the-ear wearable for stress relief paired with an on-demand content app. A former product manager at Google, he spent a decade shipping hardware including Pixel phones and Google Home before turning his cost-engineering instincts toward consumer neurotech. Earlier he founded Mango Startups, billed as the first ICO backed by a venture fund in Latin America, and helped coordinate the region's startup accelerator network. Costa Rica-born and multiply credentialed, he is part operator, part investor, and part builder who keeps returning to the same idea: democratize access to things normally locked behind gatekeepers.
Maria Artunduaga
Maria Artunduaga is a Colombian-born physician-scientist, inventor and founder and CEO of Samay (formerly Respira Labs), a Mountain View medtech startup building a wearable plus AI platform that uses patented acoustic resonance to monitor lung function at home. She walked away from a plastic surgery residency at the University of Chicago after losing her grandmother Sylvia, taught herself engineering, and turned a kitchen-table idea into a company that has won the world's most competitive medtech accelerator and landed her on Inc.'s 2025 Female Founders list. She holds an MD, an MPH and an MTM, has collected dozens of prizes, six issued patents, and publications in Nature, NEJM and PNAS.
Meredith Perry
Meredith Perry is the co-founder and CEO of Elemind, a neurotech company building a wearable headband that reads your brainwaves in real time and nudges them with bursts of sound, marketed as sleep on demand. Before Elemind she was the inventor behind uBeam, the ultrasonic wireless-charging venture she dreamed up as a University of Pennsylvania undergrad and grew into a roughly $40 million, much-debated startup backed by Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Mark Cuban and Marissa Mayer. A trained paleobiologist and astrobiologist who once did research with NASA, Perry holds dozens of patents and now wants to build what she calls an app store for the brain.
Ray Liu
Ray Liu is the CEO and co-founder of Vena Vitals, an Irvine, California medtech startup building a soft, skin-like sticker that tracks blood pressure continuously, beat by beat, without cuffs or invasive arterial lines. A National Science Foundation fellow turned operator, Liu spent two decades inside GE Healthcare, Siemens, and Vizient, and racked up two health-tech exits before reuniting with a former Berkeley labmate, UC Irvine professor Michelle Khine, and PhD scientist Josh Kim to turn a material-science breakthrough into a clinical product. Backed by Y Combinator, MedTech Innovator, and EvoNexus, Vena Vitals has tested its sensor on 600-plus patients in operating rooms and is targeting FDA clearance in 2026.
Scott Schorer
Scott Schorer is CEO and Chairman of G-Tech Medical, a Mountain View startup building GutTracker, a wireless dermal-patch system that reads the body's gut signals at home over days instead of hours. A Dartmouth-trained engineer and former 82nd Airborne infantry officer, he has spent two decades founding, turning around and selling medical-device companies, raising more than $120 million in equity and earning his name on six patents along the way.
Avi Schiffmann
Avi Schiffmann is a 23-year-old American technologist and founder who first went viral at 17 when his hand-built COVID-19 tracker hit 36 million daily users. He dropped out of Harvard after one semester, built Ukraine Take Shelter to house 100,000 refugees, then bet nearly his entire $2.5M seed round on a single domain - spending $1.88M on friend.com. His company Friend makes a $99 AI pendant that listens to your life and texts back like a companion, sparking a national debate about loneliness, surveillance, and what it means to connect.
Nathan Xu
Nathan Xu (also known as Xu Gao) is the co-founder and CEO of Plaud AI, the company behind the world's best-selling AI voice recorder and notetaker. A serial entrepreneur who failed three times before hitting gold, Xu bootstrapped Plaud from a Kickstarter campaign in 2023 to $180M+ ARR by 2025 - without a single dollar of venture capital. His credit-card-sized Plaud Note and wearable NotePin devices, which transcribe, summarize, and analyze conversations in 112 languages, have shipped to over 1.5 million users in 170+ countries. Based in San Francisco with roots in Wuhan, China, Xu represents a new breed of transpacific founder betting that the next great hardware platform fits in your pocket - or around your neck.