Meet the 2023 Bay Area honorees

Rachel Zillner is the Co-Founder and CEO of Clutch.

Clutch is an award-winning certified micro and women owned business, created by two lifetime corporate employees who wanted to use their skills of matching good people to quality work in a bigger way. Founded on the desire to serve our client’s needs, we work to match organizations with resources they dream about. Clutch supports the goals and growth metrics of each organization; striving to fulfill their strategic needs without friction and always with a smile.

Jack Kudale is the Founder and CEO of Cowbell.

Cowbell pioneered adaptive cyber insurance to reinvent how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) experience cyber coverage. Adaptive cyber coverage evolves with cyber threats and exposures, unlike traditional cyber policies that are revised only once a year. Cowbell relies on thousands of data points per account to continuously assess risk, benchmark the risk against a pool of 30 million U.S. SMEs (92% of the US market), and enable policyholders to dynamically remediate exposures and prevent cyber incidents.   

Cowbell’s mission is to make relevant, effective cyber insurance protection accessible to organizations of any size, while closing any insurability gaps that take place over the lifetime of a policy. The result is cyber insurance policies that remain aligned with the cyber exposures of the covered organizations - whether due to evolving threats, an expanded digital footprint or new employees and offices. In its unique AI-based approach to risk selection and pricing, Cowbell’s continuous underwriting platform, powered by Cowbell Factors, compresses the insurance process from submission to issue within minutes. 

Seth Sternberg is the Co-Founder and CEO of Honor Technology, Inc.

Honor is the world’s largest home care network with the most advanced care platform. The Honor Care Platform combines local care, centralized operations, and best in class technology to deliver the highest quality care. This combination of human touch and technology can adapt and be tailored across our multiple home care networks. And it positions Honor to rapidly scale quality care for aging adults worldwide. When Seth Sternberg saw that his mom was starting to slow down, he brought the idea of caring for aging adults to Sandy Jen, Monica Lo, and Cameron Ring. Together, they founded Honor in 2014, scaled a home care agency, built a national network of agencies, and developed a technology platform to strengthen the relationship between Care Pro and Client.

Sumir Meghani is the Co-Founder and CEO of Instawork.

Founded in 2016, Instawork is the leading flexible work app for local, hourly professionals. Its digital marketplace connects thousands of businesses and more than four million workers, filling a critical role in local economies. Instawork has been featured on CBS News, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Associated Press, and more. In 2022, Instawork was ranked in the top 10% of the country’s fastest-growing companies by Inc. 5000 and was included in the Forbes Next Billion Dollar Startup list. Instawork was also named the 2022 ACE Award recipient for “Best Innovation,” one of the “Best Business Apps” by Business Insider. Instawork helps businesses in the food & beverage, hospitality, and warehouse/logistics industries fill temporary and permanent job opportunities in more than 30 markets across the U.S. and Canada.

Maria Davidson is the Founder and CEO of Kojo.

Kojo is the construction industry's leading materials management platform. Today, more than $300 billion a year is spent on commercial construction materials every year in the US, most of which is managed with pen, paper and excel. This leads to billions of dollars of waste, huge environmental damage, and endless manual entry work. Kojo provides an all-in-one system to solve that, streamlining every step in the procurement and inventory management process from start to finish. By connecting field, office, warehouse, accounting teams, and vendors, Kojo gives contractors visibility into real-time materials spending and usage, automates workflows, and increase labor productivity. Contractors have access to a network of thousands of vendors to source the best prices and availability, find cost savings, and reduce material waste. Kojo is trusted by hundreds of contractors and utilized by thousands of construction professionals across the country every day in a wide variety of industries including electrical, mechanical, concrete, drywall, flooring, and site-preparation. To date, Kojo has powered over 10,000 projects across the US, saved contractors 75% of the time they spend on manual data entry, and reduced project waste by 90%.

Praveen Penmetsa is the CEO of Monarch Tractor.

Farmers today face numerous challenges including labor shortages, effects of climate change, safety, ongoing pandemic impacts, scrutiny for sustainability demands, seasonal risks, government regulations, and more. Further to this, agriculture ranks among the most hazardous industries in the U.S. with tractor-related injuries and deaths being a significant contributor. Monarch’s electric, self-driving smart tractor combines electrification, automation, machine learning, and data analysis to enhance farmer’s existing operations, maximize yields to cut overhead costs and emissions, and increase labor productivity and safety.

Setting a new standard for farm safety, the MK-V includes collision prevention, human detection, and power take-off (PTO) protection. The tractor will stop moving if it detects a human within six feet of it, and the PTO will automatically shut off if the system detects a person within one foot of the PTO. 

Additionally, today’s farmers are expected to keep up with the demands of a growing population. By automating some of the time-intensive, mundane farming processes, Monarch’s autonomous solutions can help increase labor productivity and conserve inputs on the farm, such as water, fertilizer, and pesticides.

Jason Johnson is the CEO of Quick Quack Car Wash.

Since its inception, Quick Quack has been disrupting the car wash industry to be Fast. Clean, Loved. Everywhere.™ From our professionally dressed team members and colorfully lit showrooms to our environmentally friendly soaps we are committed to providing our customers with a clean car at each of our bright and welcoming facilities. We do all of this with a focus on culture, delivering an exceptional loved experience in the way we treat our team members, customers, and communities. We have invested in our communities with over 360 charitable fundraisers over the last five years and continue to prioritize making a difference every day, everywhere we operate. We are a data-driven organization that increases revenue through our subscription model, develops new sites through our vertically integrated development platform, and optimizes site selection, customer engagement, and marketing through our technology platform.

Arturo Elizondo is the Founder and CEO of The EVERY Company.

The EVERY Co. is a global leader in precision fermentation and is the creator of the world’s first animal-free, nature-equivalent egg proteins. Charting a course toward a more resilient and transformative tomorrow, EVERY is powering the next phase of food systems resilience, decoupling the world’s proteins from the animals that make them. 

Led by Co-Founder and CEO Arturo Elizondo, EVERY and its revolutionary proteins represent a paradigm shift in the way we grow, deliver and consume protein, with technology unlocking better outcomes for flavor, texture, functionality and availability over both traditional and plant-based options. The company’s portfolio includes EVERY PepsinTM and the world’s first animal-free ‘nearly invisible’ proteins—EVERY ProteinTM and EVERY EggWhiteTM.

Accelerating the world’s transition to animal-free protein, EVERY is scaling up production in partnership with BioBrew from AB InBev, the world’s largest fermentation company. Together with leaders in the global food and beverage industries, EVERY has brought products to market across a range of applications including cold-pressed juice, baked goods such as macarons, and beverage alcohol, with more to come. 

EVERY’s proprietary AI platform, Ovonaut, draws on ML and rich data to speed discovery, scale-up, and go-to-market for EVERY’s proteins—more rapidly enabling the foods of tomorrow, today.