Autodesk is a design and make software company whose tools power the buildings, products, movies, and infrastructure of the physical world. Best known for AutoCAD, the company now spans architecture, engineering and construction (Revit, Civil 3D, Forma), product design and manufacturing (Fusion, Inventor), and media and entertainment (Maya, 3ds Max, Arnold). With roughly $6 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue and a near-fully subscription business, Autodesk's stated mission is to empower everyone, everywhere to design and make anything - increasingly with cloud platforms and AI woven into the workflow.
Pirros is an AI-powered content intelligence platform for architecture and engineering firms that lets designers find, compare, reuse and standardize Revit details and families across every project, team and office. Founded by former structural engineers Ari Baranian and Peter Johann, the Los Angeles company automatically ingests a firm's historical drawing sets and makes them searchable by geometry - no manual tagging - so designers stop digging through cluttered server folders and start reusing vetted work. Often described as 'GitHub for construction,' Pirros integrates directly with Revit and Autodesk ACC/BIM 360 and serves over 300 firms and 15,000+ users.
Ivan Panushev is the CEO and founder of TwinKnowledge, a New York startup building AI agents that read the mountains of paperwork behind every building - submittals, RFIs, specs, drawings - and flag the conflicts before they reach the field. A Harvard-trained Doctor of Design, he co-founded Horizontal Systems (acquired by Autodesk in 2011 to seed BIM 360), led construction and real estate technology at AWS, and helped write the National BIM Standard. In 2025 TwinKnowledge raised a $3.7M seed led by Camber Creek, with clients including the U.S. Space Force, Toll Brothers, SHoP Architects, and Sound Transit.
Symetri USA - formerly Microdesk - is an Autodesk-focused technology consultancy serving the architecture, engineering, construction and operations (AECO) industry. Founded in 1994 and acquired by Sweden's Symetri (an Addnode Group company) in 2022, it helps design, construction and asset-owner teams work smarter through BIM, VDC, digital twins, enterprise asset management and its own Naviate software line. Together with its European parent, Symetri is the #1 Global Autodesk Solution Provider, serving more than 20,000 customers and 250,000 daily users with a stated mission of efficient, sustainable design.

Andrew Anagnost is the President and CEO of Autodesk, the $41+ billion design and engineering software giant behind AutoCAD, Revit, Maya, and Fusion 360. A PhD aeronautical engineer who once simulated Mars rovers at NASA Ames, he joined Autodesk as a product manager in 1997 and spent two decades reshaping it from the inside - architecting the company's landmark pivot from perpetual licenses to cloud subscriptions before taking the top job in 2017. Under his tenure, revenue has grown from ~$2B to over $6B and the company entered the Fortune 500. Off the clock, he is CSUN's largest-ever alumni donor, having committed $22.1 million to the public university that he credits with saving him from falling through the cracks.
Rick Lewis is a General Partner at U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), a storied Silicon Valley venture firm based in Menlo Park. A two-time startup founder turned investor, he joined USVP in 2004 and was promoted to General Partner in 2012. He focuses on early-stage enterprise SaaS, cybersecurity, and consumer services, with a track record that includes exits to Airbnb, Viacom, Microsoft, Slack, PayPal, IBM, Oracle, and Nordstrom. Lewis holds degrees from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and Harvard Business School, and is a Kauffman Fellow (Class 10).
Dave Rhodes is the Chief Executive Officer of Verint, the AI-driven customer experience automation company formed through the combination of Verint and Calabrio under Thoma Bravo. A career software executive, Rhodes spent 11 years at Autodesk as VP of the Americas before joining Unity Software as Chief Revenue Officer — where he scaled revenue from $130M to $600M — and later as SVP/GM of the Digital Twins business. He then served as CEO of Sauce Labs and CEO of Calabrio before taking the Verint helm in February 2026, leading one of the largest CX data sets in the world spanning workforce engagement, agentic AI, and customer analytics.
Jake Olsen, P.E. is the CEO of Stratus, the leading cloud software platform for MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) contractors, helping hundreds of firms digitize workflows from BIM design through fabrication to field installation. A serial entrepreneur with over 20 years in construction technology, Olsen previously co-founded DADO - a construction document management startup that was acquired by Stanley Black & Decker - and also built Hangerworks, DEWALT Design Assist, and Powercalc Anchor Design. He steered Stratus to a $32 million Series B funding round in January 2025 led by Radian Capital, positioning the company as the connective tissue between the design table, fabrication shop, and job site in the evolving era of data-driven MEP contracting.

Michael DeLacey is the US CEO of Symetri, the global AECO and manufacturing technology consultancy he helped build from a two-person New England Autodesk reseller in 1994 into a 500-person organization spanning the US and Europe. As co-founder of Microdesk — which Symetri acquired in 2022 and rebranded in 2023 — DeLacey has spent three decades embedding building information modeling, enterprise asset management, and cloud-based digital workflows into the design, construction, and operations practices of architects, engineers, and manufacturers. His conviction: teach people to fish, not fish for them.

Søren Abildgaard is the CEO of KeyShot, the industry-leading 3D visualization and rendering platform used by designers, engineers, and marketers worldwide. A Danish-born engineer-turned-executive, he brings two decades of engineering leadership from Zendesk, Avaya, Contentful, Adobe, Autodesk, and Microsoft to his mission of transforming KeyShot from a photorealistic rendering tool into a full-lifecycle visualization and realization platform. Having served on KeyShot's board since 2023, he stepped into the CEO role on May 1, 2025, backed by GRO Capital, with a sharp focus on AI integration, customer proximity, and strategic clarity.
Amar Hanspal is the co-founder and CEO of Motif, a cloud-native AI-first design collaboration platform challenging Autodesk's Revit dominance in the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) industry. A veteran of three decades in design software, he previously served as Co-CEO of Autodesk - where he helped triple the company's market cap from $8B to $24B - and as founding CEO of robotics startup Bright Machines. With Motif, backed by $46M from CapitalG and Redpoint Ventures and named to Forbes' Next Billion-Dollar Startups list for 2025, Hanspal is building what he describes as 'Figma for architects': a browser-based, real-time collaborative workspace for the world's built environment.
Aaron Epstein is a General Partner at Y Combinator, the world's most prestigious startup accelerator. A serial founder who built his first software product in a college dorm room, he went on to co-found Creative Market (YC W10) — a design asset marketplace he grew to a 2014 Autodesk acquisition in under 16 months, then spun back out as an independent startup in 2017. At YC, he has reviewed over 8,000 applications, advised companies now collectively valued at $57 billion, and helped define how the accelerator thinks about marketplaces, business models, and pricing.

Carol Bartz is a trailblazing Silicon Valley executive who became the first woman to run a major technology company when she took the helm of Autodesk in 1992, growing revenue from $285M to $1.5B over 14 years. She later served as CEO of Yahoo from 2009 to 2011, famously emailing all 14,000 employees the night she was fired by phone, telling them she'd been let go. Known for her blunt candor, 'Fail Fast Forward' philosophy, and resilience - she delayed breast cancer surgery by a month to keep a professional commitment - Bartz transformed from a dairy farm girl in Wisconsin to one of the most powerful women in American business.