OpenRouter is a unified API gateway for large language models. Through a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint, developers can reach 400+ models from 60+ providers, with automatic routing, price comparison, and failover across vendors. It removes the need to maintain separate integrations for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral and dozens of others, and now processes around 100 trillion tokens per month for more than 8 million users.
Mercor is an AI-powered talent marketplace that recruits domain experts - doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists - to train and evaluate frontier AI models for labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Amazon. Founded in 2023 by three Thiel Fellows, it has grown from a hiring tool into the human data backbone of the AI economy.
Anil Dharni is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sense, a San Francisco-based AI-powered talent engagement platform that serves over 1,000 organizations. Before reshaping how companies hire, he co-founded Funzio, the mobile gaming studio behind 'Crime City' and 'Modern War,' which sold to GREE for $210 million in 2012. At Sense, backed by SoftBank with $106 million raised and a $500M valuation, he is on a mission to humanize the contingent workforce and make candidates feel genuinely valued through AI, automation, and omnichannel communication.
Max Wang is the Co-Founder and CTO of Workstream, a San Francisco-based HR and payroll platform built specifically for America's hourly workforce. He co-founded China's AngelList equivalent (VC.CN) in 2011, built it to a 50-person team, then crossed the Pacific to co-build Workstream with Desmond Lim and Lei Xu after a 100-interview discovery sprint revealed that hiring hourly workers was a massive unsolved problem. Today, Workstream serves 4,000+ businesses across 24,000 locations, has raised $118 million, and is deploying AI tools - including VoiceAI - to compress hiring cycles from weeks to hours for restaurants, franchises, and deskless-workforce employers.
Everett 'Ev' Randle is a General Partner at Benchmark, one of Silicon Valley's most legendary and selective venture capital firms. A Colorado native who graduated top of his class from CU Boulder's Leeds School of Business, Randle cut his teeth at Vista Equity Partners before moving through Bond Capital, Founders Fund, and two stints at Kleiner Perkins. He backed companies like Rippling, Anthropic, Databricks, Flock Safety, and Huntress across those roles. He is also a respected essayist in the VC world, best known for 'Playing Different Games' (2021), a widely-cited breakdown of Tiger Global's disruption of venture capital, and 'Operating Yield' (2023), a new framework for measuring SaaS growth efficiency. In April 2025, Benchmark announced Randle as its newest General Partner - a firm that manages roughly $425M per fund with only five partners.
Ramu Arunachalam is a General Partner at A.Capital Ventures, the San Francisco-based VC firm known for a founder-friendly approach and a portfolio spanning Notion, Anthropic, Databricks, Coinbase, and Replit. An engineer turned product manager turned investor, Ramu brings a rare depth of technical credibility to the table - he helped build VMware's first virtual switch, shaped a16z's Cloud and Big Data thesis during his time as Partner there, and now leads A.Capital's $180M Fund V with a focus on AI and crypto-native companies.
Yasmin Razavi is a General Partner at Spark Capital, where she leads growth-stage investments in fintech, enterprise software, and AI infrastructure. Born in Tehran and educated at the University of Toronto (engineering) and Harvard Business School (MBA), she brings an operator's lens to venture - forged at McKinsey, Index Ventures, and Snap's monetization team. Since joining Spark in 2017, she has backed defining companies including Deel, Marqeta, Anthropic (leading its $450M Series C), and Qdrant, and now sits on Anthropic's Board of Directors.
Wyatt Horan is a Scout at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he focuses on early-stage investments in AI applications and infrastructure. A Stanford engineer turned venture operator, Horan spent five years as a Deployment Strategist at Palantir Technologies in Europe before earning his MBA at Stanford GSB. He then joined Anthropic's Go-to-Market team, gaining rare front-row exposure to the AI boom before transitioning to the investment side at one of Silicon Valley's most influential VC firms. Outside of tech, Horan has been an engaged civic figure, volunteering with Team Rubicon disaster relief and running for International Secretary of Democrats Abroad.
David Winer is the Co-Founder and CTO of Ciro (YC S22), an AI-powered go-to-market platform that automates sales prospecting from target identification to booked meetings. With roots in applied mathematics, a Berkeley EECS master's, and a Stanford MBA, he spent time at Bain, Pure Storage, and Google (where he served as PM for the Kotlin programming language and sat on the Kotlin Foundation board) before co-founding Ciro in 2022 with Brown University friends Richard Lee and Ross Geiger. Ciro raised $3.8M in seed funding from CRV, Y Combinator, and SV Angel, and runs on a stack anchored by Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, and Elasticsearch. Outside the office, David self-identifies as an 'exceedingly obscure internet personality' and writes a personal blog mixing statistical deep-dives with essays on bike theft and vegetarianism.
Byron Deeter is a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and one of the defining voices in cloud and SaaS investing over the past two decades. A former founder who built and sold Trigo Technologies to IBM, he brings hard-won operator empathy to backing companies like Twilio, DocuSign, Box, ServiceTitan, Canva, and Anthropic - with 26 unicorn investments and 13 IPOs to his name. A four-time NCAA rugby national champion and former Ironman triathlete, Deeter applies an athlete's discipline to both portfolio management and founder wellness, having created STRIVE, Bessemer's holistic health program for CEOs. He is also a minority owner of the San Francisco 49ers.
Hemant Taneja is the CEO of General Catalyst, a $40B+ venture capital firm, and one of tech's most unconventional thinkers. Born in Delhi, India, he earned five degrees from MIT before co-founding Livongo Health - sold to Teladoc for $18.5 billion, the largest digital health merger in history. As an early backer of Stripe, Snap, Anthropic, and Canva, and the architect behind GC's audacious move to acquire an actual hospital system, Taneja has spent two decades arguing that building responsibly isn't just the right thing to do - it's the winning strategy. He's signed the Giving Pledge, written four books on technology and capitalism, and is worth an estimated $3.6 billion.
Daniela Amodei is the President and Co-Founder of Anthropic, one of the world's most influential AI safety companies. A UC Santa Cruz English Literature graduate and former classical flute scholarship recipient, she pivoted from Capitol Hill communications to Stripe to OpenAI before co-founding Anthropic in 2021 alongside her brother Dario Amodei and six other OpenAI colleagues. At Anthropic, she runs all commercial, operational, and cultural operations while Dario leads research and technical strategy — a division of labor that has scaled the company to a $380 billion valuation, over 300,000 enterprise customers, and projected $10 billion in 2025 revenue. Named #1 on Fortune's Most Powerful Women list for 2025 and to TIME's 100 Most Influential People of 2026, Daniela champions a vision of AI safety as competitive advantage, humanities education as future-proof, and 'low politics, high integrity' as the only culture worth building.
Dario Amodei is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the AI safety company behind Claude. A former VP of Research at OpenAI and co-inventor of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), he holds a PhD in biophysics from Princeton and has co-authored some of the most cited papers in AI safety and scaling laws. He leads Anthropic — valued at $380 billion as of early 2026 — with the conviction that building safe, interpretable AI is not only compatible with building powerful AI, but inseparable from it. His landmark essay 'Machines of Loving Grace' envisions AI compressing decades of scientific progress into years, potentially eliminating most disease and radically expanding human prosperity.
Michel Krieger is a Brazilian-American engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Instagram in 2010 and scaled it from zero to 1 billion users as CTO before its $1 billion acquisition by Facebook. After leaving Instagram in 2018, he co-launched Rt.live (a COVID-19 tracker) and Artifact (an AI news app acquired by Yahoo), and now co-leads Anthropic Labs, where he's building experimental AI products at the frontier of Claude's capabilities.
Guy Oseary is an Israeli-American music manager, venture capitalist, and entrepreneur who has guided Madonna's career since 1992 and co-founded Sound Ventures with Ashton Kutcher - a $1B+ VC firm with early bets on Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, and now OpenAI and Anthropic. Once the teenage chairman of Madonna's Maverick Records who signed Alanis Morissette, Oseary has quietly become one of entertainment's most consequential dealmakers - turning a free internship offer into three decades of industry-defining moves at the intersection of music, tech, and culture.
Nina Achadjian is a Partner at Index Ventures, one of the world's leading VC firms, where she invests at seed, venture, and growth stages with a focus on AI, robotics, software for hardware, and vertical SaaS. A Harvard-educated former bond trader and Google AdSense leader, she founded HIVE Ventures — the first seed fund for Armenian entrepreneurs — before joining Index. Her portfolio includes Anthropic, ServiceTitan (IPO 2024), Gong, Physical Intelligence, and 20+ other companies. Known for backing category-defining vertical software companies years before they become mainstream, she sits on 24+ company boards.
Alberto Romero is a Spanish AI analyst, writer, and newsletter author behind The Algorithmic Bridge, a Substack publication with 40,000+ subscribers. A former machine learning engineer turned independent journalist, he brings an unusual fusion of aerospace engineering, cognitive neuroscience, and ML expertise to bear on the most pressing questions in AI - with a commitment to honesty, no ads, and no sponsors. He is also an analyst at CambrianAI Research, focusing on large language models and AI hardware/software.
Jack Clark is a British-American co-founder and Head of Public Benefit at Anthropic, the AI safety company behind Claude. A literature graduate turned AI policy architect, he's the author of Import AI - a weekly newsletter read by ~70,000 researchers and policymakers - and one of the most articulate voices on AI's societal impact. He went from being the world's only dedicated distributed systems journalist to helping build one of the world's most valuable AI companies.
Stephanie Palazzolo is an AI reporter at The Information and author of the AI Agenda newsletter, covering artificial intelligence startups, Big Tech, chips, cloud, and policy. A former Morgan Stanley investment banker who pivoted into journalism, she broke major stories on OpenAI, Anthropic, and the broader AI industry, and was part of a SABEW Best in Business award-winning team for coverage of the OpenAI CEO firing in 2023.
Azalia Mirhoseini is an Iranian-born AI researcher, Stanford professor, and co-founder of Ricursive Intelligence - a frontier AI lab valued at $4 billion that uses AI to design better chips, which in turn train stronger AI. Best known for AlphaChip, the deep reinforcement learning system that now designs Google's TPUs and has compressed chip floorplanning from months to hours, she also co-invented the Mixture-of-Experts architecture underpinning GPT, Claude, and Gemini. With 20,000+ citations and a $335M-funded startup launched in under four months, she is closing the recursive loop between artificial intelligence and the hardware it runs on.
Eugene Yan is a Principal Applied Scientist turned Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, where he bridges cutting-edge AI research with production-scale systems. Formerly at Amazon for five years building real-time recommendation and LLM-powered systems for Kindle and Search, Eugene is equally well-known for his prolific writing: 209 blog posts, 420,000+ words published, and a newsletter with over 11,800 subscribers. His open-source repository applied-ml on GitHub has become a canonical reference for teams shipping machine learning in production. He lives in Seattle, snowboards on weekends, and writes like someone who actually wants you to understand.
Woz (WOZCODE) is a Claude Code plugin built by MIT engineers Ben Collins and Brad Eckert that cuts AI coding costs by 25-55% and speeds up most tasks by 30-40%. Instead of letting Claude Code burn tokens on bloated built-in file operations, WOZCODE replaces them with smarter, leaner alternatives - three specialized agents (code, explore, plan) that do more with less. It installs in two commands, runs locally with no data exfiltration, and works alongside your existing Claude subscription. Backed by Y Combinator (W25) and a $6M seed round, Woz is building the efficiency layer that makes AI-assisted development economically viable at scale.
Nelson Elhage is a systems engineer turned AI safety researcher who has left fingerprints across the modern software stack. At Anthropic, he co-authored foundational work on mechanistic interpretability and transformer circuits that shaped how the field understands language models. Before that, he was employee ~30 at Stripe and a founding engineer of Sorbet, the Ruby typechecker now used across one of the world's largest payment platforms. His open-source tools - reptyr, livegrep, and ministrace - are staples in the Linux hacker's toolkit. He blogs at 'Made of Bugs' and runs a Buttondown newsletter on computer systems.
Humanloop was an enterprise LLM development platform founded in 2020 as a UCL spinout, offering prompt management, evaluations, and observability tools for teams building AI applications. With customers like Duolingo and Gusto, it raised ~$8M and reached ~$3.8M ARR before being acqui-hired by Anthropic in August 2025, after which the platform was sunsetted on September 8, 2025. Its technology and team live on inside Anthropic's enterprise console.