
Abuzar Royesh is the founder and CEO of Pastel (DataServe AI), a U.S.- and Nigeria-based company building agentic AI software that helps regional, mid-tier, and community banks automate onboarding, compliance, fraud detection, and anti-money-laundering work. Born in Afghanistan and educated at Tufts and Stanford, where he was a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, he is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree. He is also the founder and board chair of the 30 Birds Foundation, which evacuated more than 450 Afghans, mainly schoolgirls, after the 2021 Taliban takeover.
Peter McKee is the co-founder and CEO of Aeqium, a San Francisco compensation-management platform that pulls HR and finance teams out of spreadsheet chaos and into a controlled, data-driven system for planning salaries, bonuses, equity, and benefits. An MIT-trained engineer who led self-driving rider experience at Uber and was an early backend engineering manager at Braze, McKee also served as a US Army officer running battalion combat-engineer operations in Afghanistan. He started Aeqium in late 2020 to make pay fairer, faster, and less of a fire drill.
Marty Massih Sarim is the President of Sanas, a real-time speech AI platform that modulates accents and eliminates background noise for contact center agents globally. An Afghan refugee who came to the US in the early 1980s and started his career at 18 as a call center agent, Sarim brings over 25 years of BPO and contact center industry expertise to Sanas. He is also Co-Founder and General Partner at Carya Venture Partners, a $20M micro-fund focused on deep tech and enterprise AI, and founder of the Moe123 Scholarship Fund, which has awarded $125,000+ to high school seniors in the Minneapolis area.