Coffee with a Founder

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, host Beck Bamberger sits down with Keith Corso, co-founder and CEO of BusRight, for a candid conversation about building a company in one of the most overlooked—and essential—industries: student transportation. Keith shares how BusRight is modernizing school transportation by addressing some of the industry's biggest challenges, from nationwide driver shor...

In this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Elina Onitskansky, founder and CEO of Ilant Health, to explore how value-based care is reshaping the future of obesity and cardiometabolic health. Together, they discuss why metabolic health is about far more than preventing chronic conditions like diabetes and cardiovascular disease—it's about creating the foundation for long...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, host Beck Bamberger sits down with Victor Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Trestle, the company leveraging AI to supercharge vendor risk management in the construction industry.  From his roots as a civil engineer to building software that addresses the unique challenges of construction procurement, Victor shares candid stories about the high-stakes decisions...

In this episode of Coffee with a Founder , Beck Bamberger is joined by Michael Vega-Sanz , Co-Founder and President of Gail , an AI-powered platform helping insurance, banking, and lending companies modernize the way they operate. While Michael's entrepreneurial journey may appear diverse on paper, it has always been driven by one mission: solving complex financial services challenges through inno...

On today's episode, Beck Bamberger sits down with Jack Rusk , founder and CEO of C.Scale , a company helping the building industry navigate one of its biggest challenges: reducing carbon emissions without sacrificing cost, efficiency, or growth. Before launching C.Scale, Jack spent years working across policy, sustainability, and technology at organizations like Autodesk and Schneider Electric. No...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Connor Hogan , co-founder and CFO of OnePlanet Solar Recycling , a company helping tackle one of the renewable energy industry's growing challenges: solar panel recycling. The conversation explores why solar recycling is becoming a critical part of America's clean energy future, the policy and infrastructure shifts shaping the...

In this episode Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Mike Kijewski, CEO and co-founder of Medcrypt, to unpack one of healthcare's biggest blind spots: cybersecurity. From ransomware attacks disrupting hospital systems to the growing risks tied to connected medical devices, Mike shares what it takes to protect life-saving technology in an increasingly connected world. The conversati...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Nick Payton, co-founder and COO of Distributional, a startup focused on helping companies better understand, validate, and manage the growing complexity of AI systems. The conversation explores the evolving challenges surrounding AI safety, reliability, and trust as more businesses rush to integrate artificial intelligence int...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Chris Sosnowski, CEO and founder of Waterly, a Chicago-based startup helping modernize the water and wastewater industry through people-first software built to replace outdated pen-and-paper systems. The conversation explores the growing challenges utilities are facing—from labor shortages and aging infrastructure to the urgen...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Brooke Hopkins, co-founder and CEO of Coval, to talk about testing AI agents, the rise of voice as a platform, and what it takes to build at the edge of a fast-moving market.

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Ofek Lavian, co-founder and CEO of Forage. Forage is an EBT payments company helping low-income Americans access food through online platforms like DoorDash, Uber, and Shopify. What used to be an in-person, highly limited system is now becoming digital, unlocking access for millions of people living in food deserts or balancin...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Aagya Mathur, co-founder and CEO of Aavia. Aagya built the hormone health company after realizing how much of women's health is still misunderstood, underdiagnosed, and frankly ignored. Even for someone with a neuroscience background, getting real answers meant figuring it out herself. This conversation gets into what is actua...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Kait Stephens, founder and CEO of Brij. After investing in the space and spotting a massive gap, Kait built Brij to solve a trillion dollar problem: brands losing access to their customer data when selling through retail and marketplaces. The conversation dives into how modern consumers shop across channels, why retail is stil...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Nikhil Sethi, co-founder and CEO of Workgrounds. After building and selling his first company to Accenture, Nikhil jumped back in to solve a surprisingly painful problem: booking and managing hotel room blocks for teams. The conversation dives into why group travel is still wildly manual, how distributed teams are reshaping ho...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Alex Wright-Gladstein, CEO and founder of Sphere. After struggling for years to get a climate-friendly option added to her first company's 401(k), Alex set out to build a better solution for employees who want their retirement savings aligned with their values. The conversation explores the strange world of 401(k) investing, w...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Bobby Samuels, co-founder and CEO of Protege, to talk about one of the biggest challenges in artificial intelligence today: data. As AI models grow more powerful, the demand for high-quality training data is exploding. Protege is building infrastructure that helps organizations unlock valuable, often untapped datasets while ke...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Natalya Thakur, founder and CEO of KNOVA. The company is building infrastructure that allows financial institutions to operate seamlessly across both traditional assets and tokenized assets from a single technology stack. The conversation explores the future of digital asset infrastructure, lessons from building fintech system...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Matthias Hofmann, co-founder and CEO of Eyebot, for a candid conversation about building a company that's reimagining access to vision care. Matthias shares his journey from growing up in Switzerland with dreams of becoming a fighter pilot, to navigating his own experience with vision loss, and ultimately launching Eyebot—an i...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with  Ethan Smith from Graphite for a follow-up conversation on AEO and GEO, plus what's actually changing right now in how people discover brands inside AI tools. Coming off two conferences in the same week, they get into prompt behavior, why citations are more fragmented than most people think, and why earned media is becoming ev...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck sits down with Yehuda Kog, co-founder and CEO of Lin Health, just hours after the company announced its $11 million Series A raise. The conversation explores how Lin Health is rethinking chronic pain care through a multidisciplinary digital platform, why pain can be understood as a learned skill and how mental health, anxiety, and depression shape rec...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Kyle Kamrooz, co-founder and CEO of Bonus Homes. Kyle is building a new financial category that allows homeowners to unlock their equity without selling their homes. The conversation dives into housing wealth, middle-class retirement gaps, why low interest rates are hidden assets, and what it takes to create an entirely new fi...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Rema Matevosyan, co-founder and CEO of Near Space Labs. Rema is building stratospheric robotics that capture ultra-high-resolution Earth imagery, giving insurers and climate responders access to data that reflects current reality. We cover climate resilience, insurance underwriting, why balloons beat satellites, and the long-t...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Justin Sherlock , co-founder and CEO of Caspian . After scaling Flexport's financing arm past $1B, Justin saw how tariffs and red tape quietly choke capital for global brands. Caspian is his answer, turning months of customs paperwork into days and helping companies reclaim time and cash. We talk about earning a Customs Broker...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, Beck Bamberger sits down with Abhishek Chopra, founder and CEO of BQP , to talk about the power of new math in old industries. Abhi shares how BQP is transforming the aerospace and defense industry with quantum-inspired algorithms that replace slow, expensive simulations—cutting design time, slashing costs, and accelerating innovation. We also dig into his...

On this episode of Coffee with a Founder, host Beck Bamberger sits down with Aleksandr Gampel , co-founder and COO of Cuby Technologies . Alex shares how his path through real estate—and one perfectly timed introduction—sparked the idea for Cuby's ambitious solution to the housing crisis: deployable, tech-enabled micro factories that build homes directly where they're needed. He breaks down what i...