wearables
(25)
Jonathan Berent and the trouble with a good pitch
He knew how to sell an idea at Google. Building NextSense meant learning when to stop selling, listen to the objections, and start again.
Michael Belhassen Got His Dream Job. Then He Left.
At 12, Michael Belhassen wanted to work at Apple. After five years designing iPhones, he left to build Anoria - and pursue a question he says had occupied him for a decade.
Yifeng Zhang
Yifeng Zhang is a Silicon Valley semiconductor entrepreneur and the co-founder, President and CEO of Mauna Kea Semiconductors (MKSemi), a fabless chip company building the industry's lowest-power ultra-wideband (UWB) system-on-chip solutions for wearables, IoT, smartphones and automotive. Before MKSemi he co-founded Quintic, a low-power Bluetooth and wearable SoC maker whose BLE and wearable business was acquired by NXP in 2015. He holds 15 patents in IC design and UWB technology and has spent more than two decades in digital, analog and mixed-signal design across Philips Semiconductors, NXP and ams.
Ramses Alcaide
Dr. Ramses Alcaide is the co-founder and CEO of Neurable, a Boston-based neurotechnology company building brain-computer interfaces disguised as ordinary headphones. A neuroscientist trained at the University of Washington and the University of Michigan, he turned a decade of EEG research into the MW75 Neuro, a Master & Dynamic collaboration that reads brainwaves to help wearers focus. Neurable has raised roughly $49M, closed a Series A in late 2025, and unveiled a HyperX gaming headset at CES 2026.
Jeff Kahn
Jeff Kahn is the co-founder and CEO of Rise Science, the company behind the RISE energy-management app. A Northwestern-trained engineer who turned his own student exhaustion into a research program, Kahn co-published early work on how technology can improve sleep behavior and ran what the company calls the largest study of sleep's impact on real-world job performance across the NFL and Fortune 500 sales teams. He and co-founder Leon Sasson were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and RISE has surpassed 1 million downloads.
Jarrod Jordan
Jarrod Jordan is a consumer-goods and technology marketing executive now serving as Chief Executive Officer of Rarebird, Inc., the specialty coffee company built around Px (paraxanthine). A Columbia University graduate based in New York, he built his reputation running data-driven, omnichannel marketing at scale: as Chief Marketing Officer of the smart-earbud pioneer Bragi, as Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at consumer brands company Iovate Health Sciences, and as a founding member and Executive Vice President of Thuzio, the marketing SaaS startup he helped grow from four people to nearly eighty across five cities. A frequent conference keynoter and on-camera business analyst, Jordan has become known for turning quantitative rigor into brand momentum.
Kevin Yoo
Kevin Yoo is the CEO and co-founder of Haptic (formerly WearWorks), a New York-based technology company building tactile-feedback navigation tools. With co-founders Keith Kirkland and Yangyang Wang, he created the Wayband - a wristband that guides users through pure vibration. In 2017, the device helped ultramarathoner Simon Wheatcroft become the first blind runner to attempt the NYC Marathon without sighted assistance. Yoo is an industrial designer by training, a Pratt Institute alum, and a Council of Korean Americans member.
Jahangir Mohammed
Jahangir Mohammed is a serial entrepreneur and inventor who built Jasper Technologies into the world's largest IoT platform - sold to Cisco for $1.4 billion in 2016 - then turned his attention to metabolic disease. As Founder and CEO of Twin Health, he is using AI-powered whole-body digital twin technology to reverse chronic conditions like Type 2 diabetes, with clinical results published in the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst showing 71% of participants achieving A1C below 6.5% while eliminating most medications. Twin Health has raised $335 million total and reached a $950 million valuation in 2025.
Emilė Radytė
Emilė Radytė is a Harvard- and Oxford-trained neuroscientist and the co-founder and CEO of Samphire Neuroscience, a London-based neurotech company building drug-free, hormone-free wearable devices for menstrual health. Her flagship product, Nettle, is a head-worn device using non-invasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to target the neurological drivers of menstrual pain and mood symptoms. Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare list in 2024, she came up through emergency medicine at Harvard and a PhD in psychiatry and engineering at Oxford, and reframes conditions like PMS and PMDD as questions of brain circuitry rather than hormones alone.
Dave Icke
Dave Icke is the CEO of Medisafe, the medication engagement platform that helps more than ten million patients stay on their treatments. A chemical engineer turned digital-health operator, he has spent two decades turning hardware and software into tools that keep people healthier: founding CEO of wearable biosensor company mc10, launcher of Becton Dickinson's digital health business, VP of Digital Health Product at Humana, and executive chair of mental-health AI company ieso. In 2025 he took the reins at Medisafe from founder Omri Shor to scale medication engagement across the global pharmaceutical ecosystem.
Peter Fedichev
Peter Fedichev is a theoretical physicist turned longevity entrepreneur who co-founded Gero, a biotech AI company applying physics-based generative AI models to crack the root causes of aging. A former top-2 cited Russian physicist under 35, he traded quantum gases for aging clocks, building a platform that predicted biological age from wearable data before it was fashionable, secured a Pfizer collaboration, and landed a potential $250M deal with Chugai Pharmaceutical (Roche Group) in 2025 - all while publishing over 75 scientific papers and winning a $10,000 prize for winning a public debate on defeating aging.
Reggie Chan
Reggie Chan is a Hong Kong-based serial entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Nex (nex.inc), the motion-gaming company behind the Nex Playground console - a $249 camera-based gaming device that outsold Xbox in the US during Black Friday 2025 and hit $150M+ in annual revenue. Before Nex, Chan co-founded EditGrid, an online spreadsheet startup acquired by Apple in 2008, then spent nearly a decade at Apple as a Software Engineering Manager before betting everything on body-motion entertainment. At Nex, his team has built technology that tracks 18 body points per player, enabling real physical movement as the controller - no wires, no wearables, just your body and a TV.
Barton Wells
Barton Wells is the co-founder, CEO, and CTO of DexaFit Dx, a Palo Alto-based health technology company using AI and full-body DXA scans to detect coronary artery disease, Type 2 diabetes, and other chronic conditions early and non-invasively. A Stanford-trained mathematician and former world-ranked open water marathon swimmer, Wells brings 30+ years of AI, computer vision, and iOS engineering experience - spanning stints at Dropbox and multiple startups - to the challenge of transforming a 7-minute medical scan into a multi-disease risk screening platform for insurers, employers, and individuals.
Joseph Bousaba
Joseph Bousaba is the CEO of InvenSense and General Manager of TDK Corporation's MEMS Sensors Business Group, leading a global powerhouse in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) sensing solutions. With over 18 years of senior leadership in the semiconductor industry - spanning Philips Semiconductors, Qualcomm Atheros, and Qualcomm - he stepped into the top role at InvenSense in October 2024, bringing a track record of building multi-hundred-million-dollar businesses at the intersection of motion, sound, and AI-driven sensing.
Anuj Khandelwal
Anuj Khandelwal is the CEO and Co-Founder of Empo Health, a San Bruno, CA-based medical device company developing in-home monitoring systems to prevent diabetic foot amputations. With a BS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and MS in Mechanical Engineering (Medical Devices) from Stanford, Khandelwal founded Empo Health in 2020 alongside co-founder Eric Dahlseng. The company's flagship product — Empo Footprint, an FDA-listed in-home imaging scale — lets diabetic patients monitor foot health from home, transmitting images to care teams for early intervention. In June 2025, Empo Health raised a $7 million round led by Story Ventures to commercialize its remote diabetic foot ulcer management system.
Cayden Pierce
Cayden Pierce is the CEO and co-founder of Mentra, a San Francisco startup building MentraOS - the open-source operating system for AI smart glasses. Described as 'the Android for smart glasses,' MentraOS lets developers write one app and deploy it across any pair of smart glasses. A self-described transhumanist hacker, Pierce built his first DIY smart glasses prototype in his dorm room, worked with smart glasses inventor Steve Mann at the University of Toronto, researched proactive AI wearable agents at MIT Media Lab under Pattie Maes, converted a 40-year-old RV into a mobile hacker lab, and dropped out of MIT in 2024 to launch Mentra. The company raised an $8 million seed round backed by the co-founders of Android, YouTube, and Pebble, plus Y Combinator, Amazon, and Toyota Ventures.
David Jiang
David Jiang (Gonglue Jiang) is the co-founder and CEO of VITURE, the XR glasses company that captured 52% of the U.S. smart glasses market in Q4 2024 and raised $100M in Series B funding in 2025. A Harvard-trained human-computer interaction designer who worked on Google Glass and led AR at Rokid, he founded VITURE in 2021 with a single conviction: that wearable screens would replace the smartphone as the primary entertainment and productivity interface. VITURE One raised $3.1M on Kickstarter in one month, surpassing Oculus's prior record, and VITURE Pro later outranked Meta Ray-Ban on Amazon.
Todd Mozer
Todd Mozer is Chairman and CEO of Sensory, Inc., the Santa Clara-based company he co-founded in 1994 that has quietly powered voice recognition in over 3 billion consumer devices - from the 'OK Google' and 'Hey Siri' wake words to smart home gadgets, automotive systems, and medical devices. A second-generation tech entrepreneur (son of physicist Forrest Mozer, with whom he also co-founded ESS Technology), Todd holds 50+ patents and an MBA from Stanford. He has spent 30+ years making AI run tiny, private, and always-on - long before the rest of the industry caught up.
Cédric Hutchings
Cédric Hutchings is a French serial entrepreneur and engineer who has spent two decades turning sensors into systems that change how the physical world gets understood. He co-founded Withings in 2008, building one of the first connected health companies from scratch to a €170M Nokia acquisition, then pivoted to co-found Outsight in 2019 - a Paris-based spatial intelligence company deploying 3D LiDAR software in airports, rail stations, and smart cities worldwide. Today, Outsight holds a $17.2M contract with Dallas Fort Worth Airport for the world's largest 3D LiDAR deployment, with installations at Charles de Gaulle and Rome Fiumicino airports among its growing portfolio.
Leslie Wilberforce
Leslie Oley Wilberforce is the CEO of Evidation, a San Mateo-based digital health company that has built a 5-million-person platform where individuals share permissioned health data to power real-world clinical research. A mechanical engineer by training (BS Penn State, MS Stanford), she joined Evidation in 2015 and spent a decade building the company's enterprise technology platform and landmark partnerships with Johnson & Johnson, Apple, the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and the American Heart Association before becoming Evidation's first non-founder CEO in March 2025.
Miray Tayfun
Miray Tayfun is the co-founder and CEO of Vivoo, a San Francisco-based health technology company that turns urine test strips into personalized wellness insights via a mobile app. A bioengineering graduate and serial founder, she built Vivoo from a personal frustration with expensive and slow health testing into a platform serving 300,000+ users across 50+ countries. Backed by Tim Draper and $19.4M in total funding, Vivoo expanded from subscription test strips to a $99 smart toilet unveiled at CES 2026, named Best of CES by Gadget Flow. Tayfun is a 2019 Australian Financial Review Top 100 Women of Influence honoree and 2018 Laureate Here for Good Award winner.
Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer
Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer is the Co-Founder and CEO of Signos, the company behind the first FDA-cleared over-the-counter glucose monitoring system for weight management. A Princeton computer science graduate and Harvard MBA, he played NCAA Division I ice hockey before building a career spanning VC at Sierra and Shasta Ventures, co-founding PR tech company AirPR (later Onclusive), and ultimately creating Signos in 2018 after his own lifelong struggle with weight and the death of his diabetic grandmother inspired him to ask: why wait until someone is sick to give them metabolic data?
Julia Hu
Julia Hu is the co-founder and CEO of Lark Health, an AI-powered virtual care platform managing over 30 million contracted lives. Born in Los Angeles to first-generation Chinese immigrants and raised largely by her father, Hu spent her childhood navigating an undiagnosed chronic condition that would ultimately reshape how she saw healthcare. She dropped out of MIT Sloan mid-MBA to build what is now one of the largest CDC-recognized diabetes prevention program providers in the country, having raised over $257 million and earned recognition from Forbes, Inc., and the UCSF Health Awards Hall of Fame.
Eric Migicovsky
Eric Migicovsky is a Canadian hardware entrepreneur who invented the Pebble smartwatch in 2012, raising $10.26M on Kickstarter in the most-funded campaign of its time. After Pebble's $40M sale to Fitbit in 2016, he served as a Y Combinator partner, then co-founded Beeper — a universal messaging app that sparked a major Apple antitrust investigation before selling to Automattic for $125M in 2024. Now back to his roots, he's reviving the Pebble brand under Core Devices with fully open-source hardware and software.
Renata George
Renata George is a venture capital investor, author, educator, and advocate for gender diversity in the investment world. She built and exited a major franchise media network in Eastern Europe before pivoting to VC, raising a U.S.-based fund in 2011, and later joining a Singapore VC firm. She founded Women.VC, a nonprofit advancing women in venture capital and private equity, authored the landmark book 'Women Who Venture', and serves as Program Director of VC Academy. Forbes named her among the top women in VC in 2012 and a leading millennial woman investor in 2015.