amazon-alumni
(7)
Brian Meewes Is Building for the Moment After the Prompt
After two decades moving between code, finance, logistics and company building, the Shift Health founder is betting that useful AI will be judged by what it remembers, how it reasons and where humans remain in control.
Viraat Das
Viraat Das is the cofounder and CEO of Exla, a Y Combinator (Winter 2025) startup building AI infrastructure. A former Amazon machine learning engineer who finished his Purdue computer science degree in two and a half years, he first shipped an SDK that squeezes large transformer models onto edge hardware like NVIDIA Jetsons, then aimed the company at Libra, an always-on AI site reliability engineer that reads production logs, traces failures to the deploy that caused them, and opens fix pull requests while the team sleeps.
Paul Bennett
Paul Bennett is the co-founder and CEO of PerchPeek, a London-based, AI-powered relocation platform that helps companies move employees across borders. He started his first venture at 17 selling hand sanitiser outside supermarkets, studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, then spent three years at Amazon launching its Treasure Trucks in the UK before founding PerchPeek in 2018. What began as a 'Tinder for renting' property app pivoted during the 2020 pandemic into an end-to-end relocation service now operating in 150-plus countries, backed by roughly $17-18m in funding.
Guru Hariharan
Guru Hariharan is the Founder and CEO of CommerceIQ, a unicorn-valued AI platform that helps 2,200+ consumer brands - from Nestle to Kellogg's - automate and optimize their retail ecommerce operations across Amazon, Walmart, and other major retailers. A veteran of Amazon and eBay, he co-invented the Amazon Selling Coach, sold his first company Boomerang Commerce's analytics unit to Lowe's in 2019, and pivoted to build CommerceIQ into a $136.6M ARR business by 2024. In May 2025, he launched AllyAI, a suite of agentic AI teammates purpose-built for retail - a product he describes as pioneering the next era of algorithmic commerce.
Krishna Motukuri
Krishna Motukuri is the CEO and Co-Founder of Zippin, a San Francisco-based AI startup powering checkout-free retail stores across four continents. After seven years at Amazon and stints building e-commerce businesses in India and South Africa under Naspers Group, he co-founded Zippin in 2018 after a personal frustration with grocery checkout lines sparked the idea. Zippin uses computer vision, sensor fusion, and machine learning to let shoppers grab items and walk out without stopping to pay — technology now deployed in sports stadiums, airport terminals, college campuses, and hospital cafeterias worldwide, including Super Bowl venues and the French Open.
Brad Porter
Brad Porter is the Founder and CEO of Collaborative Robotics (Cobot), a Santa Clara-based startup building AI-powered collaborative robots designed to work alongside humans rather than replace them. After 14 years at Amazon — where he rose to VP of Robotics and Distinguished Engineer, deploying over 250,000 robots — Porter left to briefly serve as CTO at Scale AI before founding Cobot in May 2022. In under three years, he raised $140M in funding (including a $100M Series B led by General Catalyst in April 2024), launched the Proxie robot in November 2024, and signed customers including Mayo Clinic, Maersk, Moderna, and the U.S. Department of Defense.
Andrew Miklas
Andrew Miklas co-founded PagerDuty with two Amazon colleagues in 2009, built the original high-availability architecture as founding CTO, and shepherded the company from a Hacker News beta post to a $1.8B NYSE IPO. After a stint as an early-stage investor at s28 Capital, he returned to Y Combinator - where PagerDuty got its start in the Summer 2010 batch - as a General Partner in May 2025, fifteen years after first walking through YC's doors as a founder.