Index / People
ENTRE
PRENEURS
We find them before everyone else. 99 researched founders — 38 in the Rising ranking, 44 on the watchlist, 13 still under verification.
Founder directory
99 of 99
Franco Rodriguez Viau
Raised $2.7M seed led by Dalus Capital, expanding from Latin America to the US, MIT Innovator U35, strong media narrative and rapid team growth.
Dhawal Jain
Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree; second-time founder tackling India's mental health crisis with a novel wearable device, covered by Inc42 and Forbes.
Kazuma Kishida
Named Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia; raised Series A (¥1B) plus prior funding totaling ~¥1.42B for a novel stem-cell fertility platform covered by TechCrunch and Forbes.
Saajan Mangrey
He leads Suits Finance's Dubai desk, helping online entrepreneurs relocate, incorporate and structure across borders from the UAE.
Amritanshu Jain
Fast-growing AI infra startup attracting Nvidia interest and multiple funding rounds in quick succession, positioning for major scale.
Hyunjune Ji
Named Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2026; Vacatio won a Red Dot design award and reported 5x global growth in 2025 for its AI hospitality tools.
Jitendra Kumar Saini
Named to Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 (2026); launched India's first commercial amphibious drone 'Avataar' with national media coverage and growing headcount.
Max Werner
Raised €5.5M pre-seed then a €15M seed (reported ~€67.5M valuation), with backing from HV Capital, Headline and Project A; total raised reported over €20M.
Puru Rastogi
Raised $3M pre-seed led by Version One Ventures with angels including Soumith Chintala; expanding to the US market, addressing a large industrial automation opportunity.
Stefan Weirich
Leads mimic, which has raised over $20M and shipped an in-house dexterous hand (M1) and exoskeleton (U1), drawing talent from DeepMind, Tesla and Stanford.
Kieran Furlong
Repeat fusion-sector entrepreneur who raised a Series A ($10M+) for a technically differentiated fusion approach spun out of University of Wisconsin research, in a fast-growing sector.
Manish Seth
Series A deep-tech startup solving a globally relevant rare-earth supply chain problem, with patents and OEM pilots underway.
Matthew Sebastian
Company reported 275% YoY headcount growth to 84 employees, scaling from Indonesia into Singapore HQ, strong local media coverage as a young founder story.
Maximilian Niroomand
Co-founded Lyceum, which raised a reported record €10.3M pre-seed for sovereign European AI compute infrastructure, positioning it for rapid scaling.
Nathan Saichk
Raised $5M+ seed funding including Air Force and notable angel backing; building novel hypersonic launch infrastructure covered by TechCrunch, SFGate and Aerospace America.
Nour Al Taher
Led Intella through an oversubscribed $12.5M Series A from Prosus and 500 Global, tackling an underserved 500M+ speaker Arabic AI market.
Saaras Mehan
Jack & Jill raised $20M (Creandum, Dig Ventures) in Oct 2025 to expand to the US, with major press coverage (TechCrunch, Business Insider, The Times), while Mehan remains relatively unknown outside tech/HR circles.
Shirley Chen
Raised ~$50M in back-to-back Series B rounds (total ~$70M) after earlier $13M round backed by a DJI angel; covered by TechCrunch multiple times as a leading foodservice robotics founder.
Jamal Rozenblad
Operating two ventures at the intersection of intelligent software and energy, between the UAE and Europe, with an international outlook from an early stage.
Kenneth Darmansjah
Led Soul Parking through Series A extension with AppWorks, AC Ventures, Taiwan Mobile and USPACE, expanding into EV/green mobility infrastructure across Indonesia.
Sebastian Hjärne
22-year-old founder profiled by Forbes and backed by Klarna's CEO and EQT Ventures; raised roughly $4-6.5M and secured enterprise customers, indicating strong early trajectory relative to age/experience.
Tanay Lohia
Raised ~$1.9M pre-seed co-led by Activate and Antler with strategic biotech angels, and is an Emergent Ventures Fellow, tackling a globally significant deep-tech problem.
Andrew Murray
Recently secured funding to expand modular turbine tech and is getting national trade-press coverage ('IKEA instructions' hydro), positioning him as an emerging clean-energy infrastructure founder.
Christian Nwachukwu
Recognized speaker at Africa Tech Summit and profiled by RefinedNG; building novel embedded-finance infrastructure for healthcare providers, a large underserved credit gap ($60B claimed by company).
Joseph Kao
Stanford spinout with $3.4M raised, 200% YoY headcount growth, and profiled by Stanford GSB for AI-driven predictive maintenance of critical power grid assets.
Julie Böhning
Leads PAVE Space's kickstage development for satellite orbit transfer, building on the team's reusable rocket prototype (Gruyère Space Program) flown 50+ times.
Lucas Posada
Raised $5M seed co-led by Variant and Lattice, described as fastest-growing neobank in West LatAm with reported 10x YoY growth, backed by notable crypto/fintech investors.
Rifanditto Adhikara
Y Combinator alum with a proactive personalized healthcare platform expanding across Southeast Asia; Stanford GSB background and consistent founder-story coverage.
Shalmali Kadu
DUSQ became the fastest Indian healthtech company to cross $1M on Kickstarter and raised ₹24 Cr seed led by Fireside Ventures, with Antler backing.
Sun Zhaozhi
Raised angel funding from Shanghai Film Group and GSR Ventures; Fuzozo AI pet sold nearly 300,000 units since July 2025 launch with strong engagement, per BigGo/Xinhua coverage.
Trina Das
Building foundational data infrastructure for regulated medical AI, backed by Techstars, at an inflection point for healthcare AI adoption.
Harry Yu
Raised $13M seed led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with BEENEXT, 500 Global, Sovereign's Capital and Goodwater Capital; scaling headcount fast (+400% YoY) across multiple APAC markets.
Kunal Shrivastava
SUIND raised ₹20.5 Cr ($2.2M) seed led by Transition VC and IIMA Ventures, bringing total funding to $2.8M, and is scaling commercial drone deployment.
Lemuel Low
Led ReN3 to a $5M seed round from Vertex Ventures SEA & India to scale sovereign enterprise agentic AI, an early but well-backed traction signal.
Michele Stansfield
Backed by Main Sequence Ventures; profiled as Startup of the Week by The Innovator; positioning Cauldron as Asia-Pacific's first precision fermentation manufacturing launchpad.
Nikunj Bajaj
Leading a well-funded AI infra startup backed by Intel Capital with enterprise traction, in a fast-growing AI deployment segment.
Tomas Uribe
Backed by investors including Morgan Stanley, L'Attitude Ventures and Google; featured in Inc. and Forbes; grown to 18 employees across 4 countries with $2.9M total funding and reported 86K+ tasks completed on platform.
Yu Yinan
Secured a large seed round (~RMB100M) led by Horizon Robotics and Hillhouse-affiliated GL Ventures; press describes it as the largest single-round funding in its niche as it moves toward mass production.
Enyegue Carl Dimick
Raised $1.7-2.2M pre-seed from Golden Gate Ventures and Antler, named to Forbes Asia 100 to Watch 2026, participated in K-Startup Grand Challenge.
Iddi Mohammed Faried
Company has a Wikipedia entry, generates revenue, won the GoGettaz Grand Prize, and addresses period poverty at scale across Africa with a circular-economy model tied to smallholder farmers.
Jenny Lemieux
Product veteran turned agtech founder building real-time crop vision systems; featured in founder Q&As and women-in-tech spotlights, gaining industry visibility.
Raghava K
Deep technical pedigree (8 years at ISRO, 40+ launch missions) building next-gen NAV-COM satellites; company has raised pre-seed/seed funding and grown to ~26 employees.
Yonghoon Cho
Raised its first external round of $6.9-7.3M from Atinum Investment and strategic investor CJ Olive Young; company reportedly doubling revenue annually.
Bruce Yang
Raised $20M for homegrown Singapore AI models and is getting profiled in regional/business press as a rising sovereign-AI builder.
Daniel Garzón
Raised $3.7M seed in Aug 2025 from Collide Capital, Clocktower and others; growing team (~29 employees, +81% YoY) tackling LatAm's low card-penetration credit gap.
Juan Cereigido
Argentine founder building a consumer AI hardware product for an underserved elder-care market, with notable angel backing and early production traction.
Lee Yoo-Joo
Secured Rakuten Capital's first-ever K-beauty investment in a Pre-Series A round and featured on Forbes Asia's 100 To Watch 2026 list amid global skincare expansion.
Luc Okalobe
Raised a pre-seed round backed by an early Paystack investor for 'Heroku for AI in Africa,' with strong technical pedigree and coverage from Techpoint Africa and Launch Africa.
Tomaž Štolfa
Emerged from stealth with $8.5M seed led by Plural to democratize industrial automation; prior track record building/backing multiple startups since 2010.
Wang Zengyue
Company has raised $12.8M+ in funding, backed by HKSTP incubation and CUHK research, positioned in growing grid-storage/flow-battery market.
Bianca Belnadia Lie
Loluna grew headcount 33% YoY, gained rapid brand recognition among young Indonesian mothers per local business press, leveraging her prior retail/e-commerce scaling experience.
Carolina Goncebat
Second-time founder with a prior Series A-to-exit track record; MIT Sloan background; small but growing team (4 people, +100% YoY) with media coverage (Foreign Founders podcast).
Eugenio Scafati
Argentine founder backed by top-tier VC Bessemer and unicorn-builder angels, building AI-driven software testing automation.
Nico Rojas
Raised over $7M total across pre-seed/seed rounds (500 Global, Seedstars, Fen Ventures); grew Dapta to 40+ employees across 6 countries with reported 150,000+ users.
Rich Sloan
UNLV deep-tech spinout with $1.15M-$4M raised, growing team (+200% YoY), media coverage (Las Vegas Review-Journal, gener8tor) and Fortune 1000 pilot partners signal early commercial momentum.
Touko Rautiainen
Co-leads Kova Labs, a defense-tech startup backed by Lifeline Ventures, selected for the EU's BraveTech DefTech Forges Phase II accelerator program.
Meghana Jagadeesh
Grew GoCodeo to 40K+ developers with zero paid spend and closed a $150K seed round from 100X.VC; gaining media profile as a non-technical AI founder.
Miks Ozols
Raised $1.6M seed for Loki Robotics, backed by byFounders, Acequia Capital and Unruly Capital, tackling a high-complexity real-world robotics niche (facility cleaning).
Deryl Lu
Raised $2.3M seed round for DayaTani, deploying IoT weather stations and a farmer-facing app across Indonesia; ex-Sayurbox/BCG background.
Juan Fernandez
Two US patents granted, active clinical partnership pursuit, pursuing MBA at Johns Hopkins while scaling a novel medtech device with regulatory traction in Colombia.
Mauricio Gil
Backed by Orbit Startups 2025 cohort; covered by El Espectador; grown to 28 employees (+272.7% YoY) building formal asset infrastructure for LatAm's motorcycle market.
Ola Fadiran
Raised $1.9M to build African engineering talent into global chip-design capability, and became a Cadence Certified Training Partner, addressing a strategically important niche.
Victoria Mwaura
Early-stage MVP venture that won top prize at a Women in STEM summit and received local press coverage, addressing accessibility for the visually impaired in Kenya and East Africa.
Salma Mayorquin
Deep technical background (decade in ML/vision-language research); building developer tooling since 2023; small pre-seed team but active GitHub presence and conference speaking.
Ahmad Ghahreman
Serial cleantech entrepreneur (co-inventor of Jetti Resources tech, Li-Cycle advisor) scaling a rare-earth recycling company amid rising critical-minerals demand.
Anas Chanaa
Positioned as building Morocco's first sovereign cybersecurity platform, joined Plug and Play's Scale 360 program in UAE, and profiled in multiple industry interviews signaling growing regional visibility.
David Adeleke
Building open banking infra for underbanked Africa, backed by AWS FinTech Africa Accelerator and Tekedia Capital, with growing recognition on fintech speaker circuits.
Felipe Ramirez
Raised $1.3M seed in Dec 2025 from angel investors; expanding stablecoin-powered settlement infrastructure across Latin America.
Vanessa Heppner
Building a finance-focused AI/tech spend intelligence platform addressing a timely enterprise pain point, with early VC backing.
Zehan Wang
Repeat founder with an exit (Magic Pony/Twitter) now building embodied AI/robotics at Paddington Robotics, an early-stage London startup founded 2024.
Himanshu Sahu
Building integrated EV powertrain (motor, controller, software) with institutional backing and headcount growth (+30.8% YoY) in India's growing EV component market.
Jacobo Adberstein
Raised $700K in prior funding round; grown to 4 employees; unusual founder background (NASA engineer to legal AI CEO) with active product rebrand in 2026.
Rodgers Wisdom
Early-stage (2025-founded, ~3 employees) fintech security startup with a differentiated device-intelligence approach, active build-in-public presence and real client fraud-prevention case studies shared on LinkedIn.
David Restrepo
Second-time founder (prior exit); building gamified skills-based hiring platform since 2024, recently launched V2 of app; small team (~4 people) still early-stage.
Elisa Seghetti
Co-founded Saturn Dynamics, an early-stage (2025) physics-aware simulation startup featured in a Women in AI cohort and Takeoff Accelerator; still very early with limited disclosed funding.
Kwabena Sarpong
Launched a novel ad-tech marketplace addressing fragmented African media buying, with press coverage from Citi Newsroom and TechLabari shortly after launch.
Ross Coull
Ex-private equity investor (CDC Group/BII) who built a solar developer that attracted institutional investment from Clime Capital; established but still scaling regionally.
Ryoga Okunishi
Raised a Series D (¥4B) plus mega-bank debt financing, bringing total funding to over ¥15B, with growing enterprise adoption of its AI phone platform.
Sarath Kolli
Building a multi-platform AI drug discovery stack (BoltChem, ReBolt, BoltPro, BoltBio, ClinBolt) covered by Inc42, but funding remains very small ($113K-$300K) after 6 years.
Ariel Mathov
Second-time founder with a prior acquisition, now building an AI product management tool and actively pitching investors in New York.
Henock Mukendi
Building unified logistics and trust infrastructure (GPS tracking, escrow payments) for a market with poor formal addressing, an underserved DRC logistics gap.
Kamal El Hardouzi
Building infrastructure to digitize Africa's informal retail sector, with coverage from We Are Tech Africa and Start-up.ma, though no funding round confirmed yet.
Akifumi Morinaka
Rege Nephro closed a ~$10.6M/¥1.22B round for its ADPKD drug candidate RN-014, but Morinaka is CEO rather than the company's founder (founder is Prof. Kenji Osafune).
Asnake Amelo
Recognized via MIT Solve 2025 Global Health Challenge submission for CO-LAB; also holds separate CEO title at ACUBED, creating some ambiguity in founder role clarity.
Christian Gallo Pelaez
Insufficient evidence: no source ties this named individual to Dialtu as founder; company itself (AI sales/customer service automation) appears operating but founder identity does not match.
Deepak Reddy
Deep aerospace/robotics engineering background (Skyroot, SS Innovations) and T-Works incubation, but no confirmed funding round or public traction metrics found.
Eric Flores
Very early-stage (founded 2026, 3 employees) enterprise AI agent startup; insufficient evidence of traction or momentum yet.
Eric Garcia
Very early pre-seed stage (raising $1.3M target), tiny team, limited independent press coverage beyond directory/pitch listings.
Lucia Valdivia
Early-stage AI social media automation tool with self-reported user base; role titles (CMO vs. founder) are inconsistent across sources and funding is unverified.
Michael Peirone
He is CEO, not founder (VHP was founded by Nick Dechev); as a nonprofit executive rather than a startup founder, fit as a 'Rising Entrepreneur' is unclear.
Morteza Ahmadi
Long-running deep-tech medtech founder tackling a huge unmet need (10M+ dialysis patients), with sustained press coverage (CBC, Digitimes) though still pre-commercialization.
Neal Rickner
Company has strong momentum ($13.75M+ raised, Bloomberg/TechCrunch coverage, Bill Gates-backed), but Rickner is a hired CEO, not founder, and has 25 years of prior senior experience, reducing fit as an emerging 'rising' founder.
Sam Davies
Built notable climate venture with media coverage and UN partnerships, but recently departed as CEO/co-founder, raising uncertainty about current role and trajectory.
Satria Situmorang
Total raised ~$10M, expanding rapidly across Jakarta, Semarang and Surabaya with strong revenue growth, though he joined as CEO rather than founding the company himself.
Valerie Gonzalez
Building an AI try-on tool addressing Africa's mobile-first social commerce gap, but company is very early (MVP stage, 2 employees) with no confirmed funding found.
Wendy Naimark
Deeply experienced medtech/biotech executive with a prior successful exit (Evonik acquisition), making her more an established repeat-founder than an emerging one.
Jean Lobe Lobe
Waspito has scaled to 850,000+ users and was a top-10 finalist in Africa's Business Heroes prize, indicating the company has moved beyond early-stage into a more established growth phase.
Regine Sum
Forbes 30 Under 30 recognition and scaled a bootstrapped bakery to multiple retail stores and multimillion-dollar revenue, but is an established, widely profiled local consumer brand already.
Sreekar Kothamachu
Company received US FDA clearance and has operated since 2016 with modest funding (~$1.1-1.6M); long operating history and slow growth suggest it is past the very-early 'rising' stage.
