Murali is a veteran payments operator who has spent over 20 years designing and running global payments and FX infrastructure across Asia, the US, and Europe. Formerly at Wise and Standard Chartered, he has built production-grade systems inside regulated banks and fintechs at scale.

Alexa Baggio is the Co-Founder and CEO of CVRD Health, where she’s focused on modernizing employee benefits in highly regulated environments. She’s spent her career building and scaling various companies across benefits, healthcare, and workplace innovation, with a focus on simplifying complex systems and designing tools that actually work for the people who use them.

Prior to CVRD, Alexa founded PERKSCon, Showcase (acquired in 2023), and Kolective - a national HR consulting network. Her experience working closely with employers, brokers, and operators gave her a firsthand view into how outdated benefits systems drive unnecessary cost and complexity and shaped CVRD’s mission. 

Alexa holds a B.A. with honors from Brown University and regularly serves as a board member, advisor, and guest lecturer.

Ivan Burazin co-founded Codeanywhere, a pioneer in cloud development, back in 2009. Concurrently, he established Shift, a premier developer conference in Europe, which was later acquired by Infobip—a global communications cloud giant—in 2021. Following the acquisition, Ivan served on the executive board of this 4,000-person company and as the Chief Developer Experience Officer, where he oversaw global developer-oriented operations. In 2023, Ivan co-founded Daytona, a fast-growing open-source platform addressing the limitations of AI coding agents by enabling them to programmatically and securely interact with runtime environments. Backed by $7M in funding, Daytona empowers developers—from startups to Fortune 500 companies—to utilize agents to their full potential.

Augustus Doricko is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Rainmaker Technology Corporation, a California-based technology company advancing the science of precipitation enhancement through advanced drones and next-generation radar systems. A Thiel Fellow and attendee of the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Doricko leads Rainmaker’s mission to address global water scarcity and declining snowback by enabling reliable, data-driven weather modification to support agriculture, ecosystems, and regional resilience.  

Gregg Johnson is CEO of Invoca, the trusted data + AI platform that empowers marketing, commerce, and contact center teams to drive efficient revenue growth. With a product-first mindset and a strong focus on customers, Gregg has scaled Invoca beyond $100M in ARR and established the company as a leader in AI technology.

He brings two decades of experience building category-defining software products and go-to-market engines. At Salesforce, he led the Marketing Cloud’s social portfolio, integrating over $1B in acquisitions, and ran the product teams on Salesforce Chatter. Earlier roles at Boston Consulting Group and Silicon Valley startups shaped his practical approach to innovation and growth.

Gregg graduated from Stanford University and holds a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.

Alex Kiam is the founder and CEO of Neon, the app that pays you to talk on the phone.

Alex grew up in New York City and from an early age was fascinated with how to derive value from data. In college, he started a personal trading account that significantly outperformed market indices. He used “alternative data,” including poll numbers, Twitter likes, and even soccer tournament schedules, to predict and profitably trade on events like Brexit, the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, and various quarterly earnings reports.

He started his career as a hedge fund quant at Eminence Capital, a $7 billion fund based in New York City. At Eminence, Alex continued to focus on ways to leverage alternative data to make more accurate investment decisions.

After attending business school, Alex led special projects at Protege, an AI training data vendor, where he gained firsthand exposure to how training data is sourced, evaluated, and used across the AI ecosystem. While Protege did not work with conversational audio, the role gave Alex a broad view into the growing importance of high-quality data for model development.

At the same time, Alex had been thinking independently about conversational data, an idea he began developing prior to and during business school, as voice-based interfaces and AI systems became more prevalent. He observed that across the industry, many companies profit from people’s data without meaningful transparency, consent, or compensation. Believing there was an opportunity to build a more consumer-aligned model, he left Protege to found Neon.

Neon is built on the idea that users should explicitly opt in, understand how their data is used, and be paid for it, creating a system that puts consumers at the center of the AI data economy.

Since launching in September, Neon has experienced historic viral growth, becoming the #2 free app on the App Store within 10 days of launch and growing to over half a million users. Neon recently raised a $25M hybrid seed led by Lightspeed (equity) and Upper90 (credit), with participation from Upfront Ventures and numerous others, following a pre-seed led by Upfront. Neon has secured contracts with top AI labs and has expanded to a team of 14.

Alex received an AB in Applied Math from Harvard, an MPhil in Economics from Oxford, and an MBA from Stanford. He is a lifelong Jets fan.

John Malsbury is Co-Founder and CEO of AnySignal, where he builds systems that connect people and technology. From advanced RF and signal processing to the culture and vision that enable high-performing teams to thrive.

John spent nearly a decade at SpaceX, leading and contributing to mission-critical communications, DSP, and FPGA systems across Falcon, Dragon, Starship, Starlink, and deep-space programs. He founded AnySignal to bring that same rigor, speed, and clarity of purpose to national security and space infrastructure.

Earlier in his career, John helped shape the modern software-defined radio ecosystem. As an RF and Communications Architect at Spire, he developed and deployed SDR systems for the company’s first satellites, directly enabling early on-orbit success and a subsequent Series A raise. At Ettus Research, he managed the USRP product line, blending deep technical expertise with product strategy, go-to-market execution, and customer engagement, driving sustained growth while supporting applications ranging from satellite communications to radar and signals intelligence.

He’s always open to thoughtful conversations about technology and leadership. 

As a Swiss undergraduate student at Harvard College tutoring economics for pocket money, Nico Simko found himself baffled by the inefficiency of the traditional two-week pay cycle. He was surprised to find that payment arrived via a mailed paper check. Short on cash for weekend activities, he'd often find himself visiting his mailbox two or three times a day, hoping his latest remuneration had arrived. While getting paid was an inconvenience, finding a place to deposit his wages felt like an impossibility. It took months for Simko to receive a social security number and further weeks to open a bank account successfully. Was this the norm? Simko wondered. If it had been this tricky for him as a Harvard economics student, how hard was it for someone without his advantages? Several years later, after working in JPMorgan's payments division on M&A and partnerships, this thought would eventually lead to the genesis of Clair. Founded in 2020 by Nico Simko and Alex Kostecki, Clair made its public debut in 2021 with an industry-leading on-demand pay tool. Nico has since been recognized by American Banker as Innovator of the Year (2024) and by Forbes for 30 under 30 (2024).

Dr. Michael G. Smayda is founder and CEO at Fortastra Corporation. Previously, he was co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Hermeus Corporation, a venture-backed high-speed aircraft company, where he led internal product development as well as external business development, requirements generation, and congressional engagement. Prior to Hermeus, Michael spent 5 years at SpaceX on the Falcon 9 launch vehicle working aerodynamics and aerothermodynamics for booster entry, descent and landing, design criteria, systems engineering, and hardware design for Falcon Heavy. Dr. Smayda has a PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the University of Virginia and a BS in the same from Cornell University. He lives in Hermosa Beach, CA.

Ali is a fintech operator and investor, having spent 15 years building and backing core financial infrastructure. As a founding member of Point72 Ventures and a leader at Techstars Fintech, he has supported companies like DriveWealth, ZeroHash, and Chainalysis from inception.

Brandon Terry is the Co-Founder and CEO of Village, where he's building the AI Care Orchestration Layer for Pediatrics to make complex pediatric care more connected. A seasoned product executive with a track record of scaling companies through hypergrowth, Brandon previously served as SVP of Product at ID.me, Shippo, and Procore Technologies—where he helped grow the construction tech leader $2M to $400M in ARR as it transformed into the category winner. He also serves as an Operating Adviser at Bessemer Venture Partners, advising portfolio company CEOs and product leaders on scaling their organizations. Brandon holds a B.A. in Business Economics from UC Santa Barbara and is based in Los Angeles.

Aditi Maliwal is a general partner at Upfront Ventures, investing in early stage companies across financial technology and enterprise software. Aditi partners with founders at their earliest stages of inception and supports them throughout the stages of company building. While at Upfront, she has partnered deeply in this way with Arcade, Clair, Renew, Stem, WriterAI and ZestAI amongst others.

Before joining Upfront, Aditi was at Google, first on the Corporate Development team leading acquisitions across various sectors including AI, commerce and fintech, and then on the Next Billion Users team building products for users in emerging markets. Prior to Google she worked in early stage venture at Crosslink Capital where she invested in Chime, BetterUp, and PowerToFly among other companies. She began her career in investment banking at Deutsche Bank, in the technology banking group. She has a B.A. from Stanford University. She has lived between Mumbai, New Delhi, Hong Kong, Singapore and San Francisco.

Stuart joined the firm in April 2014 having spent 14 years in various operational roles at tech companies. He was previously CMO at CareerArc, a social recruiting platform and CMO at Internships.com, the world's largest internships marketplace which was acquired by Chegg. He was also COO at BuildOnline, a SaaS document management company that was acquired by SWORD Group. Earlier in his career, Stuart was an attorney with the international law firm Herbert Smith, where he worked on M&A and corporate finance transactions. Stuart received a first class honors degree in International History and Politics from the University of Leeds and a law degree with distinction from the College of Law in London, England.

Nina runs financial operations and analytics at Upfront. Before joining Upfront, Nina was CFO at Omaze, a venture backed company innovating at the intersection of gaming and charitable fundraising. Before Omaze, Nina was VP Finance at TOMS, which sold to Bain Capital in 2014. Nina started her career in Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs. She received an AB in Economics from Princeton and an MBA from The Wharton School.

Mark Suster is a general partner at Upfront. He previously was the founder & CEO of two successful enterprise software companies, the most recent of which was sold to Salesforce.com where Mark became VP, Products. Prior to being a founder, Mark was a software developer at Accenture where he lived and worked in Europe, Japan and the U.S. Mark is a graduate of UCSD and has an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Kevin looks for interdisciplinary entrepreneurs solving big problems in healthcare and the life sciences. He's also a passionate gamer and invests in interactive media platforms, tools and content. Prior to joining Upfront in 2012, Kevin was at The Boston Consulting Group, where he advised on strategy, M&A and operations for technology, healthcare, and industrial goods clients in the US and Asia. Previously, Kevin worked at Verscend Technologies, a healthcare software startup in Boston, focusing on data analytics product development selling into payers and providers. Kevin studied Biology at Harvard College.