Zach Lloyd is the founder and CEO of Warp, the Rust-based terminal that grew up into an agentic development environment. A former Google principal engineer who led the Docs and Sheets teams, he looked at the one tool every programmer touches and noticed it had barely changed in 40 years. Warp's answer: a command line that reads natural language, runs AI agents, and as of 2025 codes by prompt. The company has raised roughly $73-75M from Sequoia, GV, Dylan Field and Elad Gil, and went from its first $1M of ARR in 300-plus days to adding $1M every few days.
GitLab is an AI-powered DevSecOps platform that brings the entire software development lifecycle - planning, source code management, CI/CD, security, and deployment - into a single application. Born as an open-source alternative to GitHub in 2011 and run as one of the world's largest all-remote companies, GitLab now serves enterprises and millions of developers, trades on Nasdaq under GTLB, and is pushing into agentic AI development with GitLab Duo.
Replit is a browser-based software creation platform that has evolved from a collaborative cloud IDE into one of the leading agentic AI coding companies. Its Replit Agent lets anyone - engineer or not - go from a natural language prompt to a deployed, production-ready application. Headquartered in Foster City, California, the company now serves more than 40 million users and reached a $9B valuation in 2026.
Amjad Masad is the co-founder and CEO of Replit, the AI-powered cloud development platform that has grown to over 50 million users and reached a $9 billion valuation after its $400 million Series D in March 2026. Born in Amman, Jordan - where he learned to code at internet cafes by the 15-minute slot - Masad built Replit to remove the setup friction he experienced firsthand. After stints as founding engineer at Codecademy and on Facebook's JavaScript infrastructure team (where he helped build Babel.js and Jest), he co-founded Replit in 2016 with his wife Haya Odeh and brother Faris. Rejected by Y Combinator four times before acceptance, Masad now leads a platform where anyone can go from idea to deployed software without writing a line of code - believing there will be a billion software creators in the AI era.
Cursor is an AI-first code editor built by Anysphere, a San Francisco startup founded in 2022 by four MIT graduates. Originally a fork of Visual Studio Code, Cursor has evolved into a full agent-based development platform where autonomous AI handles everything from autocomplete to end-to-end feature building. With $2B+ in annualised revenue, over half the Fortune 500 as customers, and a valuation that reached $29.3B after its Series D in November 2025, Cursor has become the fastest-growing SaaS company ever from $1M to $500M ARR - turning the IDE from a code-writing tool into an AI orchestration layer.
Michael Truell is the 25-year-old co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor — the AI-native code editor that reached $2 billion ARR faster than any SaaS company in history. A former Google intern and MIT dropout who won the ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize and IOI medals in high school, Truell co-founded Cursor in 2022 with three MIT classmates, launching it publicly in March 2023. By November 2025, Cursor had raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation — and in April 2026, SpaceX secured an option to acquire the company for $60 billion. Truell's north star: replace coding itself with something better.
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.
Gergely Orosz is the Hungarian-born, Amsterdam-based author behind The Pragmatic Engineer, the #1 technology newsletter on Substack with over 1 million readers. A former engineering manager at Uber who helped build payments infrastructure processing $65B+ annually, he left Big Tech in 2021 to write independently. He covers software engineering careers, Big Tech culture, and the AI-driven transformation of the industry - earning $1.5M+ per year from subscriptions alone, with zero ads or sponsors.
Thorsten Ball is a German software engineer, author, and technical educator best known for his self-published books 'Writing an Interpreter in Go' and 'Writing a Compiler in Go', which have become go-to resources for developers wanting to understand programming language internals. With over two decades of professional software development experience, he currently works at Sourcegraph on Amp, an AI-powered coding agent. He also writes the weekly newsletter 'Register Spill', covering systems programming, developer tools, and the intersection of AI with software engineering.