Tagged: yc-alumni
17 results
John Ramunas
John Ramunas, PhD, is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rejuvenation Technologies Inc., a Mountain View, CA biotechnology company pioneering mRNA-based telomere extension therapy to reverse cellular aging. A serial entrepreneur turned neuroscientist, Ramunas spent his PhD at Stanford's Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology inventing the first safe, nonimmunogenic TERT mRNA drug - a technology now protected by 50+ patents. His company, backed by Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, is advancing a pipeline targeting fatal orphan diseases including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and liver cirrhosis, with the long-term vision of a single therapy taken every few years to prevent age-related disease.
Anand Prajapati
Anand Prajapati is Co-Founder and CTO of Leena AI, an enterprise agentic AI platform that deploys AI colleagues to automate back-office work across HR, IT, Finance, and Procurement. A graduate of IIT Delhi, Anand built Leena AI's technology from scratch after two earlier startup pivots, guiding the company through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch to a $30M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Today Leena AI's platform serves 400+ enterprise customers across 90+ countries - including Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Sony - resolving millions of employee queries autonomously across 100+ languages.
Christopher Coleman
Christopher Coleman is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Clutch (withclutch.com), a San Francisco-based fintech company transforming how credit unions compete in the digital age. A MIT mechanical engineering graduate and Stanford MBA, Coleman co-founded Carlypso (a Y Combinator-backed used-car marketplace sold to Carvana in 2017) before joining Carvana as Senior Product Director and then launching Clutch in 2020 with co-founder Nicholas Hinrichsen. Clutch has raised $106 million in total funding, including a $65M Series B in January 2025 led by Alkeon Capital with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, and now serves 150+ credit unions - including 6 of the top 10 largest in the country - having facilitated over $10 billion in consumer loans and deposits.
Ian Christopher
Ian Christopher is the Co-Founder and Chief Engineer of Qventus, the AI-powered hospital operations platform backed by KKR and Bessemer Venture Partners. A Stanford-trained computational engineer, he co-built Qventus from a 2012 YC startup into a $400M+ company that automates how hospitals manage patient flow, surgical scheduling, and care coordination - reducing staff burnout and cutting length of stay for major health systems across the US.
Jonathan Perichon
Jonathan Perichon is the Co-founder and CTO of Checkr, Inc., a San Francisco-based AI-powered background screening platform he co-founded in 2014 with Daniel Yanisse. A French-born software engineer who discovered the gig economy's broken background check infrastructure while working at an LA startup, Perichon turned that frustration into a $4.6 billion company serving over 100,000 clients including DoorDash, Lyft, Coinbase, and Uber. A Y Combinator S14 alumnus who applied three times before getting in, he embodies the principle that persistence and execution beat credentials every time.
Kwindla Hultman Kramer
Kwindla Hultman Kramer is co-founder and CEO of Daily.co, a developer platform providing real-time voice, video, and AI infrastructure. He is also the creator of Pipecat, the most widely used open-source framework for building voice AI agents. A Harvard and MIT Media Lab alumnus, Kwindla has spent his career at the intersection of real-time communication and developer infrastructure—from scaling AllAfrica.com as CTO to building spatial computing interfaces at Oblong Industries to raising $62M+ for Daily and releasing Pipecat to the open-source community.
Moawia Eldeeb
Moawia Eldeeb is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tempo, a San Francisco-based AI-powered home fitness company that raised $316M and uses 3D sensors and computer vision to deliver real-time form correction and personalized training. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, he immigrated to the US at age 9, dropped out of school in 6th grade to work 12-hour shifts at a pizza restaurant, survived homelessness in a Harlem shelter, and put himself through Columbia University by working as a personal trainer - before building one of the most-funded fitness tech startups in history.
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is the co-founder and CEO of Promise, an Oakland-based govtech company valued at $520 million that helps municipalities and utilities offer zero-interest payment plans to struggling residents. A former union organizer turned labor federation executive turned music manager for Prince, she now runs a platform that has reached 5 million+ households across 20+ states, proving that treating people with dignity is not just ethical — it is a business model. Named #247 on the Forbes Self-Made 250, she built Promise from a YC Winter 2018 bet to a $23 million-funded company generating $33M+ in annual revenue.
Ryan McLinko
Ryan McLinko is the co-founder and CTO of Astranis Space Technologies, a San Francisco-based company building compact, software-defined geostationary satellites to bring affordable broadband to underserved regions worldwide. An MIT-trained aerospace engineer who cut his teeth on cubesats at Planet Labs and the Dream Chaser spaceplane at Sierra Nevada, McLinko co-founded Astranis in 2015 with CEO John Gedmark. The company has since launched five satellites, secured over $1.2 billion in funding including a $450M Series E in May 2026, and been named Prime Contractor for multiple U.S. Space Force programs — all while being valued at $2.8 billion.
Heang Chan
Heang Chan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Prelim, a San Francisco-based fintech that builds the digital onboarding operating system for banks and credit unions. A Stanford MBA and former Goldman Sachs banker who also helped build the mortgage platform at Blend used by 3 of the top 10 U.S. banks, Chan founded Prelim in 2017 after Y Combinator to solve the friction-filled account-opening workflows he watched slow down banks from the inside. Prelim now orchestrates 50+ banking integrations for institutions managing more than $5 trillion in assets, turning weeks-long onboarding into minutes.
Evan Stites-Clayton
Evan Stites-Clayton is a General Partner and CTO at HF0, a San Francisco-based residency and venture fund that backs repeat technical founders building AI-native startups. He previously co-founded Teespring with Walker Williams at Brown University in 2011, scaling it from a $3,000 weekend experiment to over $1 billion in cumulative sales and $65 million raised from Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures before going through Y Combinator's W13 batch. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30, he joined HF0 in 2022 to help the next generation of builders compress the gap between idea and scale.
Wei Deng
Wei Deng is the CEO and founder of Clipboard Health, a San Francisco-based healthcare labor marketplace that connects nurses and other healthcare professionals with open shifts at facilities like nursing homes and hospitals. Founded in 2016 and backed by Sequoia Capital and IVP, the company achieved unicorn status at a $1.3B valuation after raising $94M in total funding. A Yale College and Yale Law School graduate, Deng pivoted through six to eight business models before discovering that flexible, on-demand shift matching was the key to solving healthcare staffing shortages. Known for her relentless persistence — she pitched facilities seven months pregnant — Deng built Clipboard Health into a platform serving over 5,000 facilities across the United States.
Jayant Kulkarni
Jayant Kulkarni is the CEO and co-founder of Quartzy, the world's leading lab management platform serving over 400,000 researchers across 25,000+ organizations. A PhD-trained control systems engineer from Cornell University and alumnus of IIT Madras, Kulkarni co-founded Quartzy in 2011 after completing a Swartz Fellowship at Columbia University's Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. The company - named after the highest-scoring word in Scrabble - went through Y Combinator's Summer 2011 batch and has grown into a vertically integrated procurement and inventory platform for life sciences, raising $23 million in April 2026 from Avenue Capital Group and BroadOak Capital Partners.
Prayag Narula
Prayag Narula is the Co-Founder and CEO of Marvin (HeyMarvin), an AI-native customer insights platform that centralizes, analyzes, and shares qualitative research data for product and UX teams. A researcher-turned-entrepreneur, he previously co-founded LeadGenius (Y Combinator W2011), which raised over $30 million and grew to hundreds of employees before he stepped down to return to his roots in user-centric design. With a graduate research background spanning UC Berkeley's School of Information and Helsinki's Ubiquitous Interaction Group, Narula built Marvin alongside his brother Chirag Narula in 2020 — this time with AI baked in from the ground up. The platform now serves 4,000+ teams and 13,000+ users, including 10 Fortune 100 companies.
Nick Perry
Nick Perry is the co-founder and CEO of Candid Health, a San Francisco-based AI-powered revenue cycle management platform that is rebuilding how healthcare billing works from the ground up. A Stanford-trained biomedical informaticist and five-year Palantir veteran, Perry founded Candid in 2019 with co-founders Doug Proctor and Adam Reis to solve one of healthcare's most stubborn problems: the $280 billion annual cost of incorrect medical claims. Candid's platform focuses on submitting claims correctly the first time - rather than fixing them after denial - and has scaled to serve 200+ healthcare organizations with 95%+ touchless claim rates, nearly 250% revenue growth in 2024, and $99.5 million in total funding.
Todd Goldberg
Todd Goldberg is a San Francisco-based tech entrepreneur, angel investor, and art collector who sold his event ticketing startup Eventjoy (YC W14) to Ticketmaster in 2014, then co-founded Todd & Rahul Capital with Superhuman's Rahul Vohra - deploying $50M+ across 120+ startups including Mercury, Superhuman, Clearbit, and Supabase. He also co-founded Curated, a $30M+ NFT art fund backed by Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, and continues to ship indie products like Mailjoy, a bootstrapped direct mail platform.
Ryan Petersen
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.