ai-agent
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Shawn Shivdat
Shawn Shivdat is the co-founder and CEO of Penciled (YC W24), a San Francisco startup that builds an AI front office assistant for physical therapy clinics. Raised around a mother's private practice and trained in computational neuroscience at Harvard, he went from writing patient-outcome software at Massachusetts General Hospital to launching a company that fills canceled appointments and completes plans of care automatically. Penciled now serves 200+ providers across 50+ clinics and has raised over $2.6M.
Stanley Wei
Stanley Wei is the CEO and co-founder of Pine AI (19pine.ai), a San Francisco startup building an autonomous AI agent that fights consumers' customer-service battles for them: negotiating bills, cancelling subscriptions, disputing overcharges, and chasing refunds through real phone calls and emails. A former Chief Strategy and Operating Officer at Nasdaq-listed Agora and a former investor at Hillhouse Capital, Wei founded Pine in late 2024 after a $200 dispute with his bank ate up 90 minutes of his life. Pine raised a $25 million Series A in December 2025 and reports more than $37 million in consumer savings.
Max Ruderman
Max Ruderman is the CEO of Harmonic, a New York-based data company building what he calls 'the source of truth for startups.' A former Google engineer who turned to entrepreneurship after a jiu-jitsu injury sidelined him, Ruderman helped grow Harmonic from a tool that scraped Delaware corporate filings into a real-time startup database used by investors at Floodgate, Craft Ventures, a16z, Accel, and companies like Brex, Notion, and Carta. He started as COO and became CEO, steering the company toward AI-driven sourcing with an investment agent built on LangGraph.
Valentina Ratner
Valentina Ratner is the co-founder and CEO of AllSpice.io, the 'GitHub for hardware' that brings version control, collaboration, and automated design review to the engineers who build PCBs, schematics, and bills of materials. An Argentina-born mechanical engineer turned Amazon PM turned Harvard MS/MBA, she launched AllSpice after watching brilliant teams build complex machines on archaic, file-shuffling workflows. In June 2025 she raised a $15M Series A to take the company's AI design-validation agent out of private beta, with customers spanning Blue Origin, Bose, and Tools for Humanity.
Scott Wu
Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the AI company behind Devin - widely recognized as the world's first autonomous AI software engineer. A three-time International Olympiad in Informatics gold medalist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Wu started coding at age 9, interned at a fintech startup as a high schooler alongside future Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, briefly attended Harvard, then spent five years building Lunchclub as CTO before co-founding Cognition in 2023 with fellow competitive programming champions. Under his leadership, Cognition grew from a 10-person apartment startup to a $10.2 billion company with over 200 employees, acquired Windsurf in July 2025, and raised $675 million in total funding - with Devin's annualized revenue surging from $1 million to $73 million in under a year.
Yasser Elsaid
Yasser Elsaid is an Egyptian-born software engineer and entrepreneur who bootstrapped Chatbase - an AI agent platform - from zero to $9M ARR with 18 people, all without raising a dollar of VC funding. He launched to 16 Twitter followers in February 2023, the tweet went viral, he failed two university classes, turned down a $1M acquisition offer for his source code three months in, and kept building. Now based in San Francisco on an O-1 'Alien of Extraordinary Ability' visa, he's declared 2026 the year Chatbase forgets it's bootstrapped.