ai-native
(22)
Kai-Fu Lee Has Spent Four Decades Teaching Machines to Listen. Now He Wants Companies to Listen Back.
From a speech recognition lab in Pittsburgh to the boardrooms of Beijing, Kai-Fu Lee has followed artificial intelligence through several lives. At 01.AI, his latest argument is that the hard part begins when the model is ready.
Lasse-Mathias Nyberg Is Teaching AI to Do the Paperwork of Buying a Car
The Stanford MBA and former BCG consultant is betting that the future of used-car retail will be won in the unglamorous space between a customer’s click and a clean title.
Ori Eldarov
Ori Eldarov is the co-founder and CEO of OffDeal, a New York based AI-native investment bank that runs sell-side M&A processes for owners of small businesses with $10-100M in revenue. A former RBC Capital Markets banker with over $20B in advised deals and a Harvard MBA, Eldarov started OffDeal out of Y Combinator in 2024 with ex-Meta engineer Alston Lin, and in mid-2025 raised a $12M Series A led by Radical Ventures.
Patrick Anderson
Patrick Anderson is Co-Founder and CTO of Moab, a New York based startup building a modern operating system for equipment rental and dealership businesses. He was previously Head of Core Engineering at Ramp, joining the fintech as its 11th employee. In February 2026 Moab emerged from stealth with $16M in combined Seed and Series A funding backed by Elad Gil and Ironspring Ventures.
Shay Sandler
Shay Sandler is co-founder and CEO of Vega, an Israeli cybersecurity company building a federated Security Analytics Mesh that queries security data where it lives instead of dragging it into a centralized SIEM. A former Israeli Unit 8200 officer and early team member at Granulate (acquired by Intel in 2022), Sandler started Vega in early 2024 with Eli Rozen after Intel wound down Granulate. In under two years Vega has raised $185M across three rounds, most recently a $120M Series B led by Accel in December 2025 at a valuation reported between $700M and $800M.
Aliisa Rosenthal
Aliisa Rosenthal is a General Partner at Acrew Capital and the firm's first GP hire since founding in 2019. She was the first commercial leader at OpenAI, where she scaled enterprise revenue from roughly $10M to roughly $10B and built ChatGPT Enterprise's go-to-market motion. She invests in AI-native companies reshaping enterprise software.
Kusal de Silva
Kusal de Silva is the CEO of AptEdge, an AI-native company focused on solving the hard last mile of enterprise B2B technical support — complex tickets, scattered knowledge, and the engineers who untangle both. A Cornell-trained, Oxford-polished operator with two decades inside enterprise sales orgs at Citigroup and Meltwater, he took the AptEdge helm in 2025 with a sharp position: don't be the fastest answer, be the right one.
Tript Singh Lamba
Tript Singh Lamba is the founder and CEO of ProductNow, an AI-native operating system for product teams that he built largely as a solo developer (with one intern) before raising a $6M seed round led by Sierra Ventures in July 2025. Over two decades he built flagship platforms at Microsoft, Google, and Expedia - helping launch Bing and the early core of Microsoft Messenger and Azure, co-founding Google's Ads AI personalization team, leading YouTube Ads through hypergrowth, and serving as SVP of Consumer Product at Expedia. His thesis: with AI accelerating engineering, the real bottleneck is no longer code but turning strategy into execution.
Aaron Sin
Aaron Sin is the co-founder and CEO of Develo, a startup building what it calls the first AI-native operating system for independent pediatric practices. A physician by training with an MD from Stanford and a biomedical engineering degree from Yale, he traded the exam room for the product roadmap after stints leading value-based care products at Innovaccer and healthcare engagements at McKinsey. Founded in 2022 with CTO Han Ke, Develo replaces the patchwork of clunky EMRs, intake tools, and billing systems that pediatricians juggle with one unified platform. In May 2026 the company raised a $14 million Series A led by Blueprint Equity, and its software is now deployed across hundreds of pediatric providers in more than two dozen states.
Christopher O'Donnell
Christopher O'Donnell is the co-founder and CEO of Day.ai, an AI-native CRM that captures customer relationship context automatically so people stop doing manual data entry. He spent roughly a decade as Chief Product Officer at HubSpot, where he led the 'startup within a startup' that turned a marketing tool into a CRM capable of challenging Salesforce. He founded Day.ai in April 2023 with longtime HubSpot colleague Michael Pici, and the company raised a $20M Series A led by Sequoia. Off the clock, O'Donnell is a guitarist, singer and songwriter who fronts the Boston rock band The Providers.
Ayush Sharma
Ayush Sharma is the founder and CEO of Warp, an AI-native employee management, payroll, and compliance platform built for high-growth startups. An MIT computer science and physics graduate and former Yelp ML engineer, he started Warp out of Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch to fix the government red tape he hated as a distributed-team founder. Warp now runs payroll across all 50 US states and 150+ countries for hundreds of startups, and in June 2025 raised an $18M Series A led by Sound Ventures.
Evan Stites-Clayton
Evan Stites-Clayton is a General Partner and CTO at HF0, a San Francisco-based residency and venture fund that backs repeat technical founders building AI-native startups. He previously co-founded Teespring with Walker Williams at Brown University in 2011, scaling it from a $3,000 weekend experiment to over $1 billion in cumulative sales and $65 million raised from Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures before going through Y Combinator's W13 batch. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30, he joined HF0 in 2022 to help the next generation of builders compress the gap between idea and scale.
Thomas Mawhinney
Thomas Mawhinney is a General Partner at Icon Ventures, a Palo Alto-based early-stage venture capital firm where he has invested since 2003. With over 30 years in the technology industry spanning entrepreneurship and venture capital, he combines hands-on operating experience — having co-founded and run a venture-backed software company — with deep investing expertise that has produced exits to Microsoft, Cisco, HP, Twilio, Experian, and more. His current focus spans AI-native companies, digital health, enterprise software, and cybersecurity, with board seats at companies including Teladoc Health, BILL (Bill.com), Maven Clinic, Synack, and Nomad Health.
John Glasgow
John Glasgow is the founder, CEO, and CFO of Campfire, the AI-native ERP platform built for high-growth tech companies. A 15-year finance veteran who passed through Adobe, Invoice2go, and Bill.com before founding Campfire during parental leave in 2023, Glasgow has raised over $100 million in funding — $35M Series A and $65M Series B in just 12 weeks — and is steering the company toward an IPO. His platform's proprietary Large Accounting Model (LAM) achieves 95% accuracy on financial workflows, and customers like Replit, Decagon, and PostHog have traded NetSuite for Campfire's AI-first stack.
Michael Jaszczyk
Michael Jaszczyk is the CEO (US) of NEWWORK Software, a Berlin and Palo Alto-based startup founded in 2023 by former SAP and Workday veterans to rebuild enterprise software for the AI era. With over two decades of technology leadership - including 15 years at GK Software SE where he rose from CTO to Chief Digital Transformation Officer and CEO of GK Americas - he is a recognized thought leader at the intersection of AI, cloud computing, and enterprise workflow automation. Jaszczyk helped pioneer retail AI as far back as 2003 through the Metro Group Future Store initiative, and today leads NEWWORK's mission to replace legacy ERP, CRM, and HR systems with AI-native, agentic platforms that understand business requirements and generate working solutions in minutes.
Kai Cheng
Kai Cheng is the Co-Founder and CEO of Creao AI, an AI-native app builder that lets anyone turn a plain-language conversation into a fully autonomous, self-running application. After a decade deploying production AI systems for more than 250 enterprise clients, he co-founded Creao in late 2024 with a conviction that the AI productivity revolution hasn't started until humans stop being the ones clicking 'run.' The platform hit 200,000 users organically in under a year, raised $25 million across three rounds, and runs its own internal operations - marketing, SEO, content - on the product itself.
Arjun Prakash
Arjun Prakash is the Co-Founder and CEO of Distyl AI, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company valued at $1.8 billion after raising $175M in a September 2025 Series B led by Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures. Drawing on nearly a decade at Palantir Technologies where he built and led a 30+ person team of Forward Deployed strategists and engineers, Prakash co-founded Distyl to help Fortune 500 companies become genuinely AI-native - not by layering AI onto existing processes, but by rearchitecting how enterprises operate. Distyl claims a 100% production success rate against an industry norm of 95% failure, serves clients across healthcare, manufacturing, telecom, and financial services, and reached profitability in Q3 2024.
Siddharth Sridharan
Siddharth Sridharan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Spendflo, an AI-native procurement platform that helps fast-growing and enterprise companies manage SaaS vendor relationships and cut software spend. He co-founded Spendflo in 2021 after spotting a universal blind spot: CFOs had no centralized way to track or negotiate SaaS contracts. Backed by $15.9M in funding including a Series A, Spendflo has grown to 140 employees and operates out of San Francisco, promising guaranteed savings on software procurement through a hybrid AI-plus-expert-negotiation model.
Emily Bennett
Emily Bennett is an Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she leads investing for a16z speedrun - the firm's high-velocity startup accelerator that has deployed over $180M to 150+ startups since 2023. A neuroscience graduate of Middlebury College (magna cum laude) turned Harvard MBA, she carved a winding path through product roles at Spotify, The New York Times, and Facebook before pivoting fully into venture at Owl Ventures, where she rose to Partner with a focus on edtech. At a16z, her investment thesis centers on AI-native tools that allow single founders to operate what once required entire teams, and she is a vocal advocate for the first AI-native university - an institution where learning paths, schedules, and research adapt in real time through continuous data feedback loops.
Fareed Mosavat
Fareed Mosavat is a Visiting Partner at a16z Speedrun, a 12-week founder accelerator at the intersection of technology and entertainment. He came to venture capital after a career arc that started in physics simulation at Pixar and wound through product and growth leadership at Zynga, RunKeeper, Instacart, and Slack, before he ran product education for thousands of PMs as Chief Development Officer at Reforge. Today he backs AI-native B2B startups, co-hosts the Unsolicited Feedback podcast with Brian Balfour, and writes about what it actually takes to build products people love.
Julien Bek
Julien Bek is a Partner at Sequoia Capital's London office, one of the most storied venture capital firms in the world. A Geneva native who studied at Warwick Business School and the University of Cambridge, he started his career as an entrepreneur — founding one of Europe's first e-cigarette companies at age 18 — before transitioning into venture capital at Global Founders Capital and then Accel Partners. At Accel he backed breakout companies like Revolut, Melio, Miro, and BeReal. He joined Sequoia in September 2023 as a London-based partner focused on early-stage European and global tech companies. In March 2026, he published the widely-read thesis 'Services: The New Software,' arguing that the next trillion-dollar company will sell outcomes rather than software tools, using AI to automate service delivery at scale.
Sophia Luo
Sophia Luo is a Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where she backs early-stage founders building AI-native applications and enabling infrastructure. A Bay Area native who triple-majored at MIT in four years, she was a nationally ranked chess player by age eight and carried that competitive instinct into the AI startup world - first as an early engineer at Scale AI, then as a founding product engineer at Character.AI. She joined Greylock in 2024, made angel bets on Cognition and Mercor before they were household names, and landed on the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in venture capital within her first year as an investor.