ai-inference
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Veerbhan Kheterpal
Veerbhan Kheterpal is the co-founder and CEO of Quadric, a Burlingame, California processor IP company building the Chimera general-purpose neural processor (GPNPU) for on-device AI inference. A three-time technology founder with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, he previously co-founded Fabbrix (acquired by PDF Solutions) and was a technical co-founder of 21, Inc. Quadric's software-first architecture aims to run any AI model without the obsolescence that plagues fixed-function AI accelerators, and the company has raised roughly $90M across its funding rounds while scaling licensing revenue sharply through 2025.
Nikola Borisov
Nikola Borisov is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Infra, a Palo Alto cloud company that runs open-source AI models as a low-cost, low-latency inference service. A former competitive programmer who scaled messaging backends to hundreds of millions of users at imo.im and helped build HalloApp's founding backend, he bet early that inference, not training, would become the real bottleneck of the AI era. Deep Infra now processes close to five trillion tokens a week and raised a $107M Series B in May 2026 backed by NVIDIA, 500 Global, Felicis and others.
Kam Eshghi
Kam Eshghi is Chief Business Officer at OpenInfer, the Inference OS for the agentic era. He co-founded Lightbits Labs, where he helped pioneer NVMe/TCP storage and drove its adoption across data centers and AI clouds before the company was acquired by NVIDIA. Earlier in his career he led strategic alliances at DSSD (acquired by EMC for $1B), built the NVMe controller business at IDT, and shaped server chipset and Ethernet switch roadmaps at Intel. MIT EECS and Berkeley Haas MBA. Forbes Technology Council member.
Brian Yoo
Brian Yoo is Chief Business Officer at FriendliAI, an AI inference platform that helps enterprises deploy and scale large language models faster and cheaper. Before joining FriendliAI in April 2026, he spent nearly a decade as COO at Moloco, where he scaled the AI-driven advertising company from 10 employees to 600+ and grew revenue over 500x to $250M+, helping it reach a ~$4 billion valuation. A Cornell-trained operations research engineer turned business operator, Yoo brings deep expertise in scaling AI-native companies through go-to-market strategy, financial operations, and global team building.
Nicolas Muller
Nicolas Muller is the co-founder and CEO of Arago, a Paris-based deep-tech startup building a photonic AI accelerator called JEF that uses light instead of transistors to perform AI inference at 10x lower energy than leading GPUs. Coming from a physics and machine learning background - including an ML degree from MIT - Muller co-founded Arago in 2024 alongside Eliott Sarrey and Ambroise Müller. The company raised an oversubscribed $26M seed round in July 2025 backed by Earlybird, Protagonist, Visionaries Tomorrow, and angels from Apple, Datadog, Hugging Face and Arm. Arago's approach - top-down from inference efficiency requirements, not bottom-up from optics research - delivered a working prototype in under 12 months.
Zain Asgar
Zain Asgar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gimlet Labs, a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company building the world's first multi-silicon inference cloud. With a PhD from Stanford in electrical engineering focused on GPU energy modeling, Asgar previously led engineering at Google AI (where his work became Google Lens) and founded Pixie Labs, a Kubernetes-native observability platform acquired by New Relic in 2020. At Gimlet Labs, he is tackling one of AI's most pressing infrastructure challenges: making AI inference 3-10x more efficient by intelligently routing workloads across heterogeneous hardware including NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, ARM, and specialized accelerators like Cerebras.
Mitesh Agrawal
Mitesh Agrawal is the CEO of Positron AI, a Reno-based AI inference hardware startup that has raised $305M and achieved unicorn status in under 34 months. A co-founder and long-time COO of Lambda Labs - where he helped grow revenues from $500K to ~$500M - Agrawal brought his front-row view of GPU limitations to Positron, a company building purpose-built silicon (the Atlas system, and next-gen Asimov chip) that delivers 3x the performance of Nvidia GPUs at one-third the power. Backed by Arm, Qatar Investment Authority, Jump Trading, and others, Positron is building America's first at-scale AI inference silicon company.