austin-tech
(10)
Alexander Khuda
A failed education startup left Alexander Khuda with a smaller question: how can one live feed travel everywhere? Restream grew from a $15 donation in Vinnytsia into the control room behind millions of broadcasts - and its next bet is on everything that happens after the stream ends.
David Stout
David Stout is the co-founder and CEO of webAI, an Austin-based company building private, on-device artificial intelligence that runs on hardware people already own instead of centralized cloud data centers. Raised on a cattle ranch in northern Michigan, he taught himself to compress large AI models onto phones, laptops and edge hardware, and founded webAI in 2019 with Ethan Baird and Tyler Mauer. The company reached a $2.5 billion valuation in January 2026 on the thesis that the most valuable AI of the future will be sovereign, distributed and local rather than rented from Silicon Valley hyperscalers.
Denny LeCompte
Denny LeCompte is the CEO of Portnox, an Austin-based cybersecurity company that delivers cloud-native network access control and zero trust access for enterprises. A former cognitive psychology professor with a Ph.D. from Rice University, he spent two decades in product strategy at IT and security vendors including SolarWinds and AlienVault before taking the helm at Portnox in 2022. Under his leadership the company grew roughly 8x, and he was named a 2025 Cyber Leader of the Year. He writes the widely read 'Access Granted' LinkedIn column, arguing that cybersecurity is as much a human problem as a technical one.
Grant Miller
Grant Miller is the co-founder and CEO of Replicated, a platform that helps software companies ship their applications so enterprise customers can run them inside their own secure, self-managed environments. A self-taught programmer who started his career in technology M&A at Goldman Sachs, Grant first built and sold the mobile live-chat startup Look.io to LivePerson in just nine months, then set out to build a company he never wants to sell. Since founding Replicated in 2015 he has raised more than $80 million, made 'modern on-prem' a category worth taking seriously, and become a recognizable voice in enterprise software as host of the EnterpriseReady podcast.
Josh Knowles
Josh Knowles is the CEO of Code Climate, the New York software company whose Velocity platform gives engineering leaders at large organizations data on how their teams actually build software. A Ruby developer by training with more than two decades in the field, he spent years at Pivotal Labs and VMware building and running consulting and application-services teams across the US and Europe before joining Code Climate, rising from VP of Strategy and Operations to General Manager to CEO. He took the top job as Code Climate spun out its code-quality product into a separate company, Qlty Software, and refocused entirely on software engineering intelligence for large, complex enterprises.
Walter Rogers
Walter Rogers is the CEO of MontyCloud, a Redmond-based cloud operations platform that uses agentic AI to let IT teams manage AWS without writing scripts. Born in Rome, raised in Houston, and now based in Austin, he studied Italian and Economics at UT Austin before building and selling three software companies, two of them to VMware. He remains Chairman of Baker Communications, the sales-training firm he has run since 2003, and joined MontyCloud as CEO in April 2022.
James Rebesco
James (Jim) Rebesco is the co-founder and CEO of Striveworks, an Austin-based AI company that helps the U.S. defense and national-security community build, deploy, and monitor machine-learning models at scale through its Chariot platform. A physicist by training (Caltech) and a computational neuroscientist by doctorate (Northwestern), he spent seven years as a partner at high-frequency trading firm Virtu Financial before turning to operational AI. Under his leadership Striveworks has landed a $70M enterprise government agreement, raised a Series B led by Washington Harbour Partners, and become the first company to bridge the U.S. Army's two largest battlefield AI efforts.
Malur Narayan
Malur Narayan is the CEO and co-founder of XTRIUM, an Austin-based B2B AI startup building an intelligence layer for materials that matches materials to real-world applications, surfaces sourcing risk, and turns supply chains from fragile to resilient. A computer engineer who was running machine-learning research and self-managed software teams in the early 1990s, he spent three decades scaling technology businesses across five continents at Nortel and Tata Consultancy Services before co-founding two AI startups. He frames XTRIUM around a single idea: making the search for a new application for any material as fast and easy as an internet search, compressing what used to take a year into days.
Tom Hadfield
Tom Hadfield is the British entrepreneur and CEO of Mio, an Austin-based company that makes enterprise chat tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Google Chat talk to each other. He is the kid who built Soccernet with his dad at 12 and sold it to ESPN for $40 million at 17, attended Harvard, ran a biotech, then went through Y Combinator to attack the problem of messaging interoperability with backing from Khosla Ventures, Cisco and Zoom.
Rob Whiteley
Rob Whiteley is the CEO of Coder, an Austin-based enterprise platform for cloud development environments (CDEs) that lets engineering teams spin up fully-configured, browser-based dev environments in minutes. Appointed in May 2023, Whiteley drove 2x revenue growth in his first year, secured a $90M Series C led by KKR in April 2026, and has positioned Coder as the infrastructure layer for agentic AI coding workflows. Before Coder, he spent a decade at F5/NGINX as VP/GM of the NGINX product group and CMO, and earlier held executive marketing roles at Hedvig, Riverbed, and Forrester Research.