The future of American business isn’t being written in boardrooms. It’s being coded in garages, prototyped in labs, and pitched over midnight Zoom calls.
Across the U.S., a new generation of innovators is ditching the playbook to build real solutions for real problems. These aren’t vanity services or alternative apps, they’re companies rewriting the rules of what’s possible. With AI, data, and GRIT as their weapons, they’re tackling some of the biggest challenges across commerce, healthcare, infrastructure, and beyond.
Between July 9 and August 6, Keiretsu Forum launched a campaign to spotlight five such builders - entrepreneurs not just dreaming big, but executing at scale. From reinventing the dev team to solving America’s compute crisis, their stories are proof that the next wave of innovation is already here, and investors are paying close attention. Here’s a look at the bold minds behind CodeValet, Shoplift.AI, Helios, PredxBio, and Pattern Computer.
Shanon James Smith - CodeValet
Shanon James Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of CodeValet, is a proven strategist, fundraiser, and talent scout. He has built a reputation for forging powerful enterprise partnerships and scaling tech solutions that work at a global level.
With CodeValet, he’s taking on one of the biggest bottlenecks in software development - engineering bandwidth. CodeValet is an AI-powered "superhuman software engineer" that writes, tests, debugs, and deploys production-ready code autonomously. Unlike traditional AI tools that guess or assist, CodeValet acts as a reliable, never-sleeping member of the dev team.
“Everybody has a senior person at the company... We'll call him Bob... But if Bob gets sick or tries to take vacation and turn his phone off, all havoc breaks loose. But with Code Valet, everybody gets their own Bob,” Shanon explains.
With a compelling product and clear customer need, CodeValet is poised to transform how modern teams build software. Here’s their story on our Linkedin handle.
Austin Goldman, Shoplift.AI
Austin Goldman, Co-Founder and CEO of Shoplift.AI, knows that in e-commerce, traffic means nothing without conversions. As ad costs climb and shopper attention drops, most Shopify merchants face a broken funnel with no tools built to fix it.
Enter Shoplift.AI: the first A/B testing platform custom-built for Shopify. It empowers even a solo marketer to run experiments, improve UX, and drive sales, without hiring developers or using clunky enterprise tools. With native integration and lightning-fast deployment, Shoplift helps brands personalize storefronts at scale and convert more of the traffic they already paid for.
“Historically, storefront optimization has been prohibitively expensive, requiring analysts, designers, developers, and enterprise-grade software,” says Austin. “Shoplift gives that power to a single marketer.”
With razor-sharp focus and a mission to democratize conversion rate optimization, Austin and his team are equipping thousands of brands to stop burning budgets and start unlocking growth. Here’s the carousel post we prepared for Austin.
Jose Rojas, Helios
The AI revolution is hitting a wall: compute is limited, infrastructure is slow, and energy demands are skyrocketing. José Rojas, CEO of Helios, is tackling all three head-on with a radical yet elegant idea - deploy AI-ready data centers at the source of underutilized power.
By building modular data centers directly at U.S. power plants, Helios bypasses energy bottlenecks, cuts latency, slashes costs, and scales fast while dramatically reducing the carbon footprint of AI. As AI workloads double every 100 days, José’s background in finance and systems thinking positions him perfectly to navigate this frontier.
“The demand has been doubling every 100 days. So imagine that — the amount of servers and compute we need has been doubling every 100 days since launch of GPT,” José shares.
Here’s how we featured them on our social media.
PredxBio, Dusty Majumdar
Precision oncology is often limited by guesswork. Dr. Dusty Majumdar, CEO of PredxBio, is changing that with SpaceIQ™, an AI platform that maps tumor microdomains, predicts treatment outcomes with 90%+ accuracy, and helps explain why some therapies succeed while others fail.
With senior leadership experience at IBM, GE Healthcare, and Exact Sciences, Dusty brings Fortune 500 discipline to a fast-moving biotech startup. He’s no stranger to highly regulated industries or scaling breakthrough technologies, and now he’s using that expertise to save lives and billions in drug trial costs.
“When you talk about spatial biology, it's not just a buzzword,” he says. “It's a necessity for precision medicine.”
Click here to view our carousel featuring PredxBio.
Mark Anderson, Pattern Computer
While most AI still chases patterns it’s trained to find, Mark Anderson’s Pattern Computer is designed to discover what no one’s looking for. It’s the world’s first “pattern discovery engine”, a proprietary system built from the ground up to find explainable, high-impact patterns in vast, high-dimensional data without human bias or preloaded hypotheses.
Pattern Computer is already making breakthroughs in cancer diagnostics, financial forecasting, and materials science by finding insights that traditional AI misses. The Department of Energy even calls it the only company truly delivering explainable AI.
“Pattern doesn’t replicate intelligence. It discovers it,” says Mark, the company’s Founding Chair and CEO.
In an era where data is overwhelming and AI is often opaque, Pattern offers clarity, speed, and a shot at understanding complexity without compromise. View their featurette on our social media here.
These five innovators represent the spirit of American entrepreneurship. Their companies have not only secured investor confidence but have also demonstrated real market traction, suggesting that their visions are becoming reality. We, at Keiretsu Forum, are glad to have them present at our Forums, and we wish them incredible growth and impact on America’s business landscape.
