BrightEdge is an enterprise SEO and content performance platform that turns the chaos of search into a measurable system of record. Founded in 2007 by Jim Yu and Lemuel Park, it built one of the largest proprietary data sets in marketing - billions of pages and keywords - and pairs it with an AI engine (DataMind) to power products like Data Cube, ContentIQ, Autopilot and AI Catalyst. Used by thousands of brands including a majority of the Fortune 100, BrightEdge has pivoted hard into measuring and optimizing for AI-driven search experiences like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Dropbox is the company that made 'just put it in my Dropbox' a sentence everyone understood. Founded in 2007 after Drew Houston got tired of forgetting his USB drive, it turned file sync into a verb and grew into a content-collaboration platform used by roughly 700 million registered users and about 18 million paying subscribers. Today the San Francisco company, public on the Nasdaq as DBX with about $2.5 billion in annual revenue, is betting its next chapter on Dash, an AI-powered universal search layer that hunts across every app where your work actually lives.
Jim Yu is the founder and CEO of BrightEdge, the enterprise SEO and content performance platform he started at his kitchen table in 2007 after a stint leading product at Salesforce. Two decades in, his thesis hasn't changed - he's just renamed the battlefield. Search became AI search; rankings became citations; BrightEdge stayed the scoreboard.
Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine for AIs. Their neural search API lets developers and AI agents retrieve high-quality, factual content from the web using natural-language queries, powering RAG, research agents, and enterprise knowledge workflows.
Julie Bornstein is the founder and CEO of Daydream, an AI-powered shopping search engine that raised $50M in seed funding in 2024 and publicly launched in 2025. A serial entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer, she grew Nordstrom.com from $10M to $350M in sales, transformed Sephora's digital business and launched Beauty Insider, scaled Stitch Fix to $1B as COO, and sold her AI fashion startup The Yes to Pinterest in 2022. With a Harvard BA and HBS MBA, Bornstein has spent 25+ years at the intersection of retail, technology, and artificial intelligence.
ZeroEntropy is the AI infrastructure company fixing the broken retrieval layer of modern AI applications. Founded in 2024 by Ghita Houir Alami (CEO) and Nicholas Pipitone (CTO), the San Francisco–based startup builds rerankers, embedding models, and end-to-end search infrastructure that outperforms Google, OpenAI, Cohere, and Voyage on public benchmarks. Backed by Y Combinator (W25) and a $4.2M seed round led by Initialized Capital, ZeroEntropy's products — zerank-2, zembed-1, zsearch, and ze-onprem — are used by enterprises including Assembled (serving Stripe, Canva, Robinhood, and Notion). The company's proprietary zELO training methodology, derived from chess Elo ratings and the Thurstone statistical model, produces models with calibrated relevance judgments that binary labels cannot replicate.