eChai San Francisco

Max Levchin

Founded 2012 by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin; buy-now-pay-later installment lending integrated at checkout with major merchants (Amazon, Shopify, Apple Pay). Public on Nasdaq (AFRM) since 2021. As of 2025 r...

Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia & Nathan Blecharczyk

Founded 2008 renting air mattresses in a SF loft; became the world's largest home-sharing and short-stay travel marketplace. IPO'd December 2020 (NASDAQ: ABNB) and has been consistently profitable since 2022...

Adam Goldstein & Brett Adcock

Founded 2018, HQ Santa Clara with manufacturing in San Jose (South Bay); building the Midnight eVTOL air taxi for urban 'air mobility.' Public via SPAC 2021 (NYSE: ACHR); named official air-taxi provider of ...

Kristen Fortney & Eric Morgen

Longevity biotech founded 2015; mines human aging-cohort data with AI/ML to discover targets for metabolic and aging-related diseases, including obesity/metabolic drugs. Went public on Nasdaq (BIOA) in Septe...

Mike Belshe & Ben Davenport

Founded 2013; pioneered multi-signature institutional crypto custody with a decade-long unblemished security record; ~4,600+ institutional clients and ~$100B assets under custody. IPO'd January 2026 (first p...

Jack Dorsey & Jim McKelvey

Founded 2009 as Square; HQ in Oakland. Operates Square merchant payments, Cash App (57M+ active users) and TIDAL, with a deep Bitcoin strategy — held ~8,997 BTC corporate treasury (Mar 2026) and rolled out m...

Jane Chao & Xingjuan Chao

Neurotech/medtech company (founded 2014) making a rapid, portable EEG headband plus AI ('Clarity') that detects seizures and status epilepticus at the bedside. Completed an upsized ~$207M Nasdaq IPO (CBLL) i...

Richard Lowenthal, Dave Baxter, Harjinder Bhade & Praveen Mandal

Founded 2007 (as Coulomb Technologies); operates one of the world's largest EV-charging networks (NYSE: CHPT), selling AC/DC charging hardware plus cloud software to businesses, fleets and drivers across Nor...

Chris Britt & Ryan King

Founded 2012 in SF; consumer neobank offering fee-free banking, early direct deposit and credit-builder products aimed at everyday and underserved Americans. IPO'd on Nasdaq (CHYM) June 12, 2025, raising ~$8...

Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn & Lee Holloway

Founded 2009; global CDN, edge network, DDoS/security and developer platform (Workers). Public since 2019; a foundational internet-infrastructure and security company and a major hub for edge-compute develop...

Brian Armstrong & Fred Ehrsam

Founded 2012 in SF; the largest U.S. crypto exchange and custodian, public on Nasdaq (COIN) since 2021 and added to the S&P 500 in 2025. Went 'remote-first' with no HQ in 2021 (paid ~$25M to exit its SF leas...

Jay Kreps, Jun Rao & Neha Narkhede 🇮🇳

Founded 2014 to commercialize Apache Kafka (built by the founders at LinkedIn); the data-streaming platform. IPO'd 2021; IBM announced an ~$11B acquisition in Dec 2025 (completed Mar 2026). Co-founder Neha N...

George Kurtz & Dmitri Alperovitch

Founded 2011; cloud-native endpoint protection and the Falcon XDR/threat-intel platform. Public since 2019 and one of the largest pure-play cybersecurity companies (~$100B+ market cap). Recovered strongly af...

Nancy Stagliano, Patrick Daugherty

Founded 2008; pioneers 'Probody' conditionally-activated masked antibodies and ADCs that localize activity to the tumor microenvironment to widen the therapeutic window. Announced a strategic ADC collaborati...

Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang & Evan Moore

Founded 2013 at Stanford as Palo Alto Delivery; the #1 US on-demand food-delivery marketplace, later adding grocery, retail and DashMart. IPO'd December 2020 (NASDAQ: DASH); acquired Wolt (2022) and SevenRoo...

Harrold Rust, Ashok Lahiri & Murali Ramasubramanian

Founded 2007; public (NASDAQ: ENVX) maker of 100% silicon-anode lithium-ion batteries. Its AI-1 smartphone cell was independently validated in 2025 as the highest energy density reported for a smartphone bat...

Julia Hartz, Kevin Hartz & Renaud Visage

Founded 2006; a self-service events ticketing and discovery marketplace used by millions of creators and organizers. IPO'd September 2018 (NYSE: EB); rebuilt its consumer discovery app and creator monetizati...

Dylan Field & Evan Wallace

Founded 2012; browser-based collaborative design and product-development platform. After Adobe's $20B acquisition was abandoned (2023), Figma IPO'd on the NYSE on 31 Jul 2025 (priced $33, opened $85, +250% f...

Girish Mathrubootham & Shan Krishnasamy 🇮🇳

Founded 2010 in Chennai (as Freshdesk); customer-service, IT and CRM SaaS suite with strong AI (Freddy) adoption. HQ moved to San Mateo in 2018; NASDAQ IPO 2021. Founder Girish Mathrubootham — a defining fig...

Robert Swanson & Herbert Boyer

Founded 1976, the world's first biotechnology company and the birthplace of the modern industry, spun out of UCSF recombinant-DNA research. Its 40+ building South SF campus anchors the region's biotech clust...

Jeff Huber (founding CEO)

Founded 2016 (spun out of Illumina); maker of the Galleri multi-cancer early-detection (MCED) blood test that screens for signals across 50+ cancers. Divested from Illumina and now an independent public comp...

Mitchell Hashimoto & Armon Dadgar

Founded 2012; creators of Terraform, Vault, Consul and Nomad — the open-source stack for cloud infrastructure provisioning and secrets management. IPO'd 2021; acquired by IBM for $6.4B (completed Feb 2025). ...

Andrew Dudum, Hilary Coles, Jack Abraham

Founded 2017; a direct-to-consumer digital-health platform connecting patients to licensed providers and personalized treatments across sexual health, weight loss, dermatology and mental health. Publicly tra...

Yujiro Hata

Oncology biotech (South SF + La Jolla) focused on precision-medicine synthetic-lethality drugs, using molecular diagnostics to match patients to targeted therapies. Publicly traded (Nasdaq: IDYA); lead PARG ...

Apoorva Mehta, Max Mullen & Brandon Leonardo

Founded 2012; the leading US grocery-delivery and pickup marketplace, pivoting toward a retail-enablement and advertising platform. IPO'd September 2023 (NASDAQ: CART), one of the highest-profile consumer li...

Frederic Moll, Robert Younge, John Freund

Founded 1995; the pioneer and global leader of robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery via the da Vinci Surgical System (and Ion for lung biopsy). Publicly traded (Nasdaq: ISRG); one of the largest pure-...

Toby Sun & Brad Bao

Founded 2017; the world's largest shared electric-scooter and e-bike micromobility operator across 250+ cities. IPO'd on NASDAQ (LIME) on July 1, 2026 at ~$1.66B valuation after reporting $887M in 2025 reven...

Logan Green & John Zimmer

Founded 2012 (spun out of Zimride); the #2 US ride-hailing network, now adding bikeshare, autonomous partnerships and media. IPO'd March 2019 (NASDAQ: LYFT) just ahead of Uber and posted its first profitable...

Jason Gardner

Founded 2009; pioneered the modern open-API card-issuing and payment-processing platform used by fintechs and enterprises. Public on Nasdaq (MQ) since June 2021. Founder Jason Gardner stepped back from CEO i...

Nirav Tolia, Prakash Janakiraman, Sarah Leary & David Wiesen

Founded 2008 (launched 2011); the neighborhood-based social network for local recommendations, safety and community. Went public via SPAC November 2021 (NYSE: KIND); founder Nirav Tolia returned as CEO in 20...

Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aron & Ajeet Singh 🇮🇳

Founded 2009; pioneer of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and now a hybrid multicloud platform, positioned as a key VMware alternative after the Broadcom acquisition. Public since 2016. Largely Indian-ori...

Todd McKinnon & Frederic Kerrest

Founded 2009; the leading independent identity and access management (IAM/IdP) platform, public since 2017. Acquired Auth0 (2021) to own developer identity as well. Core infrastructure for enterprise SSO and...

Nir Zuk

Founded 2005; the largest standalone cybersecurity company by revenue, spanning next-gen firewalls, Prisma cloud security and Cortex SecOps. Public since 2012; a serial acquirer driving the 'platformization'...

Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp & Paul Sciarra

Founded 2010; a visual-discovery and shopping platform for ideas and inspiration boards. IPO'd April 2019 (NYSE: PINS) and surpassed 550M+ monthly active users by 2025, leaning into AI-driven visual search a...

Will Marshall, Robbie Schingler, Chris Boshuizen

Founded 2010, Planet operates the largest fleet of Earth-imaging satellites, delivering near-daily global imagery and geospatial analytics to commercial, government and defense customers. Public on NYSE (PL)...

Manish Chandra, Tracy Sun, Gautam Golwala & Chetan Pungaliya

Founded 2011 in Redwood City (South Bay); a social-commerce marketplace for reselling fashion, blending shopping with community feeds and live shows. IPO'd January 2021 (NASDAQ: POSH), then acquired by South...

Jagdeep Singh, Tim Holme & Fritz Prinz

Founded 2010, spun out of Stanford; develops solid-state lithium-metal EV batteries and is public (NYSE: QS). In Aug 2025 it began construction of a 1 GWh 'Cobra' pilot line after unveiling an 844 Wh/L silic...

Steve Huffman & Alexis Ohanian

Founded 2005; 'the front page of the internet,' a network of interest-based community forums. IPO'd March 2024 (NYSE: RDDT) in a landmark social-media listing, monetizing data-licensing deals with AI firms a...

Chad Rigetti (founder); Subodh Kulkarni (CEO)

Founded 2013, Rigetti builds superconducting quantum computers and operates them via its cloud (QCS). Public on Nasdaq (RGTI), it held ~$600M in cash/investments as of Nov 2025, took a $35M strategic investm...

Vlad Tenev & Baiju Bhatt (Indian-origin co-founder)

Founded 2013 in Menlo Park; commission-free trading of stocks, options, ETFs and crypto. Public (Nasdaq: HOOD) since 2021; joined the S&P 500 in September 2025 with a market cap around $98B mid-2025. Crypto ...

David Baszucki & Erik Cassel

Founded 2004 (launched 2006) in San Mateo (South Bay); a user-generated gaming and immersive-experience platform driving the consumer 'metaverse.' Direct-listed March 2021 (NYSE: RBLX) and surpassed 85M+ dai...

Bipul Sinha, Arvind Jain, Soham Mazumdar & Arvind Nithrakashyap 🇮🇳

Founded 2014; cloud data-management and cyber-resilience / data-security platform (backup, recovery, ransomware protection). IPO'd on the NYSE in Apr 2024 at ~$5.6B, raising $752M. Predominantly Indian-origi...

Marc Benioff & Parker Harris

Founded 1999; the company that defined cloud CRM and 'no software' SaaS. Anchor of the SF enterprise-software ecosystem and its largest employer; ~$38B annual revenue, aggressively repositioned around the Ag...

Tomer Weingarten & Almog Cohen

Founded 2013; AI-driven autonomous endpoint/XDR security platform (Singularity) and a direct CrowdStrike competitor. IPO'd 2021 in what was then the largest cybersecurity IPO. Expanding into AI-SIEM and clou...

Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes & Marcin Zukowski

Founded 2012; the cloud data-warehouse pioneer, one of the largest software IPOs ever (2020). Became a 'distributed' company with an executive office in Bozeman MT in 2021 but relocated its HQ back to Califo...

Lynn Jurich, Ed Fenster & Nat Kreamer

Founded 2007; the largest US residential solar and home-battery company (NASDAQ: RUN), which pioneered the solar-as-a-service leasing model. Increasingly bundles rooftop solar with storage into virtual-power...

Trevor Hallam & team (Stanford/UC science)

Clinical-stage biotech using its cell-free protein-synthesis platform (XpressCF) to design next-generation antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) and bispecifics, notably in ovarian cancer. Publicly traded (Nasdaq:...

Julie Wainwright

Founded 2011; the leading authenticated luxury-consignment resale marketplace. IPO'd June 2019 (NASDAQ: REAL); reached its first quarters of adjusted-EBITDA and free-cash-flow positivity in 2024 under a turn...

James Reinhart, Chris Homer & Oliver Lubin

Founded 2009 in Oakland (East Bay); one of the largest online resale marketplaces for secondhand apparel, plus a resale-as-a-service platform for brands. IPO'd March 2021 (NASDAQ: TDUP) and returned to reven...

Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke & John Wolthuis

Founded 2008; the programmable communications API company (SMS, voice, email via SendGrid, and customer-data/Segment). Public since 2016; the canonical API-first / developer-first infrastructure business and...

Emily Leproust, Bill Peck, Bill Banyai

Founded 2013; a synthetic-biology leader using a proprietary silicon-based platform to manufacture synthetic DNA at scale for drug discovery, diagnostics, agriculture and DNA data storage. Publicly traded (N...

Travis Kalanick & Garrett Camp

Founded 2009 as UberCab; the ride-hail pioneer that seeded the global gig-mobility economy and now spans rides, Uber Eats delivery, and freight. IPO'd on NYSE (UBER) in May 2019 and turned its first full-yea...

Gregg Dixon & Dana Guernsey

Founded 2016; a distributed-energy-resource (virtual power plant) platform that aggregates commercial and industrial demand-flexibility to sell into wholesale power markets. Went public via SPAC (Broadscale)...

Jeremy Stoppelman & Russel Simmons

Founded 2004 by two early PayPal employees; the dominant US local-business reviews and discovery platform. IPO'd March 2012 (NYSE: YELP) and has reoriented around AI-assisted search and services lead-gen.

Jesse Levinson & Tim Kentley-Klay

Founded 2014 in Foster City (South Bay); building a purpose-built, bidirectional autonomous robotaxi with no steering wheel. Acquired by Amazon in 2020 for ~$1.2B; began public robotaxi rides in Las Vegas in...

Jay Chaudhry 🇮🇳

Founded 2007; the zero-trust cloud-security / SASE leader (Zero Trust Exchange) that pioneered securing users directly to apps rather than via the network perimeter. Public since 2018. Founder-CEO Jay Chaudh...

Evan Reiser & Sanjay Jeyakumar 🇮🇳

Founded 2018; AI-native email/human-behavior security that models normal behavior to block socially-engineered attacks. Raised a $250M Series D in Aug 2024 at a $5.1B valuation; crossed $200M ARR with 100% Y...

Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad & Emmett Nicholas

Founded 2012; no-code/low-code database-spreadsheet hybrid for building custom business apps. Peaked at an $11B valuation; repositioned in 2024–2026 as an AI-native app-building platform (Airtable AI / Omni)...

Nikil Viswanathan & Joe Lau (Indian-origin co-founder)

Founded 2013; leading Web3 developer infrastructure — node APIs, rollups-as-a-service, smart wallets, gasless transactions and DeFi primitives — often called the 'AWS of web3.' Decacorn valued at $10.2B (202...

Diogo Mónica & Nathan McCauley

Founded 2017; the first U.S. federally chartered crypto bank (OCC national trust charter), providing institutional custody, staking, trading and settlement. Valued at ~$4.2B (backers include a16z, GIC, Goldm...

Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark & Aman Sanger

Founded 2022; maker of Cursor, the AI-native code editor that became the fastest-growing developer tool ever — from $100M ARR (Jan 2025) to ~$4B ARR (Jun 2026). Series D (Nov 2025) valued it at $29.3B with N...

Mo Shaikh & Avery Ching (Indian-origin co-founder)

Founded 2021 by former Meta Diem/Libra engineers; develops the Aptos Layer-1 blockchain (Move language, high throughput). Raised ~$350M (a16z, Jump, FTX Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Circle Ventures). Direct...

John Gedmark, Ryan McLinko

Founded 2015, Astranis builds small, low-cost geostationary (MicroGEO) communications satellites to deliver broadband to underserved regions. It raised a $187M Series C in 2025 (Khosla Ventures, Founders Fun...

Ryan Breslow & Eric Feldman

Founded 2014; one-click checkout and shopper-network platform for online retailers. Peaked at an $11B valuation (2021), crashed to ~$300M (2024); founder Ryan Breslow returned as CEO and in 2026 was raising ...

Henrique Dubugras & Pedro Franceschi

Founded 2017 by Brazilian founders; corporate cards, spend management and business banking for startups and enterprises. Peaked at a $12.3B valuation (2022); became operating-cash-flow positive in 2025. In A...

Andrew Feldman, Gary Lauterbach, Sean Lie

Founded 2015, Cerebras makes the Wafer-Scale Engine — the largest AI chip ever built — and sells AI training/inference systems and cloud. It closed a ~$1.1B round (Sept 2025) at a ~$23B valuation, reported ~...

Noam Shazeer & Daniel De Freitas

Founded 2021 in Menlo Park (South Bay); a consumer platform for chatting with customizable AI companion characters, a breakout hit with Gen Z. Valued at ~$1B (2023); in a $2.7B August 2024 deal Google licens...

Mohit Aron 🇮🇳

Founded 2013; AI-powered data security and management (backup, recovery, threat detection). Merged with Veritas' data-protection business in Dec 2024, creating a ~$7B, 12,000+ customer leader in data protect...

Othman Laraki, Elad Gil, Nish Bhat, Taylor Sittler

Founded 2015 as Color Genomics; a population-health platform spanning genetic testing, cancer risk screening and virtual care, plus an AI 'Copilot' for oncology built with OpenAI (2024). Scaled national COVI...

Sid Sheth, Sudeep Bhoja

Founded 2019, d-Matrix builds digital in-memory-compute (DIMC) chips (Corsair platform) targeting cost- and energy-efficient generative-AI inference. It raised $275M (Nov 2025) at a ~$2B valuation, and its C...

Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, Ion Stoica, Reynold Xin & Berkeley AMPLab co-founders

Founded 2013 out of UC Berkeley (creators of Apache Spark); the leading data + AI 'lakehouse' platform. Closed a >$4B Series L in Dec 2025 at a $134B valuation and surpassed a $5.4B revenue run-rate (up 65% ...

Jason Citron & Stanislav Vishnevskiy

Founded 2015; a voice-, video- and text-chat platform for communities that began in gaming and expanded across interest groups. Last valued at ~$14.7B; filed confidentially for an IPO in early 2026, with Hum...

Jaspreet Singh & Milind Borate 🇮🇳

Founded 2008 in Pune, later HQ'd in Santa Clara; the leading SaaS platform for data resiliency / cloud backup and cyber recovery, delivered fully as-a-service on AWS. A unicorn (~$2B); one of the earliest In...

Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu, Robert Wachen

Founded 2022, Etched builds Sohu — a transformer-specialized ASIC that hard-wires the transformer architecture into silicon for dramatically faster/cheaper inference. It reportedly secured ~$500M in early 20...

Max Rhodes, Marcelo Cortes, Daniele Perito & Jeffrey Kolovson

Founded 2017; a B2B wholesale marketplace connecting 100,000+ independent retailers with 20,000+ makers and brands. Reached a peak $12.6B valuation; a late-2025 tender valued it near $5.2B as it scaled ARR p...

Brett Adcock

Founded 2022, Figure is the most-funded pure-play humanoid robotics company (~$1.9B raised). Its Figure 03 humanoid, launched October 2025 and redesigned for high-volume manufacturing and home use, was named...

Lin Qiao & Dmytro Dzhulgakov

Founded 2022 by ex-Meta PyTorch engineers; a fast, cost-optimized generative-AI inference platform for enterprises. Raised $250M Series C in Oct 2025 at a $4B valuation and was in talks in 2026 at a reported...

Gabriel Otte, Charlie Roberts, Riley Ennis

Founded 2014; a multiomics liquid-biopsy company using machine learning on blood-based genomic, protein and methylation signals for early cancer detection (lead: colorectal cancer screening). Raised $254M in...

Jonathan Ross, Douglas Wightman

Founded 2016 by an ex-Google TPU engineer, Groq builds LPU inference chips optimized for low-latency LLM serving via GroqCloud. After raising at a ~$6.9B valuation in 2025, it became the landmark AI-chip dea...

Jyoti Bansal & Rishikesh Tirumala 🇮🇳

Founded 2017; AI-native software-delivery / DevOps platform (CI/CD, feature flags, cloud-cost, and 'everything after code'). Raised a $240M Series E in Dec 2025 (Goldman-led) at a $5.5B valuation with $250M+...

Owen Tripp (merger of Grand Rounds + Doctor On Demand)

Formed 2021 via the Grand Rounds/Doctor On Demand merger (later + Included Health); an integrated virtual-care and care-navigation platform for employers and health plans spanning primary care, behavioral he...

Daphne Koller

Founded 2018 by Coursera/Stanford ML pioneer Daphne Koller. A TechBio drug-discovery platform integrating in-vitro cellular data with human clinical data via machine learning to find targets and intervention...

Dan Cook, Bryce Tennant & Michael Stowell

Founded 2015; develops lithium-sulfur batteries and 3D-graphene 'supermaterials.' In July 2025 it acquired Europe's largest battery-energy-storage manufacturing operation from bankrupt Northvolt, plus a Pola...

Jennifer Doudna, Trevor Martin, Janice Chen, Lucas Harrington

Co-founded 2017 by CRISPR Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna; develops ultra-small CRISPR systems (Cas14/Casɸ) for in-vivo therapeutics and CRISPR-based diagnostics. Reached unicorn status in 2021 ($195M raise)....

Immad Akhund (Indian/Pakistani-origin founder)

Founded 2017; digital banking for startups and SMBs, serving 300,000+ companies. Raised a $300M Series C at $3.5B (March 2025), then $200M Series D at a $5.2B valuation (2026, +49% in 14 months, led by TCV)....

Evan Cheng, Sam Blackshear, George Danezis, Kostas Chalkias & Adeniyi Abiodun

Founded 2021 by ex-Meta Novi/Diem engineers; builds the Sui Layer-1 blockchain and Move-based infrastructure for Web3 apps. Reached a $2B valuation (2022) having raised ~$336M (FTX Ventures, a16z, Jump). [FL...

Elon Musk & founding team

Founded 2016; developing implantable brain-computer interfaces (the N1 implant + R1 surgical robot) to restore movement/communication, with first human implants in 2024. Maintains a large Fremont operation a...

Dave Ferguson, Jiajun Zhu

Founded 2016 by ex-Waymo engineers, Nuro builds autonomous driving systems, having shifted from its own delivery pods to licensing its 'Nuro Driver' L4 stack. Its 2025 Series E raised ~$203M (Uber, Nvidia) a...

Will Regan & Eric Lander

Founded 2023; pursuing inertial-confinement fusion driven by a pulser-based electromagnetic 'pulsed magnetic' driver rather than lasers. Stunned the sector with a ~$900M Series A in 2024 (General Catalyst, B...

Jack Conte & Sam Yam

Founded 2013; the leading membership platform letting creators earn recurring income directly from fans. Valued at ~$4B (2021); expanded into gifts, commerce and a native app, positioning as a core pillar of...

Ryan Pandya & Perumal Gandhi

Founded 2014; pioneer of precision-fermentation animal-free dairy proteins (whey) that a third-party LCA found cut greenhouse-gas emissions up to 97% and blue-water use up to 99% vs conventional dairy. Now r...

Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho & Andy Konwinski

Founded 2022; a consumer AI 'answer engine' challenging traditional search, now with an agentic Comet browser and shopping features. Valuation rocketed from $121M (April 2023) to ~$20B by September 2025, one...

Brandon Millman, Francesco Agosti & Chris Kalani

Founded 2021; the dominant multichain self-custody crypto wallet (Solana-first, now multichain), with ~15M+ active users and ~$20B annual trade volume. Raised a $150M Series C at a $3B valuation (January 202...

Karol Hausman, Sergey Levine, Lachy Groom

Founded 2024, Physical Intelligence builds general-purpose foundation models (pi-zero) that let a single AI transfer manipulation skills across different robot bodies — folding laundry, assembling electronic...

Waseem Daher, Jessica McKellar & Jeff Arnold

Founded 2017; tech-enabled bookkeeping, tax and CFO services for startups and SMBs. Backed by Sequoia, Index and Bezos Expeditions; hit a $1.2B valuation in 2021. Serves thousands of venture-backed companies.

Zach Perret & William Hockey

Founded 2013; the connective 'plumbing' of fintech — APIs linking consumer bank accounts to apps, plus identity, anti-fraud, credit and payments. Peaked at $13.4B (2021); a 2026 tender offer set the valuatio...

Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobti & Abhijit Kane 🇮🇳

Founded 2012 in Bangalore as a side project; the de-facto API development and collaboration platform, used by 30M+ developers. Moved HQ to SF in 2017 and opened a new SF HQ in 2025; last valued at $5.6B (202...

Jeremy O'Brien, Terry Rudolph, Mark Thompson, Pete Shadbolt

Founded 2016, PsiQuantum is building a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer using photonic qubits fabricated on standard semiconductor processes (with GlobalFoundries). It closed a ~$1B round (Sept 2...

David Hsu

Founded 2017 (YC); low-code platform for building internal business tools and apps fast, now extending into AI agents. Valued ~$3.2B with ~$138M+ revenue; a leader in the internal-tooling / developer-product...

Chris Larsen & Jed McCaleb

Founded 2012; enterprise crypto payments and infrastructure built around the XRP Ledger, plus the RLUSD stablecoin. In 2025 spent ~$2.45B on acquisitions — Hidden Road ($1.25B prime brokerage, closed Oct 202...

Rodrigo Liang, Kunle Olukotun, Christopher Ré

Founded 2017 out of Stanford, SambaNova builds reconfigurable dataflow (RDU) AI chips and full-stack systems for enterprise/government AI inference and training. It has raised over $1.1B (Series D at a ~$5B ...

Alexandr Wang & Lucy Guo

Founded 2016; data-labeling and data-engine platform for training AI/ML models and a major government/defense AI contractor. In Jun 2025 Meta took a ~49% stake for ~$14.3B, valuing Scale at ~$29B, and co-fou...

David Cramer & Chris Jennings

Founded 2012 as an open-source project; the widely-adopted application error-monitoring and performance/observability platform for developers. Valued ~$3B; a flagship open-source-first devtools business with...

Rob Woollen & Jason Frantz

Founded 2014; cloud-native BI and analytics that lets business users explore live warehouse data with a spreadsheet-like interface (deeply tied to Snowflake/Databricks). Raised a $200M Series D in 2024 at a ...

Gene Berdichevsky, Gleb Yushin & Alex Jacobs

Founded 2011 by Tesla employee #7 Gene Berdichevsky; makes silicon-anode battery materials that boost energy density. Raised a $375M Series G in June 2024 (total >$900M) to complete its Moses Lake, WA manufa...

Adam Bry, Abraham Bachrach, Matt Donahoe

Founded 2014, Skydio is the largest US drone maker. After exiting consumer drones in 2023 it pivoted to defense, public safety and enterprise autonomy; over half of its $1.2B in bookings now come from defens...

Anatoly Yakovenko & Raj Gokal (Indian-origin co-founder)

Founded 2018 in SF; core developer of the Solana Layer-1 blockchain, a high-throughput proof-of-stake chain (mainnet 2020) built on the novel Proof-of-History mechanism. ~250 employees across six continents;...

Patrick & John Collison

Founded 2010; developer-first payments infrastructure, the most valuable private fintech/infra company in the US (~$90B+ tuck-in tender valuations 2024–2025). A defining API-infrastructure company: 'seven li...

Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie & Jairaj Sethi

Founded 2017; a subscription-publishing platform for newsletters, audio and video that pays writers directly. Raised a $100M Series C in July 2025 at a $1.1B valuation (led by BOND and The Chernin Group), cr...

Paul Copplestone & Ant Wilson

Founded 2020; the open-source Firebase alternative — a Postgres-based backend-as-a-service (auth, storage, edge functions, realtime, vector search). A breakout among AI-app and indie developers; raised a lar...

Kyle Vogt, Paril Jain, Luke Holoubek

Founded 2024 by Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt, The Bot Company builds household robots to automate chores. It closed a $150M Series B in March 2025 led by Greenoaks at a $2B post-money valuation, raising ~$300...

Marco Zappacosta, Jonathan Swanson, Sander Daniels & Jeremy Tunnell

Founded 2008; a local-services marketplace connecting homeowners with pros for repairs, cleaning and projects. Last valued at ~$3.2B (2021); shifted to a home-management app and AI-guided project matching, w...

Vipul Ved Prakash, Ce Zhang, Chris Ré & Percy Liang 🇮🇳

Founded 2022; a GPU/AI-cloud ('neocloud') for training and serving open-source models at scale. Raised $305M Series B (Feb 2025, $3.3B) then $800M Series C (Jul 2026) leaping to an $8.3B valuation. Co-founde...

Guillermo Rauch

Founded 2015 (as ZEIT); the frontend cloud behind open-source Next.js and, increasingly, an 'AI cloud' with the v0 generative-UI tool. Closed a $300M Series F in Sep/Oct 2025 at a $9.3B valuation. A central ...

Taylor Francis, Christian Anderson & Avi Itskovich

Founded 2019 by ex-Stripe carbon-tools builders; enterprise carbon-accounting and climate-disclosure software that measures footprints, sets science-based targets and automates regulatory reporting. Raised a...

(Alphabet; John Krafcik/Tekedra Mawakana, Dmitri Dolgov)

Alphabet's autonomous-driving unit (spun out of Google's self-driving project, 2016) operates commercial robotaxi service across SF, the Peninsula/Silicon Valley and beyond, including freeways as of late 202...

Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Keenan Wyrobek, Will Hetzler

Founded 2014, Zipline operates the world's largest autonomous drone-delivery network for medical supplies, food and retail across the US and Africa. It surpassed 2 million deliveries in January 2026 and rais...

Charles Wuischpard (CEO), founders Alex Wright-Gladstein, Chen Sun, Mark Wade

Founded 2015, Ayar Labs makes optical I/O (co-packaged silicon photonics 'TeraPHY' chiplets) to move data between AI chips at far higher bandwidth and lower power than copper. Backed by AMD Ventures and NVID...

Pierre-Damien Vaujour, Alex Greenberg

Founded 2017, Loft Orbital offers 'space infrastructure as a service' — its standardized satellite buses (and Condosat model) let any customer fly a payload without building a satellite. It raised $170M (Jan...

Reiner Pope, Mike Gunter

Founded 2023 by ex-Google engineers, MatX designs chips purpose-built for the largest LLMs, prioritizing throughput for frontier AI labs. It raised a $500M Series B in early 2026 led by Jane Street and Situa...

Andre Haddad

Founded 2010 (as RelayRides); the largest peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace, 'the Airbnb of cars.' Filed to IPO in 2022 but formally withdrew its S-1 in February 2025 amid soft market conditions; remains ...

Etosha Cave, Kendra Kuhl & Nicholas Flanders

Founded 2015 (as Opus 12), spun out of Stanford; its CO2 electrolyzer turns captured CO2, water and renewable electricity into 'E-Jet' sustainable aviation fuel and other fossil-free chemicals. Announced $64...

Brett Granberg, Nini Moorhead, Scott Sanders

Founded 2019, Vannevar Labs builds AI-powered intelligence and non-kinetic capabilities — turning foreign open-source communications into real-time actionable intelligence for the US military and allies. It ...

Baiju Bhatt

Founded 2024 by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, Aetherflux (recently renamed Cowboy Space Corporation) is developing space-based solar power — LEO satellites that beam energy to Earth via infrared lasers. ...

Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz & Chris Dixon

a16z (founded 2009) runs a16z crypto, the world's most influential crypto/Web3 venture arm, led by Chris Dixon. Its four crypto funds held ~$9.5B AUM (2025); its first fund returned a 5.4x net DPI. Raising a...

Andrew Ponec, David Bierman & Justin Briggs

Founded 2017; makes thermal batteries that store renewable electricity as heat in glowing-hot solid carbon blocks to deliver zero-carbon industrial heat and power. Raised a $150M Series B in early 2024 (Deca...

Ion Stoica, Robert Nishihara & Philipp Moritz

Founded 2019 out of UC Berkeley RISELab; the company behind open-source Ray, the distributed-compute framework widely used to train and serve large AI models. A key AI-infrastructure/compute-orchestration pl...

Ken Drazan (CEO), Kole Roybal & Alex Marson (UCSF science)

Founded 2019 on UCSF-developed programmable cell-therapy tech; builds next-generation autologous CAR-T therapies for solid tumors. Raised $325M Series C in September 2024, one of the year's largest biotech r...

Andy Yeung, Ivana Djuretic

Founded 2019 and backed by Third Rock Ventures; develops 'cis-targeted' immunotherapies (cytokines that signal only to specific immune cell types) to improve precision in cancer and immunology. Lead asset AB...

Ben Bloom, Rob Hays (CEO)

Founded 2018, Atom Computing builds neutral-atom quantum computers and demonstrated a >1,000-qubit system. Playground Global led its earlier Series B; in late 2025 it was in talks to join the federal quantum...

Kate Rosenbluth & Deanna Harshbarger (Stanford science)

Bioelectronic neurotech medtech company (founded 2013) whose wrist-worn Cala kIQ delivers transcutaneous afferent patterned stimulation (TAPS) to reduce hand tremor in essential tremor and Parkinson's. Close...

Eren Bali & Caesar Djavaherian

Founded 2015 by Udemy co-founder Eren Bali; a tech-enabled hybrid primary/urgent-care provider with an AI-assisted EHR and a national clinic network. Well-funded private; expanded AI charting in 2024.

Priscilla Chan & Mark Zuckerberg (founders); Stephen Quake (science)

Nonprofit research institute (launched 2016) in Mission Bay that funds and collaborates across UCSF, UC Berkeley and Stanford, pursuing AI-powered biology, virtual cell models and infectious-disease tools. B...

Peter Reinhardt, Shaun Meehan & Kelly Hering

Founded 2018 by Segment co-founder Peter Reinhardt; converts agricultural biomass (corn stover) into bio-oil via pyrolysis and injects it into geologic storage for permanent carbon removal. Raised a $100M Se...

Arum, Dawoon & Soo Kang

Founded 2012 by three sisters (of Shark Tank fame); a curated, 'quality over quantity' dating app that emphasizes intentional matches. Bay Area's most prominent homegrown dating platform; relaunched with new...

William Hockey & Annie Hockey

Founded 2019 by Plaid co-founder William Hockey; a nationally chartered 'developer infrastructure bank' offering deposits, ACH/wire, real-time payments and lending directly to fintechs — no middleware. Notab...

Solomon Hykes (founder); Scott Johnston (CEO)

Founded 2013 (from dotCloud); popularized software containers and remains the default developer local-container toolchain (Docker Desktop, Hub, Build Cloud). Refocused on developer tooling after selling its ...

Teddy Solomon & Ashton Cofer

Founded 2020 at Stanford; an anonymous Gen Z social network scaled to 240+ college campuses and 60+ high schools, positioned as the 'anti-Facebook.' Raised $41.5M total (Owl Ventures, NEA) and added a studen...

Shashank Samala & Noah McQueen

Founded 2020; limestone-based direct air capture that accelerates natural mineralization to pull CO2 from the air in ~3 days. Operates North America's first commercial DAC facility in Tracy, CA and signed a ...

Matt Rogers & Harry Tannenbaum

Founded 2020 by Nest co-founder Matt Rogers; a countertop kitchen bin that dries and grinds food scraps overnight into dry 'Food Grounds' that are mailed back to be turned into animal-feed ingredient, divert...

Jonny Dyer, Reuben Rohrschneider, Dan McCleese

Founded 2021, Muon Space designs and operates end-to-end small-satellite constellations for climate, weather and defense/commercial Earth-observation missions. It closed a ~$146M Series B (initial 2024 + $89...

Dan Morehead

Founded 2013; the first U.S. institutional asset manager focused exclusively on blockchain, spanning venture, liquid-token and yield strategies. Long-standing early backer across the ecosystem; in 2025 retur...

Matt Huang & Fred Ehrsam

Crypto-native VC founded 2018 by ex-Sequoia partner Matt Huang and Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam; among the most respected research-driven crypto funds (backer of Uniswap, Phantom, Optimism and more). In 2...

Brennan Spellacy & Aaron Grunfeld

Founded 2020; an API-first marketplace and infrastructure layer for buying carbon credits and carbon removal, letting companies integrate offsetting/removal into their products and procurement. Has raised mo...

Ali Madani

Founded 2022; a Bio-AI 'frontier models for programmable biology' company. First to demonstrate LLM-generated functional proteins (Nature Biotechnology, 2023) and open-sourced OpenCRISPR-1, an AI-designed ge...

Pete von Behrens & John O'Donnell

Founded 2020; the Rondo Heat Battery stores renewable power in brick stacks to supply continuous high-temperature industrial heat. Closed a $60M Series B in June 2024 with Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Micro...

Soups Ranjan (Indian-origin founder)

AI risk platform for fraud prevention, compliance (AML/KYC) and credit underwriting using device intelligence and behavioral biometrics. Raised a $70M Series C in Feb 2025 (led by Activant; a16z, GV, Experia...

Benjamin Oakes, Jennifer Doudna, Brett Staahl, David Savage

Founded 2018 out of the Doudna lab; engineers proprietary CRISPR (CasX/XE) genome and epigenome editors for in-vivo therapeutics. Multi-billion-dollar collaborations with Sanofi and Prevail/Lilly. Presented ...

Arch Rao

Founded 2018 by former Tesla Powerwall lead Arch Rao; reinvents the home electrical panel as a smart, software-controlled hub for solar, batteries, EV charging and electrified appliances. Raised a $96.5M Ser...

Kara Egan & Avnesh Thakor

Femtech company developing the Teal Wand, an at-home self-collection device for cervical cancer (HPV) screening that received FDA clearance in 2025. Aims to expand access beyond in-clinic Pap smears. Venture...

Apoorv Bhargava & John Taggart

Founded 2018; software that helps utilities manage EV charging load, orchestrating managed charging to avoid grid upgrades as EV adoption surges. Partners with utilities including PG&E, DTE and Xcel. One of ...

Marc Tessier-Lavigne (CEO), David Baker (co-founder)

Launched April 2024 with a landmark ~$1B commitment incubated by ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs. Combines machine learning, large-scale data generation and therapeutic development; co-founded by Nob...

Kannan Muthukkaruppan, Karthik Ranganathan & Mikhail Bautin 🇮🇳

Founded 2016 by ex-Facebook/Nutanix engineers; open-source distributed SQL database (Postgres-compatible) for cloud-native, globally-scaled apps. A leading distributed-database challenger to CockroachDB and ...

Sky Dauphin & Mark Cyffka

Founded 2022; builds modular direct-air-capture machines that pull CO2 from ambient air for downstream utilization or sequestration, targeting a lower-cost chemical process. An early-stage Berkeley DAC start...

(stealth-emerged 2024/25)

An early-stage advanced-manufacturing startup developing next-generation chip-fabrication machines, aiming to make the most powerful chips up to ~15x faster and to reshore advanced fabrication capacity to th...

AI clinical documentation & coding

Founded 2020 by Nikhil Buduma and Mike Ng. AI documentation and medical-coding platform for health systems. Closed a $243M Series C in July 2025 (Oak HC/FT, a16z) at a $1.25B valuation, reaching unicorn stat...

Dario Amodei & Daniela Amodei

Founded 2021 by ex-OpenAI leaders; builds the Claude family of frontier models with a safety-first mission and dominant enterprise/coding traction. Overtook OpenAI in the valuation race in 2026, reaching ~$9...

AI model inference infrastructure

Founded 2019. Infrastructure for deploying and serving AI/ML models in production at scale (used by AI-native companies incl. Lovable). Raised a $150M Series D at a $2.2B valuation ($280M+ total) from Greylo...

Karan Goel, Albert Gu, Arjun Desai, Brandon Yang & Chris Ré

Founded 2023 by Stanford researchers behind the state-space (SSM/Mamba) architecture; builds ultra-low-latency real-time voice/audio foundation models (Sonic). Backed by Index, Lightspeed and General Catalys...

physical AI for food manufacturing

San Francisco company providing AI-enabled meal-assembly robots to food manufacturers on a robotics-as-a-service model; robots have completed 70M+ servings across the US and Canada. A rare Bay Area foodtech/...

AI go-to-market / sales data automation

Founded by Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan. AI-powered GTM platform that aggregates 100+ data sources and automates prospecting, enrichment and outbound. Raised a $100M Series C in August 2025 at a $3.1B valua...

active cyber insurance

Founded by Joshua Motta and John Hering. Combines cyber insurance with proactive security monitoring and incident response, bundling coverage with digital-risk management for businesses. Has raised roughly $...

Scott Wu, Steven Hao & Walden Yan

Founded 2023; maker of Devin, the autonomous AI software engineer, and acquirer of Windsurf's IDE. Roughly $492M annualized revenue with clients including Goldman Sachs, Citi and Dell. Raised >$1B at a ~$26B...

Hemant Taneja (General Catalyst) & team

Founded 2017 and scaled via General Catalyst; deploys AI and agents (ambient scribe, revenue-cycle automation) across US health systems. Raised $200M+ growth financing at a ~$7B post-money valuation to expan...

AI customer support agents

Founded 2023 by Jesse Zhang and Ashwin Sreenivas (ex-Palantir, Citadel). Enterprise conversational-AI agents for customer support. Raised a $131M Series C (June 2025, $1.5B) co-led by Accel and a16z, then a ...

global HR, payroll & EOR platform

Founded 2019 in San Francisco by Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang. Global payroll, contractor management and employer-of-record platform serving 100+ countries. Raised ~$979M total; valued at $12B (Feb 2025). Nota...

enterprise AI-native workflow automation

Founded 2022. Builds and deploys AI-native workflows into large-enterprise operations (partnered closely with OpenAI). Raised a $175M Series B at a $1.8B valuation ($200M+ total) from Khosla Ventures and Lig...

AI platform for plaintiff law firms

SF-based legal-AI company (CEO Jay Madheswaran) building an AI platform that helps plaintiff/personal-injury firms manage cases and deliver outcomes. Raised $103M in a Series B at a $1B+ valuation, led by Sp...

AI for personal-injury law

Founded 2019 by Rami Karabibar, Raymond Mieszaniec and Saam Mashhad. AI that builds demand packages and case documents for personal-injury firms. Raised a $150M Series E in October 2025 at a $2B+ valuation (...

agentic AI for audit & advisory firms

SF-based vertical-AI platform (YC) delivering end-to-end agentic workflows for audit, assurance and advisory firms to raise margins and win business. Has raised ~$122M. A leading example of AI reshaping the ...

enterprise AI search & work assistant

Founded 2019 by Arvind Jain (ex-Google, ex-Rubrik co-founder) and team. Enterprise AI search and agent platform that indexes a company's apps to answer work questions and run agents. One of the Bay Area's fa...

payroll, benefits & HR for SMBs

Founded 2011 in San Francisco by Josh Reeves, Tomer London and Edward Kim. Payroll, benefits and HR platform for small and mid-sized businesses. Raised ~$746M total; last valued around $9.5B, with steady exp...

legal AI for law firms & enterprises

Founded 2022 by Winston Weinberg (ex-litigator) and Gabriel Pereyra (ex-DeepMind/Meta AI). AI agents for contract analysis, due diligence, compliance and litigation, used by 142,000+ lawyers across 1,500+ cu...

Stephen Balaban & Michael Balaban

Founded 2012; GPU cloud and hardware for AI training and inference (the "AI Developer Cloud"). Raised a $480M Series D at ~$2.5B (Feb 2025) and a $1.5B+ Series E (TWG Global) in Nov 2025 targeting a ~$4–5B+ ...

AI agent engineering platform

Founded 2022 by Harrison Chase. Widely used open-source framework plus LangSmith/LangGraph tooling for building, observing and deploying LLM agents. Raised a $125M Series B at a ~$1.3B valuation (~$160M tota...

Amit Jain, Alex Yu & Alberto Taiuti

Founded 2021; maker of the Dream Machine text/image-to-video model and Ray-series generative video. Reached a ~$4B valuation as of late 2025, competing with Sora and Runway in generative video. Co-founder/CE...

AI hiring & expert data-labeling marketplace

Founded 2023 by Thiel Fellows Brendan Foody, Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath (Bay Area high-school debate teammates). Started as AI-driven recruiting; pivoted to sourcing specialized human experts to train f...

usage-based billing infrastructure

Founded 2019 in San Francisco by Scott Woody and Kevin Liu. Real-time usage-based billing and metering infrastructure powering AI and SaaS companies (OpenAI, Anthropic among reported users). A key Bay Area f...

technology-enabled insurance brokerage

Founded by Spike Lipkin and Gordon Wintrob. A software-driven commercial insurance brokerage and benefits platform. Raised ~$300M total ($200M Series D, 2022); acquired by WTW (Willis Towers Watson) for ~$90...

Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever & team

Founded 2015; maker of ChatGPT, GPT-series and the Sora video model — the company that ignited the generative-AI era. Closed a record ~$40B round in 2025 and by early 2026 was valued around $852B, one of the...

co-ownership marketplace for second homes

Founded 2020 by Austin Allison and Spencer Rascoff (ex-Zillow). Proptech marketplace enabling fractional co-ownership of luxury second homes via managed LLCs. Raised a $125M Series C; a headline Bay Area pro...

Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho & Andy Konwinski

Founded 2022; the AI-native answer engine challenging Google search. Valuation climbed from $14B (June 2025) to ~$20B (Sept 2025) and ~$21B by early 2026. Chennai-born CEO Aravind Srinivas was named India's ...

identity verification infrastructure

Founded 2018 in San Francisco. Configurable identity-verification and fraud/KYC infrastructure now positioning as the 'verified identity layer' for an agentic-AI world. Raised a $200M Series D in 2025 (led b...

Edo Liberty

Founded 2019; the pioneering managed vector database powering retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for AI apps. Previously valued at ~$750M; a foundational piece of the AI-infra/memory stack founded by ex-AW...

nitrogen-fixing microbial agtech

Berkeley-based agtech using gene-edited soil microbes to replace synthetic nitrogen fertilizer for corn, wheat and other crops, cutting emissions and input costs. Has raised ~$617M. The flagship Bay Area agt...

workforce management (HR + IT + finance)

Founded 2016 in San Francisco by Parker Conrad and Prasanna Sankar. Unifies HR, IT and finance (payroll, devices, apps, spend) on one employee-data platform. Raised a $450M Series G in May 2025 at a $16.8B v...

Brendan Iribe, Ankit Kumar & Ryan Brown

Founded 2023; its Conversational Speech Model and viral Maya/Miles voice personas set a new bar for natural voice AI in early 2025. Raised a $250M Series B led by Sequoia and Spark in Oct 2025 after a $47.5M...

enterprise AI customer-service agents

Founded 2023 by Bret Taylor (ex-Salesforce co-CEO, OpenAI chair) and Clay Bavor (ex-Google). Builds branded AI agents that resolve customer-service interactions, billed per successful outcome. Raised a ~$950...

AI language-learning app

Founded 2016 in San Francisco by Andrew Hsu and Connor Zwick. AI speaking-focused language tutor backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund. Raised a $78M Series C in Nov 2024 reaching unicorn status at a $1B valuati...

automated security & compliance

Founded 2018 by Christina Cacioppo (also a notable woman founder). Automates security compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR) and trust management for thousands of companies. Raised large 2024–2025 rounds...

Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner & Ben Mildenhall

Founded 2024 by "godmother of AI" Fei-Fei Li to build large world models for spatial intelligence. Emerged from stealth in Sept 2024 with $230M, launched the Marble 3D-world generation platform in late 2025,...

May Habib & Waseem Alshikh

Founded 2020; full-stack generative-AI platform (Palmyra models) for enterprises to build and deploy AI apps and agents on their own data. Raised at a ~$1.9B valuation with ~$326M total funding; a leading en...

Elon Musk

Founded 2023; builds the Grok models and integrates them into X. Raised ~$20B in a Nvidia-led round in early 2026 pushing its valuation toward $230B, positioning it as a third frontier lab alongside OpenAI a...