Long before nearshoring became a boardroom buzzword, Softtek built an international IT business around proximity. Now the Mexican company is testing whether that human advantage can survive an agentic turn.
The Pittsburgh systems integrator is betting that the hard part of enterprise AI is not the model. It is the unglamorous work of fitting intelligence into old systems, guarded data and everyday operations - then keeping it running.
From a ground-floor room with dial-up internet in Bitola, IWConnect grew into a 300-plus-person operator for the systems most companies cannot afford to break. Its bet on AI is deliberately practical: connect it to the old stack, govern what it can do, and keep a human near the final call.
AMTI rarely appears in the passenger journey, yet its engineers have spent decades inside the systems that guide aircraft and turn federal data into public facts. The company’s story is a lesson in the durable, unglamorous technology that government cannot simply switch off.
Milestone Technologies is a Fremont, California-based global IT services and digital solutions company founded in 1997. It helps large enterprises run and modernize their technology at scale - spanning digital workplace services, IT service desk and NOC operations, cloud and infrastructure, application and digital engineering, AI/automation, and platform work on ServiceNow and Salesforce. The company employs roughly 2,600-3,100 people, serves more than 200 clients across about 31 countries, and is majority-owned by The Halifax Group with a minority stake held by Two Sigma Impact.
Appeon is a San Francisco software company that develops, sells, and supports PowerBuilder, the veteran rapid application development platform it took over from SAP in 2016. Through PowerBuilder, PowerServer, InfoMaker, and its CloudPro bundle, Appeon helps enterprises build data-driven business apps and modernize decades-old client/server systems into cloud-native and C#/.NET applications - protecting existing code investments rather than forcing full rewrites.
Rhino.ai is a Washington, D.C.-based enterprise AI platform that reconstructs the hidden business logic buried inside legacy code, ERP systems, SaaS tools, workflows, and integrations. Using agentic AI paired with human expertise, it discovers and maps business rules, organizes them into a governed, version-controlled logic graph built on its proprietary Universal Application Notation (UAN), and uses that single source of truth to accelerate modernization and application development. Founded in 2023 by Adam Branch, the company raised a $50M Series A in January 2025 led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, with KPMG as a strategic minority investor.
Deepak Nagpal is the CEO of Audax Labs, a Bothell, Washington-based technology innovation company he has led since 2016. With a career spanning over two decades across NTT DATA, Capital One, and Interra Information Technologies, and an MBA from Oxford's Said Business School, he has built Audax Labs into a multi-practice consultancy operating across AR/VR/MR, AI, IoT, cloud migration, and data analytics - serving industries from automotive and healthcare to BFSI and government, with partnerships spanning Microsoft, Google, Amazon AWS, Hitachi Vantara, Oracle, and Rocket Software.

Frank Zamani is the Founder, President, and CEO of Caspio, a pioneering low-code platform that has powered over one million business applications in 150+ countries. Born Farhang Zamani in Tehran, Iran, he fled religious persecution as a Baha'i in 1986, was smuggled across the border to Pakistan, and received U.S. asylum in 1988 - arriving in San Francisco with his brother and just $70 between them. After earning a CS degree from Cal State Chico, working on Microsoft's PowerPoint team, and co-founding Autoweb.com (which IPO'd in 1999 at a $938 million valuation), he started Caspio in 2000 with a single conviction: business professionals should not need to code to build the tools their organizations need. By 2024, Caspio had grown to $120.7 million in annual revenue, 15,000+ customers, and roughly 230 employees.