wharton-mba
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Rochan Sankar
Rochan Sankar is the founder and CEO of Enfabrica, a Silicon Valley startup building networking silicon to move data between the GPUs, CPUs and memory that power large-scale AI. A 26-year semiconductor veteran who ran Broadcom's data center Ethernet switching business before striking out on his own in 2019, he bet the company on a single idea: that AI's real bottleneck is not compute but the plumbing that feeds it. In September 2025, Nvidia paid more than $900 million to license Enfabrica's technology and bring Sankar and much of his team in-house.
Sravanth Aluru
Sravanth Aluru is the co-founder and CEO of Avataar, a generative AI company building spatial storytelling and 3D visualization tools for enterprises and e-commerce. An IIT Bombay engineer and Wharton MBA, he moved from a program manager role at Microsoft to technology investment banking on Wall Street before founding Avataar in 2014. He holds more than 10 US patents across AI, computer vision, and mobile data transmission, and has raised over $55 million from investors including Tiger Global, Peak XV (Sequoia Capital India). Under his leadership Avataar has shifted from interactive 3D product experiences toward AI-generated product video, serving customers such as HP, Victoria's Secret, Lowe's, Samsung, and Sleep Number.
Jill Beraud
Jill Beraud is an American consumer brand executive who has spent more than three decades building and running some of the best-known names in retail, beauty, luxury and beverages. She began in brand management at Procter & Gamble, ran her own New York advertising agency, then spent 13 years at Limited Brands, where as Chief Marketing Officer of Victoria's Secret she helped grow the label into a multi-billion-dollar business and also led marketing across Bath & Body Works, Express, Henri Bendel, C.O. Bigelow and Limited Stores. In December 2008 PepsiCo created the role of worldwide Chief Marketing Officer for her, reporting to Indra Nooyi; there she pushed the company away from Super Bowl spending and into the $20 million Pepsi Refresh Project, and later ran the Starbucks and Lipton joint ventures. She went on to serve as CEO of Living Proof, EVP of Global Retail Operations at Tiffany & Co., and CEO of the luxury jewelry house IPPOLITA, before co-founding the plant-based functional beverage company Sh'nnong. Fast Company named her one of its 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2013. She has sat on the board of Levi Strauss & Co. since 2013, was re-elected in April 2026, chairs the Fashion for Good board, and has served on the World of Children Board of Governors since 2009.
Sara Griffin
Sara Griffin is a retail marketing executive who serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Belk, the Charlotte-based Southern department store chain. She built her career over a decade at Saks OFF 5TH, where she rose from marketing leadership to Chief Marketing and Analytics Officer, launched the SaksOFF5TH.com site in 2013, helped build the retailer's Canadian store fleet, and created the tender-neutral OFF 5TH Rewards loyalty program that surpassed 2.5 million enrollments. A Yale graduate with a Wharton MBA and a former Monitor Deloitte consultant, she later served as CMO of The Shade Store before joining Belk. She is known for tying data, analytics and marketing together to deliver personalized shopping experiences.
Vikram Pavate
Vikram Pavate is the CEO and co-founder of Tacta Systems, a Palo Alto robotics company building 'Dextrous Intelligence' - a fusion of AI, software and tactile hardware meant to give robots human-like touch, spatial awareness and manipulation skills. A hard-tech operator with roughly three decades in advanced materials and hardware, he trained as a ceramic and materials engineer, earned an MBA from Wharton, and holds dozens of patents. Before Tacta he co-founded and ran the sensing and location startup Locix, and led business development at LuxVue Technology, the micro-LED display pioneer acquired by Apple in 2014. In June 2025 Tacta emerged from stealth with $75 million in funding to bring physical dexterity to machines.
Wei-Wu He
Wei-Wu He is a scientist, inventor, entrepreneur and investor who serves as Executive Chairman and CEO of Human Longevity, Inc., the San Francisco Bay Area precision-health company that pairs whole-genome sequencing with advanced imaging and blood analytics to catch age-related disease early. Trained as a molecular biologist at Baylor College of Medicine with an MBA from Wharton, he was among the first scientists at Human Genome Sciences before building OriGene Technologies into a major research-tools business. Over three decades he has founded or funded dozens of biotech companies through his venture fund Emerging Technology Partners, and he now channels that experience into the science of extending healthy human lifespan.
Dana Kim
Dana Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Highlight, a New York-based product intelligence platform that modernizes in-home product testing for consumer brands. A former qualitative market researcher who spent years collecting insights the slow way - standing in stores with paper surveys for brands like Coca-Cola and Nike - she went to Wharton for an MBA, met co-founder Ethan Kellough, and built a technology-driven alternative that pairs a proprietary consumer community with logistics automation and AI analytics. Founded in 2020, Highlight has raised more than $30 million and works with brands including Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Mondelez. Kim has been named to GreenBook's 2022 Future List and Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders 250 list.
Jay Chen
Jay Chen is the interim CEO of Contextual AI, the Silicon Valley enterprise company building a 'context layer' for grounded AI agents. He stepped into the top job in 2026 after co-founder Douwe Kiela and a group of researchers moved to Google DeepMind under a licensing deal. A Wharton MBA who started as a chip engineer at NVIDIA, Chen built his career across product marketing and growth roles at Confluent, Starburst, Opendoor and Twingate before joining Contextual AI as VP of Marketing, where he helped launch its enterprise RAG platform.
Khaled Bitar
Khaled Bitar is the co-founder and CEO of Avtal, an Austin-based fintech building a white-labeled, AI-powered digital collections platform for third-party debt collection agencies. In March 2026 the company announced $24 million in combined Seed and Series A funding led by S3 Ventures. Before Avtal, Bitar co-founded and ran LeftLane Software, a subprime auto lending platform, led Supply Operations at ServiceChannel (acquired by Fortive for $1.2B), and spent four years as a consultant at Bain & Company. He holds an MBA from The Wharton School and a BBA from the University of Texas at Austin.
Sean X. Hu
Sean X. Hu is the President and CEO of Rapafusyn Pharmaceuticals, a Baltimore-based biotech spun out of Johns Hopkins that is building a library of natural-product-like macrocycles it calls RapaGlues. He is a genomics PhD turned Wharton MBA turned management consultant turned operator, with prior stops at Bristol Myers Squibb, CuraGen, Illumina, AT Kearney, IMS, Bionest, BioStrat, GlobalData, and Avotres. In September 2025 he closed an oversubscribed $44M Series A led by BioTrack Capital and Yonjin Capital to push RapaGlues into difficult-to-drug targets.
Will Holtz
Will Holtz runs strategy and operations at Prescient AI, the marketing mix modeling platform that tells omnichannel brands where the next dollar should go. He listed as Interim CEO on the company page and VP of Strategy & Operations across recent profiles - a range of hats at a fast-moving Series A startup. A Cornell economics-and-psychology grad with a Wharton MBA, he started in finance at Morgan Stanley and Soros Fund Management before spending a decade in the trenches of DTC operations at Recess, Grove Collaborative, SourceMedium and his own ventures. On the side he co-founded and hosts Don't V*LOOKUP, a podcast about how the best operators actually use their data.
Ariel Quinones
Ariel Quinones is the co-founder and co-CEO of Ironhack, a global tech bootcamp he launched in Madrid in 2013 with Gonzalo Manrique after the two met at Wharton. Raised in a Puerto Rican family of educators, he spotted a mismatch he could not unsee: youth unemployment above 50% in Spain sitting beside hundreds of thousands of unfilled tech jobs. Ironhack was his answer - short, intensive, outcomes-obsessed training that has since graduated thousands of career-changers across campuses in Europe, the Americas, and beyond. He now leads from Miami, preaching a gospel of ruthless focus on student outcomes and over-delivering on what people expect.
Niranjan Sardesai
Niranjan Sardesai is the founder, president and CEO of Geneos Therapeutics, a Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania biotech building personalized DNA-based cancer vaccines that are custom-designed to each patient's own tumor mutations. A Caltech-trained chemist with a Wharton MBA, he spent years as COO helping build Inovio Pharmaceuticals into a Phase III immunotherapy company before spinning out Geneos in 2016. Under his leadership Geneos published a landmark Nature Medicine paper in 2024 showing its neoantigen vaccine drove complete responses in advanced liver cancer, with some patients reaching multi-year, recurrence-free survival.
Noel Greenberger
Noel Greenberger is the CEO of Nob Hill Therapeutics, an Albuquerque-based respiratory company building DryNeb, a dry powder nebulizer that pushes high therapeutic doses deep into the lungs regardless of a patient's breathing capacity. A Wharton MBA and Northwestern-trained industrial engineer, he spent years commercializing respiratory medicines at Sandoz, ran commercial strategy at Vertice Pharma, and consulted at McKinsey and ZS Associates before taking the helm of Nob Hill in 2022. Under his watch the company won a $1.73M HHS Phase II grant and closed a $3M Series A in 2024.
Robbins Schrader
Robbins Schrader is the co-founder and CEO of SafeRide Health, a San Antonio-based technology company that runs non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) for the country's largest Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and provider programs. A former US Navy officer and Boston Consulting Group project leader with a Wharton MBA, he started the company in 2016 with his brother Whit Schrader and Ben Salter to fix healthcare's hardest mile: getting vulnerable patients to the care they need. Under his leadership SafeRide now coordinates more than a million rides a year and Schrader was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 Gulf South Award winner.
Josh Mackanic
Josh Mackanic is the founder and CEO of CivilGrid, a San Francisco construction intelligence platform that stitches together utility, environmental, and geotechnical site data so engineers stop discovering surprises with a backhoe. A licensed mechanical engineer with a decade inside PG&E and an MBA from Wharton, he has shepherded north of half a billion dollars of gas, electric, and renewable infrastructure into the ground.
Andrew Reaume
Andrew Reaume is the co-founder, President and CEO of Melior Discovery, an Exton, Pennsylvania preclinical contract research organization built around theraTRACE, a multiplexed in vivo phenotypic screening platform that runs a single drug candidate through a battery of animal disease models at once to uncover unexpected therapeutic uses. A geneticist by training with a Wharton MBA, he conceived the idea at Pfizer, left in 2005 to build it, and has since raised over $15 million in capital, closed more than $40 million in partnering deals, and pushed a repurposed compound, MLR-1023, into Phase 2 diabetes trials.
Fahad Jalal
Fahad Jalal is the founder and CEO of QLU.ai, a San Francisco AI platform that lets executive recruiters describe an ideal hire in plain English and surface qualified candidates in seconds rather than months. A Stanford computer scientist with a Wharton MBA, he scaled a business unit at Mentor Graphics from zero to $100M ARR in two years and has exited multiple startups to Fortune 100 companies. At QLU.ai he is building tools that automate prospect research and outreach while insisting human judgment stays at the center of hiring.
Samir Pendse
Samir Pendse is the co-founder and CEO of Coral, a New York-based climate fintech that turns the maddening maze of utility rebates and tax credits into instant point-of-sale discounts. His pitch is plain: most people don't want a heat pump, they want a warm house at a price they can afford. Coral advances rebate money upfront so HVAC and electrical contractors can knock thousands off the invoice at the kitchen table, then handles the paperwork with utilities behind the scenes. After a decade spanning microfinance at Accion, small-business lending strategy at Boston Consulting Group, and fintech product work, Pendse co-founded Coral in 2023 with engineer Nizar Dhamani. In March 2026 the company raised a $7.5M seed led by ResilienceVC, with strategic backing from Watsco Ventures, North America's largest HVAC distributor.
Shanel Fields
Shanel Fields is the founder and CEO of MD Ally, a public safety telehealth company that plugs virtual care directly into the 911 system so non-emergency callers get routed to the right help instead of an ambulance. A Cornell graduate and Wharton MBA, she spent her first year doing ride-alongs with dispatchers and first responders before building the platform solo. The daughter of a volunteer EMT, she has raised more than $23M, taken MD Ally through Techstars, joined the Techstars board of directors, and been featured by The New York Times and Good Morning America.
Alastair Blake
Alastair Blake is the Chief Business Officer of Layer Health, an MIT-spinout building an AI layer for clinical chart review backed by Google Ventures, General Catalyst and Define Ventures. A Cambridge-trained physician (MD, MRCP) turned commercial operator, he trained as an internal medicine doctor in the NHS, served a National Medical Director's Clinical Fellowship at the Care Quality Commission, earned an MBA from Wharton, consulted at McKinsey, and led clinical and commercial partnerships at the healthcare data company nference before joining Layer Health in 2024. He sits at the intersection of medicine, data and go-to-market - a doctor who now sells the software meant to give doctors their time back.
Andrew Barnell
Andrew Barnell is the co-founder and CEO of Geneoscopy, a St. Louis life sciences company that turned a sibling conversation about a missed colonoscopy into ColoSense, the first FDA-approved stool RNA test for colorectal cancer screening. A Cornell economics graduate and Wharton MBA who started in J.P. Morgan's healthcare investment banking group and private equity at Lindsay Goldberg, Barnell paired his finance background with the scientific work of his sister and co-founder Erica Barnell, MD/PhD, to build a company that has raised more than $217 million and earned FDA approval for a noninvasive screening test built on patented RNA biomarker technology.
Evan Gibson
Evan Gibson is the Chief Business Officer of Sensorium Therapeutics, a Boston-based, clinical-stage biotech using its AI-driven SensAI platform to turn nature's neuroactive chemistry into precision treatments for brain and mental health. A Wharton-trained dealmaker, he has spent his career on the business side of central-nervous-system biotech - building partnerships, strategy and corporate development across a string of neuroscience and therapeutics ventures including Neumora, Tempero Bio, Junevity, Aditum Bio and Vir Biotechnology.
Greg Maged
Greg Maged is the cofounder and CEO of SEEN Hair Care, a dermatologist-developed haircare brand he launched in 2018 with Harvard-trained dermatologist Dr. Iris Rubin. SEEN built its business on a single idea - that hair care is skin care - making shampoos and styling products engineered not to clog pores or irritate sensitive scalps. Before beauty, Maged spent decades in finance and consulting: McKinsey, then chief of staff to Charles Schwab's founder, then cofounding the online advisor Bicycle Financial. He has steered SEEN to 100% compounded annual growth, a $9 million Series A backed by marquee investors, and shelf space in every Ulta Beauty store in the country.
Jennifer Bergheiser
Jennifer Bergheiser is the Chief Business Officer of eGenesis, the Cambridge biotech turning gene-edited pig organs into a real answer to the transplant waitlist. She runs corporate strategy and all portfolio and commercial development, drawing on more than two decades across big pharma, venture capital, and consulting. Her resume runs from screening deals at Domain Associates to steering the blockbuster autoimmune drug Stelara at Centocor/Johnson & Johnson. At eGenesis she helps commercialize one of medicine's boldest bets: organs grown in pigs, edited dozens of times over, transplanted into living humans.
Vip Andleigh
Vip Andleigh is Head of Strategy & Operations and Office of the CEO at Moloco, the machine-learning advertising company based in Menlo Park. He partners with CEO Ikkjin Ahn and the leadership team on business planning, leadership cadence, and cross-company strategy. Before Moloco he spent over a decade at Google, where he led multiple Strategy & Operations teams, served as Director of Ads Strategy & Operations and Chief of Staff for the App Ads and Display Ads businesses, and founded Google's Ads Incubator. Earlier he was a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company. He holds an MBA from Wharton and a double-major BA from UC Berkeley.
Jon Meachin
Jon Meachin is the CEO of Fleetio, the Birmingham, Alabama-based fleet management software company that crossed a $1.5 billion valuation in 2025 after raising more than $450 million in Series D funding and acquiring maintenance-authorization platform Auto Integrate. A finance-and-operations executive by training, he joined Fleetio as Chief Operating Officer in 2022 and took the top job in May 2023 when founder Tony Summerville moved to executive chairman. Before Fleetio he was COO of A Cloud Guru, VP of Finance at Campaign Monitor, and started his career as an investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley. The Software Report named him one of the Top 50 SaaS CEOs of 2023. Together with Auto Integrate, the company now touches roughly 8 million vehicles and 13+ million repair orders a year across a network of 110,000+ repair shops.
Neal Desai
Neal Desai is the CEO and co-founder of Kafene, a New York fintech that lets people without prime credit lease-to-own furniture, appliances, electronics and tires at the point of sale. A molecular biology major from Princeton who spent more than a decade trading equity derivatives on Wall Street, he later became CFO of powersports lender Octane before spending six months methodically studying 45-plus specialty finance niches and choosing lease-to-own. Kafene approves applicants in seconds for an average of roughly $2,700, assigns up to ten risk grades, reports to all three credit bureaus, and has raised well over $100 million from investors including Third Prime, Valar Ventures and Global Founders Capital.
Rabih Ramadi
Rabih Ramadi is the co-founder and CEO of Avantos, a New York fintech building an AI-native operating system for client onboarding and servicing inside banks, asset managers, and insurers. He spent a career on the inside of financial services - technology strategy at The Bank of New York, leading capital markets as a senior partner at KPMG, then helping build Unqork from the ground floor as a founding team member and chief revenue officer - before deciding the client-service layer of finance needed to be rebuilt around a knowledge graph and AI agents. In early 2026 Avantos raised a $25 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing total funding to $35 million.
Will Stratton
Will Stratton is the Chief Business Officer and Head of Strategy and Planning at Autobahn Therapeutics, a San Diego biotech building brain-targeting small molecules for neuropsychiatric and neuroimmunologic disorders. A Yale chemist turned Wharton-trained dealmaker, he helped steer the company's oversubscribed $100 million Series C in 2024 and runs the corporate strategy behind a pipeline led by ABX-002, a thyroid hormone receptor beta agonist for depression.