ai-for-hr
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Alexei Dunaway
Alexei Dunaway is the founder and CEO of Pinnacle, a New York and Palo Alto based startup building Pascal, an AI performance and career coach that lives inside Slack, Teams, and Zoom. A Stanford GSB graduate and Fulbright Scholar, he spent five years building an entrepreneur accelerator in Kenya before running an executive coaching practice for venture-backed founders. He now wants to give every worker the kind of coaching that used to be reserved for the C-suite. Pinnacle raised a $2.5M seed round in March 2025 led by eLab Ventures.
Ana-Maria Constantin
Ana-Maria Constantin is the CEO and co-founder of Cascade AI, a Bellevue-based startup building agentic AI that automates the grind of HR and back-office operations. A Harvard dual major in computer science and astrophysics who left Romania after high school, she spent five-plus years as a software engineer at Microsoft writing code that touched millions of users on Azure before deciding HR - the function that touches more lives than any other in a company - was the perfect place to point machine learning. She raised a $5.45M-plus seed round led by Google's Gradient Ventures with AlleyCorp, was named GeekWire's Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2024, and recognized as a 2025 Google Cloud Partner All-Star.
Joseph Quan
Joseph Quan is the founder and CEO of Knoetic, the people-analytics platform and CPOHQ community that bills itself as the AI 'Second Brain' for Chief People Officers. He started the company in March 2020 with 25 HR leaders trading notes through the COVID crisis, then turned that group into a 2,000+ member network and a software business backed by $54M+ from Accel, Menlo, EQT and 150+ angels including Adam Grant. A two-time founder, Wharton/Berkeley graduate and Inc. 30 Under 30 alum, he returned as CEO to build Knoetic's AI product suite.