Introducing Gold Rush’s Spring 2021 Founders

The 19th century Gold Rush globalized the idea of pursuing the American dream. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world made their journey to California to stake a claim and build a new life. Paving one’s path to find “gold” parallels the journey of an entrepreneur, yet for API (Asian and Pacific Islander) founders today, the risk remains outsized compared to the reward.

In response to findings reported by the Harvard Business Review that Asian Americans are the least likely group to be promoted into management, Gold House was inspired to start our own Gold Rush. As API founders ourselves, we built Gold Rush to overcome societal stereotypes and break the bamboo ceiling by creating and empowering more C-Suite level Asian leaders.

Since starting two years ago, our accelerator program has amplified, educated, and connected 120+ API Founders and 85+ small and medium-sized businesses. In a year when Asian-owned businesses were the most negatively impacted nationwide, our founders created 1,900+ new jobs and collectively raised an additional $20 million in funding just months after completing the program.

Committed to elevating small businesses in the midst of the pandemic, we were deeply encouraged by the hundreds of applications to our Spring 2021 cohort by API founders building disruptive businesses across e-commerce, consumer tech, enterprise software, food and beverage, consumer products, and enablement of the creator economy.

One of our priorities was to create programming in response to the clear inequities across gender in venture capital funding. In the same report by the Harvard Business Review, it was found that Asian women are the least likely to be promoted to management of any demographic. Thus, we launched a new women’s track embedded in this cohort’s programming, featuring direct matchmaking with top venture capitalists for investment, structured mentorship from renowned female alumni and advisors, and curated workshops on topics such as fundraising dynamics.

In addition to offering more targeted programming, we redoubled our focus on recruiting across spectrums and welcomed our most diverse Gold Rush cohort yet (60% identifying as female, 60% as East Asian, 13% as Southeast Asian, and 27% as South Asian).

We couldn’t be more excited to introduce to you to our Gold Rush Spring 2021 founders — 15 of the most promising API-led companies, hand-picked by our all-star Selection Committee:

• Brightland is a modern pantry essentials brand championing traceability, design and simple everyday moments at home.
• Clipboard Health is an online marketplace offering no-commitment staffing for healthcare facilities and on-demand shifts for healthcare professionals.
• Cresicor is a cloud-based software platform and data analytics engine that understands the world of trade management for indirect-heavy businesses.
• Datasaur.ai builds a data labeling workforce management platform for Natural Language Processing.
• Ettitude is a purpose-driven lifestyle brand offering home essentials that are soft on your skin and gentle on our planet.
• Haldi creates 100% personalized stores for customers and layers on the social proof of their micro-community.
• Jemi is a platform that helps content creators generate new revenue streams through memberships and an all-in-one digital store.
• Kulfi Beauty is a premium beauty brand and digital platform celebrating South Asian beauty.
• Lunar is the first and only Asian-American craft hard seltzer.
• Meadow is an all-in-one cannabis point-of-sale, eCommerce, and CRM suite of software.
• Moonship is a social ecommerce software platform that aims to help ecommerce products go viral via word of mouth.
• Rosebud AI is an easy to use AI generated media to enable storytelling at the speed of thought.
• Searchlight is a Quality of Hire platform that reduces bias in performance-driven hiring.
• The Juggernaut is a media company and community for global South Asians and the South Asia-curious.
• Umamicart is an Online Asian grocer offering a curated selection that highlights the diversity of Asian American cuisine and culture.

We are thrilled to be working with such a diverse group of founders over the next twelve weeks as well as top advisors, including:

• Teresa Tang (VP of Data, Masterclass)
• Aike Ho (Principal, ACME)
• Ben Lee (General Partner, CircleUp)
• Christine Chang (Co-Founder and CEO, Glow Recipe)
• David Cheng (Investor, DCM Ventures)
• Eric Feng (Hulu/FlipBoard, KPCB)
• Gautam Gupta (Partner, M13 Ventures)
• Hanson Li (Founder, Managing Partner, SALT Partners Group)
• Jonathan Hua (Investor, Scrum Ventures)
• Joyce Zhang Gray (Founder, Alariss)
• Namiko Kajiwara (Partner, World Innovation Lab)
• Sara Choi (Partner, Wing VC)
• Shiva Rajaraman (VP of BizOps, Facebook)
• Smriti Jayaraman (Partner, Evolv Ventures)
• Vanessa Dew (Co-Founder, Health-Ade)
• Vishal Lugani (Partner, Acrew Capital)

Spring 2021 Gold Rush Founders

Aishwarya Iyer (Founder and CEO, Brightland)

Aishwarya Iyer is the founder + CEO of Brightland, a modern pantry essentials company based in LA that has been featured by the New York Times, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, and more. Previously, Aishwarya spent over a decade in public affairs and corporate communications at various technology companies in both New York City and LA. She started her career at L’Oreal in the luxury products division at Lancome and is a graduate of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Aishwarya is originally from Texas and now lives in LA with her husband and dogs, Crosby and Madison.

Wei Deng (Founder and CEO, Clipboard Health)

Wei is the founder and CEO of Clipboard Health (Y Combinator W2017). Clipboard matches healthcare facilities with nurses nearby, and is live in over a dozen cities. Before founding Clipboard Health, Wei was one of the first 10 employees at Sendwave, a remittance startup for the African diaspora, and was responsible for opening the UK and European corridor. Sendwave was recently acquired for $500M. She’s worked in a variety of roles at startups, ranging from head of product to COO, after working as an investment banking Associate at Moelis & Company. She got her career started as a lawyer, where she worked at a top-5 law firm (Davis Polk & Wardwell). She graduated from Yale College & Yale Law School.

Alexander Whatley (CEO and Co-Founder, Cresicor)

Alexander Whatley is the CEO and Co-Founder of Cresicor. Prior to Cresicor, he worked in software and data science roles at Intel, Quora, and Facebook. Alexander graduated from Harvard in 2019, where he received a bachelors and masters in applied mathematics. In his free time, he enjoys reading, hiking, and exploring restaurants.

Daniel Whatley (CTO and Co-Founder, Cresicor)

Daniel Whatley is the CTO and cofounder of Cresicor. His background is in software — he graduated from MIT in 2020 with a degree in Computer Science, and before Cresicor he most recently worked at Nuro, a fast-growing robotics startup. In his spare time, he enjoys singing, playing tennis, and nerding out over rhythm games!

Ivan Lee (CEO and Founder, Datasaur.ai)

Ivan Lee is the CEO and Founder of Datasaur.ai — an AI data labeling company. He studied Computer Science at Stanford University. He took a leave of absence from pursuing his Master’s degree to co-found Loki Studios and build Geomon, a location-based monster capturing game. Loki was acquired by Yahoo in 2013. Ivan went on to participate in Yahoo’s inaugural Associate Product Manager program. He spent two years as a Product Manager defining and re-building mobile search using artificial intelligence. Ivan went on to serve as VP of Product at GoButler, working to define a new genre of virtual personal assistant. He most recently spent two years working on AI Products at Apple. He currently lives in the Bay Area. Aside from thinking about technology and its application to products, he enjoys playing Ultimate Frisbee on warm California days.

Phoebe Yu (CEO and Founder, ettitude)

Phoebe Yu is the CEO and Founder of ettitude. While shopping for her own home after moving to Melbourne, Australia, Phoebe spotted an opportunity within the bedding market to create sustainable luxury for less. Her vision of revolutionizing the bedding industry saw Phoebe bridge together her entrepreneurial instincts, passion for sustainability, and understanding of fabric technology. After years of testing materials, weaving and dying techniques, and harnessing a decade of experience working in supply chain management and merchandising, Phoebe perfected and launched ettitude’s innovative bamboo lyocell fabric in 2014. By 2018, ettitude expanded globally opening a Los Angeles office. In 2019 ettitude was named “International Conquerer” by Online Retail Industry Awards in Sydney for demonstrating significant growth in international markets. In 2020, ettitude closed a $1.5m seed round and was named an Inc. 5000 fastest-growing private companies in America. Prior to ettitude, Phoebe had founded two international trading and sourcing companies in Asia.

Julia Huang (Co-Founder, Haldi)

Julia is the Co-Founder of Haldi and previously ran operations at a DTC company through Series A, and was previously at McKinsey and Google.

Simran Kalra (Co-Founder, Haldi)

Simran is the Co-Founder of Haldi, and was previously Head of Marketing at YouTube TV and spent the prior 20 years at American Express.

Jason Cui (Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Jemi)

Jason Cui is co-founder and Co-CEO of Jemi. Together with Annie, he founded Jemi in April 2020 over a shared passion for helping the next generation of creators. He was named Forbes 30 under 30 in consumer technology in 2021. Before Jemi Jason came from a background in product management, having worked at companies like Uber, Hulu, and Livingsocial. He grew up in Northern Virginia and received his BA in computer science from Harvard University.

Annie Hwang (Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Jemi)

Annie Hwang is co-founder and Co-CEO of Jemi. Together with Jason, she founded Jemi in April 2020 over a shared passion for helping the next generation of creators. She was named Forbes 30 under 30 in consumer technology in 2021. Before Jemi Annie came from a background in product management, having worked at companies like Facebook, Hulu, and Bitsight. She grew up in various places around the world — from Colorado, Penn, NY, Seoul, and California. She received her BA in computer science and psychology from Harvard University.

Priyanka Ganjoo (Founder, Kulfi Beauty)

After a five-year-long career in the corporate beauty industry building brand recognition for indie beauty companies, Priyanka Ganjoo saw first-hand how South Asians were being underrepresented in “traditional” beauty. Constantly searching for products that matched her skin tone and targeted quirks of South Asian skin, Ganjoo recognized that, overwhelmingly, people who shared her background weren’t made a priority in beauty. Tired of constantly feeling like an outsider in the industry and waiting for established brands to celebrate South Asians, Ganjoo took it upon herself to bridge the gap in the market. When existing brand options tokenized South Asian culture, Ganjoo created Kulfi Beauty, a curated line that celebrates people with her background, too often neglected in popular marketing culture, as the singular top priority. Kulfi’s vision is to celebrate South Asian beauty with fun beauty essentials and a platform that creates space for self-expression.

Kevin Wong (Co-Founder, Lunar)

Kevin and Sean are the co-founders of Lunar, the first Asian-American craft hard seltzer made with real fruit juice and premium ingredients from Asia. At Lunar, Kevin leads sales and finance while Sean spearheads marketing, partnerships, and creative direction, while the two develop new products and flavors from the Lunar lab.

Previously, Kevin worked as a corporate strategist at Yext and as an investment banker at J.P. Morgan. On weekends, he currently helps run Subtle Asian Networking and served as a board member at TAP-NY. Kevin graduated from the University of Virginia in 2013 with a BA in Computer Science and a BA in Commerce.

Sean Ro (Co-Founder, Lunar)

Before Lunar, Sean worked as a product manager at Prescriptive Data and as a UX designer at Conductor. Sean holds a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon and also graduated from the University of Virginia in 2013 with a BA in Economics.

David Hua (CEO and Co-Founder, Meadow)

David Hua is the CEO and Co-Founder of Meadow, a software company helping cannabis dispensaries sell more cannabis with less work. Meadow was founded in 2014 and is Y-Combinator’s first start-up to operate in the cannabis space.

George Zeng (CEO and Co-Founder, Moonship)

George X. Zeng is the co-founder and CEO of Moonship, a social ecommerce company focused on social group buying for the Shopify ecosystem. Prior to Moonship, he was a product lead at Facebook where he worked with developers and ecommerce merchants to build out Facebook’s Ads API, Dynamic Ads, and Dynamic Creative Optimization products. In a prior life, he had also helped launch Groupon in China, helping to run Groupon Southern China. George currently spends time in the metaverse between SF, Boston, and Hawaii. He enjoys breakdancing, reading, and stand-up comedy in his spare time.

Lisha Li (Founder and CEO, Rosebud AI)

Lisha Li is the founder and CEO of Rosebud AI. She was previously a principal at Amplify Partners leading investments in early stage startups, and worked in data science at Pinterest and Stitch Fix. Lisha holds a PhD in Machine Learning from UC Berkeley.

Kerry Wang (CEO and Co-Founder, Searchlight)

Kerry Wang is the CEO & co-founder of Searchlight. Kerry graduated from Stanford with a BA with distinction in Human Biology (Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Human Behavior) and an MS in Computer Science. Prior to Searchlight, she worked as a Product Sales Lead at Google and a management consultant at McKinsey. She is a Forbes 2021 30 under 30 honoree.

Anna Wang (CTO and Co-Founder, Searchlight)

Anna Wang is the CTO & co-founder of Searchlight. Anna graduated from Stanford with a BS in Computer Science and an MS in Artificial Intelligence. Prior to Searchlight, she worked as a Product Manager at Google, Software Engineer at Uber, and management consultant at McKinsey. She is a Forbes 2021 30 under 30 honoree.

Snigdha Sur (Founder and CEO, The Juggernaut)

Snigdha is the founder & CEO of The Juggernaut. She has worked at McKinsey and advised BuzzFeed, Quartz, Amazon Studios, Scroll.in, and Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine. She got her MBA at Harvard, studied Economics & South Asian Studies at Yale, and spent five months coding at Flatiron School. She was born in Chhattisgarh, India; grew up in the Bronx and Queens, New York; and has worked and lived in Mumbai, India. She can speak Hindi, Bengali, and Mandarin. She loves Bollywood and reading novels.

Andrea Xu (CEO and Co-Founder, Umamicart)

Andrea Xu is the CEO and co-founder of Umamicart. Born in Spain to Chinese immigrant parents, Andrea’s diverse upbringing influenced her passion for the two-fold problem that Umamicart is solving: on the one hand, building an online experience for customers to seamlessly access an expansive selection of delicious products across Asian cuisines; on the other, providing a new digital window for mom-and-pop, immigrant-led businesses to reach consumers and have the space to tell their story. With Umamicart, Andrea is building an online shopping experience with Asian cuisine lovers at the very center of the company. Though her passion has always been entrepreneurship, Andrea comes from a rigorous background in Principal Investments at Goldman Sachs. She attended New York University (BA) and MIT Sloan (MBA). She now lives in Brooklyn.

For more information, please visit goldhouse.org/goldrush.