Rev is an American speech-to-text company that pairs the world's most accurate AI speech recognition with a global network of human transcriptionists to deliver transcription, captions, and subtitles at up to 99% accuracy. Founded in 2010 by six MIT-connected entrepreneurs, Rev serves over 100,000 customers and more than a million users across legal, media, education, and enterprise, and has increasingly focused its AI on the legal market with tools for depositions, evidence, and case prep.
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.
Sahil Hasan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Dots, a developer-friendly global payouts platform that has processed over $1 billion to more than 1 million gig workers, creators, and contractors in 190+ countries. A UC Berkeley EECS grad with a CMU master's degree, Sahil spent time as a Research Engineer at Google X before co-founding Dots through Y Combinator's S21 batch. The company raised an $8.9M Series A in February 2026 led by DCM Ventures, is profitable, and growing revenue 400% year-over-year.
Thomas Schiavone is a San Francisco startup operator who has spent his career on the bottoms-up, developer-first side of software. He was the first product manager at Twilio (around employee #15), went on to be COO at EasyPost and VP of Product at Sift, advised at Netlify, then founded and ran the SaaS CRM startup Calixa. He now leads Courier, the developer-first notifications platform that lets engineering teams design and deliver email, SMS, push, and chat through one API.
Bo Jiang is the co-founder and CEO of Lithic, the New York card-issuing platform that started life as the consumer privacy tool Privacy.com. He and two childhood friends built the burn-after-use virtual card people loved, then discovered the real prize was the issuer-processor plumbing underneath it. When developers started reverse-engineering Privacy.com's API to issue their own cards, Jiang turned the back end into the product, rebranded to Lithic, and now sells programmable money movement to high-growth companies.
Rory O'Reilly is the CEO and co-founder of Knot, a New York fintech building the API layer that lets people switch the card on file across hundreds of merchants like Netflix and Amazon in a single tap. A Thiel Fellow and Harvard dropout, he built Knot with his brother Kieran after a decade of ventures together - turning YouTube clips into viral GIFs at gifs.com, riding an early Ethereum wave, and running Millions, the gamified debit card that became the biggest challenger bank on TikTok. Knot raised a $10M Series A led by Nava Ventures with Amex Ventures and Plaid backing.
Zapier is the automation platform that connects more than 8,000 apps so people can build workflows - called Zaps - without writing code. Founded in 2011 by Wade Foster, Bryan Helmig and Mike Knoop, the fully remote company has grown from a Y Combinator side project into a roughly $5 billion business serving millions of users, and it is now reorienting around AI agents that don't just move data between apps but make decisions inside the workflow.
Postman is the world's leading API platform, used by more than 35 million developers and 500,000+ organizations to design, build, test, document and monitor APIs. What began in 2012 as a side-project Chrome extension to debug HTTP requests is now an AI-native, end-to-end API workspace - the connective tissue behind a huge chunk of the modern internet.
Checkr is a San Francisco-based HR-tech company that uses AI and a modern API to run background checks at internet speed. Founded in 2014 by Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon out of Y Combinator, it processes screenings for Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, OpenAI and thousands of other employers - and lobbies hard for fair-chance hiring along the way.
Deepgram builds foundational voice AI - speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and full voice-agent APIs - used by more than 1,300 enterprises including NASA, Spotify, Twilio and Citibank to give machines the ability to listen, understand, and respond in real time.
Gusto is a cloud-based payroll, benefits, and HR platform built for small and medium-sized businesses. Founded in 2011 as ZenPayroll by Josh Reeves, Tomer London, and Edward Kim, the company has grown to serve over 500,000 businesses and recently crossed $1 billion in annual revenue. Gusto handles everything from payroll runs and tax filings to health insurance, 401(k) plans, and employee onboarding - replacing what used to require a patchwork of accountants, brokers, and spreadsheets with a single platform. The company also offers Gusto Embedded, a payroll API that lets other software platforms build payroll directly into their products. Valued at roughly $9.5 billion, Gusto remains private and is widely considered a leading IPO candidate in the HR tech space.
Incode is an AI-powered identity verification platform that lets businesses confirm who is really on the other side of a screen — in under two seconds. Founded in San Francisco in 2015, the company has built a modular biometric platform used by banks, hotels, hospitals, and gaming companies across more than 190 countries. Its flagship product, Incode Omni, handles everything from document verification and facial recognition to AML screening and liveness detection, processing more than 100 million user verifications per year. Backed by General Atlantic, SoftBank, J.P. Morgan, and Capital One Ventures at a $1.25 billion valuation, Incode has been named a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for Identity Verification two consecutive years running.
Incognia is a location identity and fraud prevention company that uses device intelligence, location behavioral analytics, and AI to help platform businesses — from food delivery to financial services — detect fraud without compromising the user experience. By processing signals from GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth without capturing PII, Incognia identifies legitimate users from fraudsters across multiple devices with 99.999999% accuracy, a 0.0001% false-positive rate, and no friction for genuine users. Deployed on over 200 million smartphones and protecting nearly 1 billion devices, Incognia has become the go-to fraud layer for platforms like Grubhub, Delivery Hero, and Upwork.
InfrasAI (formerly iLife Technologies) is a Sunnyvale-based AI infrastructure company that builds the plumbing behind modern insurance distribution. Their headless API platform lets insurance carriers connect to any distributor channel - agents, brokers, IMOs - without rebuilding integrations from scratch each time. The core bet: use agentic AI to auto-generate workflows from natural language, collapsing integration timelines from 24 weeks to about 2. Customers include Transamerica and Guardian Insurance. Backed by Foundation Capital, Brewer Lane Ventures, SCOR, and others, InfrasAI has raised $28M total.
Lob is a San Francisco-based SaaS company that turns direct mail into programmable infrastructure. Through APIs and an automation platform, marketers and developers send personalized postcards, letters, checks, and self-mailers at scale, with built-in address verification and a nationwide print delivery network.
Abhijit Kane is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Postman, the world's leading API platform used by 20+ million developers and 98% of Fortune 500 companies. A BITS Pilani alumnus, he joined Abhinav Asthana and Ankit Sobti in 2014 to turn a viral Stack Overflow side project into a $5.6 billion company that defines how developers build, test, and collaborate on APIs.
Abhinav Asthana is the co-founder and CEO of Postman, the world's leading API platform used by over 35 million developers and 500,000 organizations. Growing up in small-town Uttar Pradesh, India, he taught himself programming as a child, built virtual tour software before finishing college, and turned a side project Chrome extension into a company valued at $5.6 billion. He moved Postman from Bangalore to San Francisco in 2017 and has raised $433 million in total funding, including a $225M Series D in 2021.
Augusto 'Aghi' Marietti is the CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc., the company behind the world's most widely deployed API gateway. Born in Rome in 1988, he co-founded Mashape at age 19 in a Milan garage, arrived in San Francisco with $600 and a 90-day visa, crashed on Travis Kalanick's couch, and built what became Kong - a $2 billion enterprise processing over 20 trillion API requests monthly. Known as the 'API Godfather,' Marietti has raised $424 million in total funding, surpassed $146M in annual recurring revenue with 800+ employees, and is now positioning Kong as the essential AI connectivity layer for the enterprise.
Harry Zhang is the Co-Founder of Lob, the direct mail automation platform he built from scratch with Leore Avidar after Y Combinator's Summer 2013 batch. Inspired by his own frustrations managing clunky direct mail campaigns at Microsoft, Zhang coded Lob's first APIs himself and grew the company to over $100 million in annual revenue, $79.5M in total funding, and 12,000+ business customers. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (Enterprise Technology), he holds degrees in Informatics and Business from University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and remains on Lob's board of directors.
Jon Dahl is the co-founder and CEO of Mux, a developer-first video infrastructure platform that powers video at scale for companies like Robinhood, PBS, and ViacomCBS. A serial founder who sold Zencoder to Brightcove for $30M in 2012 and co-created Video.js — the most widely deployed open-source video player on the web — Dahl has spent two decades turning the complexity of online video into simple, powerful APIs for developers. Mux has raised $173.9M in total funding, achieved unicorn status in 2021, and processes several billion monthly video streams.
Jonathan Perichon is the Co-founder and CTO of Checkr, Inc., a San Francisco-based AI-powered background screening platform he co-founded in 2014 with Daniel Yanisse. A French-born software engineer who discovered the gig economy's broken background check infrastructure while working at an LA startup, Perichon turned that frustration into a $4.6 billion company serving over 100,000 clients including DoorDash, Lyft, Coinbase, and Uber. A Y Combinator S14 alumnus who applied three times before getting in, he embodies the principle that persistence and execution beat credentials every time.
Jordan Dearsley is the co-founder and CEO of Vapi, the leading voice AI infrastructure platform trusted by over one million developers and powering more than one billion calls. A University of Waterloo software engineering dropout turned Y Combinator alumnus, Dearsley built Vapi out of a personal AI therapist he created for his morning walks in 2023. Under his leadership, Vapi reached a $500 million valuation in May 2026 after raising a $50M Series B led by Peak XV, with customers including Amazon Ring, Intuit, and New York Life.
Kwindla Hultman Kramer is co-founder and CEO of Daily.co, a developer platform providing real-time voice, video, and AI infrastructure. He is also the creator of Pipecat, the most widely used open-source framework for building voice AI agents. A Harvard and MIT Media Lab alumnus, Kwindla has spent his career at the intersection of real-time communication and developer infrastructure—from scaling AllAfrica.com as CTO to building spatial computing interfaces at Oblong Industries to raising $62M+ for Daily and releasing Pipecat to the open-source community.
Kyle Mack is the CEO and Co-founder of Middesk, the business identity platform that's modernizing how financial institutions and fintechs verify and trust the companies they work with. Founded in 2018 after Mack witnessed firsthand the painful manual process of customer credentialing at Checkr, Middesk has grown into a category-defining KYB infrastructure company backed by Sequoia Capital, Accel, Insight Partners, and Canapi Ventures with $77M+ in total funding. The company serves hundreds of enterprise clients - including two of the top three U.S. banks and fintechs like Plaid, Affirm, Brex, and Shopify - by connecting to roughly 400 U.S. government agencies to surface real-time business identity intelligence. Mack is also a Sequoia Scout, investing in early-stage founders.
Mahmoud Abdelkader is the Egyptian-American co-founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based data security platform that raised $105 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Visa. Born near the Suez Canal and raised in Brooklyn, he built high-frequency trading systems at Wachovia, was employee #4 at Milo.com before its $75M eBay acquisition, then co-founded Balanced Payments through Y Combinator (W11) before founding VGS in 2016. VGS pioneered the 'Zero Data' category of data security as a service, serving 700+ customers including Fortune 100 companies. He stepped down as CEO in late 2022 and now invests in fintech companies including Ramp, Vercel, Alloy, Mercury, and Stytch while experimenting with AI.
Mwalimu Karisa is an executive at Kong Inc., the San Francisco-based API connectivity company behind the Kong Gateway and Konnect platform. Originally from Kilifi County on Kenya's coast, Karisa's path ran through an exchange program in Iowa and onto the front lines of global API and AI infrastructure. Kong serves enterprises managing critical API traffic across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments, with over $424 million raised and a $2 billion valuation. Before entering the technology sector, Karisa was publicly recognized for community development work in his home village, raising funds for clean water access and healthcare infrastructure in coastal Kenya.
Nelson Lee is the Founder and CEO of InfrasAI (formerly iLife Technologies), an AI-powered workflow infrastructure company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Drawing on early stints at Tencent and J.P. Morgan and participation in Stanford's Idea-to-Market program, Lee spent years mapping the fragmentation inside insurance distribution before building infrastructure to fix it. InfrasAI's headless connectivity platform decouples business logic from user interfaces, enabling insurance carriers to deploy workflows across any distributor channel without rebuilding backend systems - reducing maintenance costs by up to 60% and accelerating deployment speed by up to 70%. Backed by $21M in funding led by Foundation Capital and top insurtech investors, the company serves enterprise clients including Transamerica and Guardian across life, annuities, group benefits, disability, and wealth management.
Paulo Martins is the Brazilian-born founder and CEO of Arena (arena.im), a San Francisco-based AI-powered community engagement platform that lets brands embed live chat, live blogs, and audience interaction tools directly on their own websites with a single line of code. After stints at NASA, Ubisoft, and Hulu — where he helped grow the streaming company from 100K to 7 million paying subscribers — Martins founded Arena in 2017 with a clear thesis: businesses should own their audience, not rent it from social platforms. By 2022, Arena had grown to 25,000 customers across 150 countries and closed a $13.6M Series A led by CRV, with backing from heavyweights like David Sacks, Des Traynor, and Olivier Pomel.
Prajit Nanu is the co-founder and CEO of Nium, the Singapore-born fintech unicorn that has quietly become the plumbing behind global money movement for banks, airlines, and digital platforms. Starting with a frustrating attempt to wire INR 40,000 for a friend's bachelor party in Phuket, he built what is now a $1.4 billion payments infrastructure company processing over $8 billion annually across 190+ countries in 100 currencies. A commerce graduate from Mumbai with a sales background rather than a fintech pedigree, Nanu turned that outsider status into competitive advantage - building what incumbents told him was impossible.
Richie Serna is the CEO and co-founder of Finix, a full-stack payments infrastructure company he built from the ground up in San Francisco. A Harvard-educated son of Mexican immigrant parents from Santa Ana, California, Serna left management consulting at Booz & Company, taught himself to code, and joined Balanced - the first payments API for marketplaces - before founding Finix in 2015. Today, Finix has raised $205.5M in total funding (including a $75M Series C in October 2024) and has become a direct-connection payment processor competing with Stripe, Adyen, and Braintree, serving software platforms and marketplaces processing billions of dollars annually.