Pratap Ranade is the CEO and co-founder of Arena (Arena Physica), a New York startup building Atlas, an AI hardware engineer grounded in applied physics that helps semiconductor, aerospace, automotive, medical-device and defense companies design and test physical hardware. A Stanford and Columbia-trained physicist who left a PhD to join McKinsey, he previously co-founded Kimono Labs (acquired by Palantir) and led engineering and machine learning at Enigma. Arena raised a $30M Series B in April 2025 and counts AMD, Bausch & Lomb and Anduril among its partners.
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.