Dennis M. Sponer began his career as in-house counsel to one of Nevada's largest Managed Care Organizations and shortly thereafter founded one of the first workers' compensation-specific Pharmacy Benefit Managers. He is passionate about founder-led startups and entrepreneurship. Through his consultancy, SRX Advisors, he serves as a fractional general counsel and advisor to several healthcare companies and VC firms.

He is licensed as an attorney in California and Nevada and is a senior advisor to Connected Capital, a London-based UK FCA-regulated advisory firm. He is a thought leader in the legal, health-tech, biotech, pharmaceutical and startup worlds. Sponer devised his first PBM, ScripNet, as a payer-based technological solution to the pharmaceutical payment and remittance challenge. Sponer sold ScripNet to Optum Healthcare Solutions in 2012. His latest venture, HSARx, was a consumer-facing pharmacy benefit manager serving health savings account owners. He sold HSARx to SwiftScript in October of 2023.

Carrie Nixon is a healthcare innovation attorney and the Founder and Managing Partner of Nixon Law Group. Alongside her colleagues at NLG, she works with digital health, virtual care, and AI-enabled healthcare companies as they build, scale, and navigate complex regulatory and reimbursement landscapes. She was drawn to this work after observing a consistent pattern early in her career: truly innovative companies often struggle not because their ideas lack merit, but because regulatory, compliance, and payment systems were not designed with innovation in mind.

Over time, serving as counsel to founders and growth-stage teams has shaped her view of legal strategy as a business enabler rather than a barrier. She believes the strongest outcomes come from practical, values-driven collaboration, intellectual honesty about risk, and helping teams understand not only what the rules are, but how to use them thoughtfully to support sustainable growth and better patient care.