Lucky Gunasekara is the co-founder and CEO of Miso.ai, an AI media lab that builds private answer engines for news publishers and learning platforms. A trained interaction designer who once built an RSS crawler to track global disease outbreaks, he now partners with 45-50+ publishers worldwide on what he calls 'liquid content' - adaptive, machine-readable information that pays royalties back to the writers and sources it draws from. His pitch to the news industry is blunt: AI is an asteroid coming for all of us, so we had better get to dinner and figure it out together.
Issac Roth is a Silicon Valley founder, operator and investor who has spent 25-plus years turning hard infrastructure into products developers actually use. He created Red Hat OpenShift out of his startup Makara, was founding CEO of the Node.js company StrongLoop (acquired by IBM, where he became a cloud CTO), and invested as a Venture Partner at Shasta Ventures. Today he is co-founder and CEO of Orama, an open-source search and answer-engine company building a fourth-generation database that fuses full-text search, vector search and built-in LLMs to power AI agents and copilots.

Aravind Srinivas is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, the citation-backed AI answer engine that reached a $21B+ valuation in under three years. Born in Chennai in 1994, he earned a dual degree from IIT Madras before completing a PhD at UC Berkeley, then worked as a researcher at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain before founding Perplexity in 2022. India's youngest billionaire at 31, he has positioned Perplexity as a direct challenger to Google Search by insisting that every AI-generated answer carry verifiable citations - a principle he lifted straight from academic paper standards.