aiops
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Topaz Turkenitz
Topaz Turkenitz is the co-founder and CEO of Vespper (YC F24), a multi-agent AI system that acts as a 24/7 on-call engineer, triaging alerts and troubleshooting incidents through Slack in seconds. A full-stack software engineer with a background in computer science and design, she spent years at the security unicorn Snyk building distributed systems at 99.9% uptime and running growth experiments before setting out to make on-call work stress-free.
Xiaodan Zhuang
Xiaodan Zhuang, who also goes by Dennis, is the co-founder and CEO of Greptime, a company building GreptimeDB, an open-source observability database written in Rust that unifies metrics, logs, and traces. Before starting Greptime in 2022, he spent roughly 18 years in software infrastructure, including leading the intelligent monitoring team at Ant Group where he built ultra-large-scale time-series platforms for AIOps, plus earlier stints at Taobao/Alibaba and LeanCloud. He is a long-time open-source contributor (GitHub handle killme2008) behind projects like Aviator and xmemcached, and a self-described car enthusiast who races on tracks.
Raju Datla
Raju Datla is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Fabrix.ai (formerly CloudFabrix), an AI-native IT operations platform he founded in 2015. Before Fabrix.ai, he sold two companies to Cisco - Jahi Networks (~$16M, 2004) and Cloupia ($125M, 2012), the latter becoming the foundation of Cisco's UCS management suite. At Fabrix.ai, he is pioneering Agentic AI for enterprise IT operations through a Robotic Data Automation Fabric that unifies data ingestion, AI agent orchestration, and workflow automation at scale.
Justin Folkers
Justin Folkers is the co-founder and CEO of apiphani, a Boston-based technology-enabled managed services company that runs mission-critical enterprise applications such as SAP using a blend of expert engineers and AI-driven automation. He started the company around 2020 after more than two decades supporting enterprise clients at firms including Virtustream and Capgemini, betting that AI-powered automation would let people focus on meaningful work instead of routine operational tasks. In 2025 apiphani raised a $25 million round led by Insight Partners to expand Luumen, its AI-driven observability and automation platform.
James Rebesco
James (Jim) Rebesco is the co-founder and CEO of Striveworks, an Austin-based AI company that helps the U.S. defense and national-security community build, deploy, and monitor machine-learning models at scale through its Chariot platform. A physicist by training (Caltech) and a computational neuroscientist by doctorate (Northwestern), he spent seven years as a partner at high-frequency trading firm Virtu Financial before turning to operational AI. Under his leadership Striveworks has landed a $70M enterprise government agreement, raised a Series B led by Washington Harbour Partners, and become the first company to bridge the U.S. Army's two largest battlefield AI efforts.
Dev Nag
Dev Nag is the founder and CEO of QueryPal, a San Francisco AI company rebuilding the economics of customer support with agentic automation. A serial founder with deep machine-learning roots, he earlier created Wavefront, the real-time cloud monitoring platform acquired by VMware in 2017, where he went on to launch VMware's flagship AIOps product. He also founded the observability startup CtrlStack, backed by Sequoia Capital and Engineering Capital. Before founding companies he was an engineer at Google, PayPal, and eBay and the founding engineer at securities-trading platform GLMX. Stanford-trained in both mathematics and psychology, he holds more than a dozen AI and security patents and authored one of the most widely read beginner tutorials in deep learning, 'GANs in 50 lines of code.'
Ayman Sayed
Ayman Sayed is President and CEO of BMC Software, the $2.3-billion enterprise software company serving 86% of the Forbes Global 50. He joined BMC in 2019 after senior roles at CA Technologies (President and Chief Product Officer) and Cisco (SVP, leading 2,500+ engineers). Under his tenure, BMC pivoted toward AI-driven IT automation under the 'Autonomous Digital Enterprise' framework, and in 2024 he announced a landmark split of BMC into two independent companies - one focused on mainframe software and one on digital services management.
Assaf Resnick
Assaf Resnick is the co-founder and CEO of BigPanda, an AI-powered IT operations platform valued at $1.2 billion. Born in Israel and raised in Silicon Valley, he spent six years as a principal investor at Sequoia Capital Israel before leaving to build BigPanda in 2012. After pivoting from ad-tech and surviving years of near-silence in the market, BigPanda found product-market fit with large enterprises and has raised over $330 million in total funding. Today the company leads the emerging category of agentic IT operations, helping enterprise teams automate the detection, investigation, and resolution of IT incidents.
Kannan Kothandaraman
Kannan Kothandaraman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Selector AI, a Santa Clara-based AIOps and network observability platform that uses large language models, knowledge graphs, and causal reasoning to help Fortune 1000 enterprises detect, diagnose, and resolve infrastructure issues faster. Before founding Selector in 2019, Kannan spent nearly two decades at Juniper Networks - rising from senior software engineer to Vice President of Product Line Management - and before that at Cisco Systems. Selector has raised $104 million in total funding, including a $32M Series B in February 2026 at a valuation of $375 million, and counts Fortune 20 companies in manufacturing and healthcare among its customers.
Jerry Kennelly
Jerry M. Kennelly co-founded Riverbed Technology in 2002 and spent 16 years building it from a two-person startup into a billion-dollar enterprise serving 30,000 customers across every Forbes Global 100 company. A finance executive turned visionary operator, Kennelly combined rigorous business discipline with Silicon Valley boldness - taking Riverbed public on NASDAQ in 2006, engineering nine acquisitions, and watching its market cap peak near $6 billion in 2011. After retiring from Riverbed in April 2018, he became Chairman and CEO of Scandic Capital LLC and joined the board of cybersecurity firm Tenable.
Raju Chekuri
Raju Chekuri is the Chairman, President & CEO of Netenrich, a San Jose-based cybersecurity and digital operations company he co-founded. A serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who previously founded Velio Communications (acquired by LSI Logic/Rambus) and chaired OpsRamp (acquired by HPE), Chekuri now leads Netenrich's Resolution Intelligence Cloud - an AI-powered platform transforming how enterprises manage security operations. An alumnus of Kakatiya University and St. Mary's College of California, he splits his passion between cybersecurity innovation and Indian sports, having invested in Goa Guardians, the 10th franchise of India's Prime Volleyball League.
Vasu Maganti
Vasu Maganti is the founder and CEO of Zelar (formerly Zelarsoft), a Google Cloud Premier Partner and cloud-native consulting firm headquartered in San Francisco. Since founding the company in 2018, he has built it into an ~180-person, $26.6M-revenue enterprise serving Fortune 500 companies, major banks, telcos, and federal governments across North America and APAC. Zelar was named Google Cloud Activation Partner of the Year - JAPAC 2025 and Google Cloud Partner All-Star in Artificial Intelligence 2024 under his leadership. Maganti co-organizes Silicon Valley's cloud-native meetup community and is a vocal advocate for Kubernetes multi-tenancy, GitOps, zero-trust security, and FinOps practices.