Darrin Chen is the VP of Global Partners (NPN) GTM & Operations at NVIDIA, where he leads go-to-market strategy and operations for the NVIDIA Partner Network - the company's global partner ecosystem spanning solution providers, systems integrators, and channel partners. With 30+ years in technology from storage to networking to AI infrastructure, Chen joined NVIDIA through the 2020 acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, where he had spent over a decade building worldwide channel programs. In mid-2023, NVIDIA expanded his mandate as it split its global channel chief role in two, tapping Chen to oversee its entire NPN program as the company transformed into a full-stack AI computing company.
Anyscale is the company behind Ray, the open-source distributed computing framework used to train and serve some of the world's largest AI systems. Founded by the creators of Ray at UC Berkeley's RISELab, Anyscale provides a managed compute platform that lets enterprises scale Python and AI workloads across any cloud, with the performance of bare metal and the ergonomics of a notebook.
Armada is a San Francisco-based edge computing company that builds ruggedized, containerized data centers - the Galleon family and the megawatt-scale Leviathan - paired with Starlink connectivity and an AI orchestration platform. Its mission is to put AI and compute everywhere the cloud can't reach: oil rigs, mines, ships, forward operating bases, and remote industrial sites.
GMI Cloud is an AI-native GPU cloud built around NVIDIA's H100 and H200 accelerators. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Mountain View, it sells on-demand and reserved GPU compute, an orchestration layer (Cluster Engine), and a low-latency Inference Engine to AI labs and enterprises building generative models. In 2025 NVIDIA named it one of seven Reference Platform Cloud Partners worldwide.
MinIO is a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage company building the data layer for AI. Its software-defined storage runs on commodity hardware in private clouds, on-prem, and at the edge, and is used by more than half of the Fortune 500 to power analytics, ML training, and exascale AI workloads.
Aaron Katz is the Co-Founder and CEO of ClickHouse, the world's fastest OLAP database company, which he has built from a 12-person open-source project into a $15 billion enterprise serving 4,000 customers including Tesla, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI. A veteran of Salesforce (12 years, from $20M to $4B in revenue) and Elastic (CRO, $5M to $500M), Katz assembled a founding team mid-pandemic, relocated engineers from Russia to Amsterdam, and raised over $1 billion in funding. In January 2026 ClickHouse closed a $400M Series D; by May 2026 the company surpassed $250M ARR, growing 250% year-over-year.
Abhishek Choudhary is the Co-Founder and CTO of TrueFoundry, a Series A-backed AI infrastructure platform that helps enterprises deploy, manage, and govern machine learning models at scale. A former Senior Staff Engineer at Meta — where he worked on infrastructure serving over a billion users — he left to build the platform he wished had existed at Facebook: one that brings Meta-level AI automation to every enterprise. An IIT Kharagpur alumnus, he co-founded TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside batchmates Nikunj Bajaj and Anuraag Gupta, and has since grown it to serve clients like NVIDIA, Siemens Healthineers, and ResMed, raising $21.3M in total funding.
Alex Yeh is the Founder and CEO of GMI Cloud, a GPU-native AI cloud infrastructure company he built from Bitcoin mining data centers into a global AI infrastructure leader in just 30 days. GMI Cloud — one of only 6 NVIDIA Reference Platform Partners worldwide — raised $82M in Series A funding in 2024 and is behind a $12 billion sovereign AI infrastructure initiative in Japan. Yeh's mission: make building AI applications as simple as building a website on Shopify.
Anand Babu 'AB' Periasamy is the Co-Founder and CEO of MinIO, the world's most widely deployed open-source object storage platform with over 2 million Docker pulls per day. A serial entrepreneur from Tamil Nadu, India, he previously co-founded Gluster Inc. — the distributed file system company acquired by Red Hat for $136 million in 2011. With MinIO, he built a Kubernetes-native, Amazon S3-compatible storage engine that became foundational infrastructure for AI, machine learning, and data-lake workloads. In January 2022, MinIO closed a $103M Series B at a $1 billion valuation, cementing its unicorn status with backing from Intel Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, and Nexus Venture Partners.
Ankur Goyal is the Founder & CEO of Braintrust, a San Francisco-based AI evaluation and observability platform that helps engineering teams ship reliable AI products. Previously VP of Engineering at SingleStore (MemSQL) and founder of Impira (acquired by Figma in 2022), Goyal brings over a decade of distributed systems and ML infrastructure experience to the challenge of making AI applications production-ready. Braintrust has raised $121M in total funding, including an $80M Series B at an $800M valuation in February 2026, backed by ICONIQ Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and a roster of elite angels including Greg Brockman and Elad Gil.
Augusto 'Aghi' Marietti is the CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc., the company behind the world's most widely deployed API gateway. Born in Rome in 1988, he co-founded Mashape at age 19 in a Milan garage, arrived in San Francisco with $600 and a 90-day visa, crashed on Travis Kalanick's couch, and built what became Kong - a $2 billion enterprise processing over 20 trillion API requests monthly. Known as the 'API Godfather,' Marietti has raised $424 million in total funding, surpassed $146M in annual recurring revenue with 800+ employees, and is now positioning Kong as the essential AI connectivity layer for the enterprise.
Hao Zhong is the CEO and Co-Founder of ScaleFlux, a San Jose-based fabless semiconductor company that builds computational storage drives and CXL memory solutions for cloud, AI, and data center workloads. With 20+ years in flash storage and LDPC technology — including stints at LSI, SandForce, and Fusion-io — Zhong co-founded ScaleFlux in 2014 to rethink what a storage device can do: compress data in hardware, cut write amplification, and deliver 4x effective capacity at roughly half the price of standard NVMe SSDs. ScaleFlux has raised $288M in funding and posted record-breaking growth in 2024.
Haseeb Budhani is the Co-founder and CEO of Rafay Systems, a Sunnyvale-based infrastructure orchestration platform that simplifies Kubernetes and AI infrastructure lifecycle operations across public clouds, private data centers, and the edge. A serial entrepreneur with a track record of building and selling enterprise technology companies, Budhani previously co-founded Soha Systems - a secure remote access startup acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2016 - and has held senior product and engineering roles at Citrix, Infineta Systems, and others. Under his leadership, Rafay has raised $37.1M in total funding, built partnerships with Verizon, NVIDIA, and Cisco, and grown to serve major enterprise customers at the intersection of Kubernetes operations and AI infrastructure.
Ishaan Bhola is the Co-Founder of SuperAGI, a Palo Alto-based AI company building full-stack autonomous agent infrastructure and a next-generation AI-native CRM. A serial entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded six ventures across consumer apps, home decor e-commerce, fintech lending, account-based marketing, and now AGI infrastructure, Bhola has scaled teams to 200+ employees and built products used by millions. SuperAGI raised a $10M Series A led by WhatsApp founder Jan Koum's Newlands VC in March 2024, and has grown to $9.9M in revenue with an open-source platform boasting 15,200+ GitHub stars.
Jeyappragash 'JJ' Jeyakeerthi is the co-founder and CTO of Tetrate, the company that made Istio enterprise-ready and brought FIPS-verified service mesh to regulated industries including the US federal government. An IIT Madras graduate who once ran Twitter's Cloud Infrastructure, JJ co-founded Tetrate in 2018 with Varun Talwar to secure the cloud-native stack from edge to datacenter - building one of the most technically credible teams in the service mesh ecosystem, trusted by the US Air Force and some of the world's largest enterprises.
Linda Haviv is a Staff Developer Advocate at Anyscale and founder of CodingCrystals.com, best known for her wildly nonlinear path from philosophy major and professional singer to site reliability engineer and AI infrastructure advocate. After graduating summa cum laude as Baruch College's salutatorian, teaching herself to code at The Flatiron School, and spending years as a JavaScript developer and SRE at Fox Corporation, she joined AWS as a developer advocate before landing at Anyscale — the company behind Ray, the open-source distributed computing framework that powers OpenAI's ChatGPT training. She uses her platform to demystify AI infrastructure for developers everywhere, and sells STEM-inspired crystal jewelry on the side.
Liran Zvibel is the Co-Founder and CEO of WEKA, a Campbell, California-based AI-native data platform company valued at $1.6 billion. He co-founded WEKA in 2013 after earlier stints at XIV Storage Systems (acquired by IBM) and Fusic, bringing deep expertise in high-performance distributed storage. Under his leadership, WEKA has raised $465M+ in funding, surpassed $100M in annual recurring revenue, and built a platform powering 300+ of the world's largest AI and GPU deployments including 11 of the Fortune 50. A former Israeli military Captain who earned the Israeli Defence Award, Zvibel holds a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.
Robert Nishihara is a co-founder of Anyscale, the company commercializing Ray - the open-source distributed computing framework powering AI workloads at OpenAI, Apple, Uber, and thousands of other organizations. A Harvard math grad and UC Berkeley PhD, he built Ray during his doctoral research to solve the tooling bottlenecks he personally experienced doing AI research. Anyscale has raised $259.6M and reached a $1B+ valuation under his leadership before he transitioned from CEO to a product-focused role in mid-2024.
Rafay Systems is a Sunnyvale-based platform-engineering company that builds infrastructure orchestration and workflow automation software for Kubernetes, GPU workloads and AI/ML pipelines. Its cloud-based platform lets enterprises offer self-service compute to developers and data scientists while keeping platform teams in control of cost, security and compliance across AWS, Azure, GCP and on-prem environments.
Spectro Cloud is a San Jose-based enterprise software company that builds Palette, a Kubernetes management platform used to run, secure and scale containerized workloads, AI infrastructure and GPU clusters across cloud, data center, bare metal and edge environments. Founded in 2019 by Cisco/Cliqr veterans, it counts GE HealthCare, T-Mobile, Nokia and the U.S. Air Force and Navy among its customers and closed a $75M Series C in November 2024 led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs.
WEKA builds a software-defined data platform engineered for AI and HPC workloads, feeding GPUs and CPUs with low-latency, high-throughput storage across on-prem, cloud, edge and hybrid environments. Its NeuralMesh architecture underpins hundreds of the world's largest AI deployments, including model builders, hyperscale neoclouds, and Fortune 50 enterprises.
DreamBig Semiconductor is a San Jose-based chiplet company building open silicon platforms that scale AI networking from 800 Gbps to 12.8 Tbps. Founded by Marvell veterans, the team is selling chiplets, a SuperNIC, and a chiplet hub aimed at AI data centers, automotive, and edge compute.
ECL (EdgeCloudLink) builds the world's first modular, off-grid data centers powered by green hydrogen fuel cells. Founded by data-center veteran Yuval Bachar, ECL delivers Tier 4 uptime with zero emissions, zero grid power, and a PUE under 1.1 - selling capacity in 1-2 MW modular blocks designed for high-density AI compute.
FlexAI is a Paris-based AI infrastructure company building a 'universal AI compute' layer that lets teams deploy, train, and serve models across diverse GPU architectures and cloud providers without wrestling with the underlying hardware. Founded in 2023 by former Intel, NVIDIA, Apple, and Tesla veterans, it raised a $30M seed round in April 2024 and is positioning itself as Europe's answer to the GPU-as-a-service crunch.
LangChain is the agent engineering company. It builds the open-source frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph) and the commercial platform (LangSmith, LangGraph Platform) that developers use to design, deploy, evaluate and observe LLM-powered applications and autonomous agents in production.
Omni Design Technologies builds high-performance, ultra-low-power semiconductor IP - the data converters and mixed-signal blocks that move information between the analog and digital worlds. Its Swift family of ADCs, DACs and analog front-ends sits inside SoCs for AI infrastructure, 5G/6G, Wi-Fi 7, automotive lidar/radar, satellite links, and quantum control, fabricated on processes from 28nm down to advanced FinFET nodes.
TrueFoundry is a San Francisco-based enterprise agentic AI platform that helps Fortune 1000 companies deploy, govern, and scale AI and machine learning applications. Founded in 2021 by former Meta engineers from IIT Kharagpur, it provides an end-to-end MLOps/LLMOps platform covering model deployment, AI gateway, model registry, prompt lifecycle management, and observability - all on the customer's own infrastructure with SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance. With $21.3M in total funding led by Intel Capital and Peak XV, TrueFoundry's platform manages 1,000+ clusters, processes 10+ billion monthly API requests, and delivers 40-50% infrastructure cost reductions for customers including Siemens Healthineers, ResMed, NVIDIA, and Automation Anywhere.
Derek Garnier is the CEO of Evocative, a global digital infrastructure provider headquartered in Los Angeles, California. With over 35 years in the industry, he has built, operated, and sold multiple companies across data centers, fiber networks, and managed services. A former engineer turned strategist, Garnier co-founded Arcadian Infracom, led Layer42 Networks through a successful acquisition by Wave Broadband in 2015, and returned to Evocative as CEO in February 2023. He champions hybrid cloud, AI-ready infrastructure, and inclusion as core business pillars, guiding Evocative through a significant debt financing round in December 2025 to expand high-density colocation and network capacity for next-generation AI applications.
George Kurian is the Chief Executive Officer of NetApp, the $20B+ enterprise data storage and cloud infrastructure company, where he has led a decade-long transformation from legacy storage vendor to AI-ready data platform. Born in Pampady, Kerala, he arrived at Princeton at 17 with a partial scholarship and a twin brother — Thomas Kurian, now CEO of Google Cloud — making them one of the rarest pairs in tech: identical twins who both run major Fortune 500 companies. Under his tenure since 2015, NetApp has posted record revenues of $6.57B in FY2025 and positioned itself as critical backbone for enterprise AI workloads.
Jun Shi is CEO and President of Accton Technology, the $7.9B Taiwanese ODM powerhouse behind much of the world's white-box networking hardware. A 25-year veteran of Silicon Valley's networking giants — Cisco, Juniper, and F5 — he shepherded startup Volterra from inception through its $500 million acquisition before joining Accton in 2023. Now he's steering the company's ambitious pivot: from hardware maker to full-stack open infrastructure provider, anchored by Nexvec, a turnkey AI-ready infrastructure solution launched in May 2025.