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Mateo Jaramillo
Co-founder & CEO of Form Energy

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Mateo is the Co-Founder and CEO of Form Energy, which manufactures 100-hour iron-air batteries that provide low-cost, multi-day energy storage to keep the electric grid reliable. Form has raised more than $2B and recently announced a 30 GWh system with Xcel Energy and Google, the largest battery by energy capacity ever announced.

Prior to Form Energy, Mateo spent more than seven years at Tesla, where he started Tesla Energy’s stationary storage business and served as VP of Products & Programs. He also launched Tesla’s Supercharger effort, securing the first 200 sites in the U.S. and EU. Earlier, he was COO of Gaia Power Technologies.

Mateo is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. He holds an A.B. in Economics from Harvard University and a Master of Theological Studies from Yale University.

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Deon Nicholas
Co-founder & CEO of Espa Labs

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Deon is the Co-Founder and CEO of Espa Labs, which makes an AI-native executive assistant that manages your inbox, calendar, follow-ups, and logistics. It’s built with a privacy-first design that never retains or trains on your data. Espa is backed by Village Global, Neo, SV Angel, and angels including Adam D’Angelo.

Prior to Espa, Deon co-founded Forethought, a generative AI platform for customer support automation. As CEO he scaled it to more than $100M raised and 1 billion monthly interactions before it was acquired by Zendesk. Earlier, he was a software engineer at Pure Storage, Dropbox, Meta, and Palantir, and he is an angel investor in more than 30 companies, including Anthropic and Cognition.

Deon was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Enterprise Technology and is a two-time ACM ICPC World Finalist. He holds a Bachelor of Mathematics with Distinction in Computer Science and Combinatorics & Optimization from the University of Waterloo.

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Peter Colis
CEO of Ethos

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Peter is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ethos, a technology platform that makes life insurance fast, accessible, and fully online, with instant coverage and no medical exams for most applicants. Ethos is publicly traded on NASDAQ (LIFE), has protected more than 700,000 families, and recently reported 113% year-over-year revenue growth.

Prior to Ethos, Peter co-founded and served as CEO of Ovid, which became a profitable leader in life insurance settlements before it was acquired. Under his leadership, Ethos has also built partnerships with major carriers, including Liberty Mutual and Banner Life, which use its technology and underwriting engine.

Peter holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Colorado Boulder.

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Howie Liu
CEO & Founding Team of Hyperagent

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Howie is the CEO and a member of the founding team of Hyperagent, a cloud-native AI agent platform. Hyperagent gives agents a full computing environment and lets companies deploy them as intelligent coworkers in Slack, with skills that compound over time and a command center for managing an entire fleet.

Prior to Hyperagent, Howie co-founded Airtable and served as its CEO for 13 years. He grew it from a three-person idea into a platform used by many of the world’s largest companies, and it was acquired by Bending Spoons. Earlier, he co-founded Etacts, an intelligent CRM startup acquired by Salesforce, where he went on to lead the social CRM product.

Howie holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering and Public Policy from Duke University.

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Amol Deshpande
Founder & CEO of Frontera

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Amol is the Founder and CEO of Frontera, an AI-native autism care company that combines digital phenotyping technology with clinical services to expand access and improve outcomes for children and families. He also invests in mission-driven ventures through Divergent Investments, his family office, and is a founding investor and board member of CFi, an agricultural fintech company.

Prior to Frontera, Amol co-founded Farmers Business Network and built it from scratch into a nearly $4B company with 1,000 employees. Before that, he was a Partner at Kleiner Perkins, where he was the first investor in companies including Beyond Meat.

Amol holds a B.S. in Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and attended Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management.

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Pete Florence
Co-founder & CEO of Generalist

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Pete is the Co-Founder and CEO of Generalist, which is building general-purpose AI for robots, foundation models that let machines learn new physical skills and operate in unfamiliar environments. Its latest model, GEN-1.5, can learn new tasks from a single demonstration, and the company recently raised $400M.

Prior to Generalist, Pete spent more than four years as a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind (via Google Brain), working on robotics and multimodal AI and rising to Staff Research Scientist. He earned his Ph.D. at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in the Robot Locomotion Group and was a research intern at Facebook Reality Labs.

Pete holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, an M.Phil. in Physics from the University of Cambridge, and an A.B. in Chemistry from Princeton University.

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Saeju Jeong
Co-founder of Noom

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Saeju is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Noom, a digital health company that helps people live healthier lives through behavior change, with programs for weight management, obesity care, and diabetes. Over 17 years as CEO, he raised $657M from investors including Sequoia Capital and Silver Lake and grew Noom into a profitable unicorn.

Alongside Noom, Saeju co-founded and chairs United Korean Founders, the largest network of Korean founders in the U.S. He also sits on the boards of WEBTOON and the FNIH, and serves on the Steering Committee of the World Economic Forum’s Healthy Workforces initiative. Earlier in his career, he founded South Korea’s first heavy metal e-commerce business.

Saeju is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and received EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year National Award. He holds a B.Eng. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Hongik University.

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Marcelo Claure
Founder & CEO of The Claure Group

about

Marcelo is the Founder and CEO of Claure Group, a multi-billion-dollar global investment firm that deploys proprietary capital across AI and tech, telecom, critical minerals, and lifestyle and entertainment. He is also Co-Chairman of Brightstar Capital Partners, Group Vice Chairman of SHEIN, and the largest independent shareholder of T-Mobile.

Prior to Claure Group, Marcelo was CEO of SoftBank Group International, where he managed a portfolio of more than 40 companies. As CEO of Sprint, he led the company’s turnaround and its landmark merger with T-Mobile. He began his career by founding Brightstar, which became the world’s largest wireless distribution and services company.

Marcelo has been inducted into Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Hall of Fame and named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. He is an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School and holds an honorary Ph.D. in Commercial Science from Bentley University.

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David Velez
Founder & CEO of Nubank

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David is the Founder and CEO of Nubank, the largest digital bank in Latin America, serving more than 140 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Nubank recently launched in the United States and introduced Nu Global, a multi-currency account for fee-free money movement across more than 35 countries.

Prior to founding Nubank in 2013, David was a Partner at Sequoia Capital, where he led the firm’s Latin American investments. Before that, he was a Senior Associate at General Atlantic in New York and São Paulo. He began his career as an Investment Banking Analyst in Morgan Stanley’s Financial Sponsors Group.

David holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.

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Jeremy Gurewitz
Co-founder & CEO of Solace

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Jeremy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Solace, which connects patients with expert healthcare advocates who help them get through the U.S. healthcare system, with services covered by Medicare. Solace has helped thousands of patients, recently partnered with Walmart, and raised a $130M Series C led by IVP.

Prior to Solace, Jeremy led growth and marketing at consumer companies. He was VP of Marketing at Literati, VP of Growth at Imperfect Foods, and a growth leader at Man Crates. He began his career as an Associate Portfolio Manager in Quantitative Equity at Lord Abbett.

Jeremy holds a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Dan Preston
Co-founder & CEO of Stand

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Dan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Stand, a property insurer that uses physics-based simulation to model how each home will perform in a wildfire or storm, helps owners make targeted fixes, and insures the home accordingly. Stand insures more than $10B of property and recently raised $70M at a $1B valuation.

Prior to Stand, Dan was CEO of Metromile, the pay-per-mile car insurance company, which he took public on NASDAQ and later sold to Lemonade, where he served as SVP of Strategic Initiatives. Before that, he co-founded AisleBuyer, which was acquired by Intuit. He also sits on the board of Dave.

Dan holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he was a Siebel Scholar, and a B.S. in Computer Science, summa cum laude, from Brandeis University.

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Jeff Thompson
Co-founder & CEO of Logiqal

about

Jeff is the Co-Founder and CEO of Logiqal, which is building the first scaled quantum computer, using neutral atom technology to deploy millions of qubits. The company’s team spans quantum hardware, error correction, and computer architecture.

Jeff is also an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University, where he has led quantum research since 2016 and is part of the Princeton Quantum Initiative. Before joining Princeton’s faculty, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at MIT.

Jeff holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. in Physics from Harvard University and a B.S. in Physics from Yale University.

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Dr. Becky Kennedy
Co-founder & CEO of Good Inside

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Becky is the Founder and CEO of Good Inside, a parenting platform that helps parents build resilience and connection with their kids. Good Inside reaches more than 5 million followers, and its app, which offers personalized guidance, 1:1 coaching, and an AI parenting coach, supports parents in over 100 countries.

Prior to Good Inside, Becky spent more than a decade as a clinical psychologist in private practice in New York, offering individual and couples therapy, parent guidance, and executive coaching. She is also the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, and she gave a popular TED talk on the power of repair.

Becky was named to the TIME100 Creators list. She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University and a B.A. in Psychology, summa cum laude, from Duke University.

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Naveen Rao
CEO of Unconventional AI

about

Naveen is the CEO of Unconventional AI, which is rethinking the foundations of computing to build AI hardware as energy-efficient as the human brain. The company was named to LinkedIn’s 2026 Top Startups list.

Prior to Unconventional AI, Naveen co-founded MosaicML, which was acquired by Databricks for $1.3B. He then served as Databricks’ Vice President of AI. Before that, he co-founded Nervana Systems, one of the first deep learning hardware startups, which was acquired by Intel. He also sits on the boards of Beacon Biosignals and NeuReality and on the Allen Institute’s scientific advisory board.

Naveen holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Brown University.

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Jonathan Frankle
Chief AI Scientist of Databricks

about

Jonathan is the Chief AI Scientist at Databricks, where he leads research on training and deploying large AI models. He joined Databricks in 2023, when it acquired MosaicML, the generative AI company he co-founded, for $1.3B.

Prior to MosaicML, Jonathan earned his Ph.D. at MIT, where he developed the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis, a widely cited theory showing that neural networks can be made much smaller without losing accuracy. He was also a researcher at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and an Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center.

Jonathan’s dissertation received the AAAI/ACM SIGAI Dissertation Award. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT and a master’s degree in Computer Science from Princeton University.

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Alex Hawkinson
Founder & CEO of BrightAI

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Alex is the Founder and CEO of BrightAI, a physical AI company that gives operators of essential infrastructure real-time visibility into their field operations. Its customers work in power, water, HVAC, and pest control.

Prior to BrightAI, Alex was Founder and CEO of SmartThings, which grew into the world’s largest consumer IoT platform, with more than 1 billion connected devices and 200 million monthly active users. He also co-founded Observable Space and Efficient Computer and sits on several boards, including iFIT.

Alex holds a B.S. in Cognitive Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

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Brian Distelburger
Co-founder of Windmill

about

Brian is the Co-Founder of Windmill, the context graph for your people. It gives HR teams and managers a continuous understanding of their workforce through AI-powered performance reviews and engagement tools.

Prior to Windmill, Brian co-founded Yext and helped grow it from a three-person startup into a 2,000-person public company. Over nearly 18 years there he served as President, COO, and CRO. He was also Chairman of Food Genius, which was acquired by US Foods.

Brian sits on the board of Tech:NYC and holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University.

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Mikey Shulman
Co-founder of Suno

about

Mikey is the Co-Founder of Suno, an AI music platform that lets anyone create original songs. More than 100 million people have used it since its 2022 launch.

Prior to Suno, Mikey was Head of Machine Learning at Kensho Technologies, where he led a team building natural language processing, time-series prediction, and speech transcription systems. He has also been a Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Mikey has been named to the TIME100 AI list. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University and a B.S. in Applied Physics from Columbia University.

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our advantage

At Inspired, one of our greatest assets is the world-class people we're connected to and work alongside. Meet a few of them.

Naveen Rao

CEO of Unconventional AI

Alex Hawkinson

Founder & CEO of BrightAI

Dan Preston

Co-founder & CEO of Stand

Jeff Thompson

Co-founder & CEO of Logiqal

Dr. Becky Kennedy

Co-founder & CEO of Good Inside

Brian Distelburger

Co-founder of Windmill

Mikey Shulman

Co-founder of Suno

Jeremy Gurewitz

Co-founder & CEO of Solace

Amol Deshpande

Founder & CEO of Frontera

Saeju Jeong

Co-founder of Noom

Mateo Jaramillo

Co-founder & CEO of Form Energy

Pete Florence

Co-founder & CEO of Generalist

David Velez

Founder & CEO of Nubank

Deon Nicholas

Co-founder & CEO of Espa Labs

Peter Colis

CEO of Ethos

Howie Liu

CEO & Founding Team of Hyperagent

Jonathan Frankle

Chief AI Scientist of Databricks

Marcelo Claure

Founder & CEO of The Claure Group