Tript Singh Lamba is the founder and CEO of ProductNow, an AI-native operating system for product teams that he built largely as a solo developer (with one intern) before raising a $6M seed round led by Sierra Ventures in July 2025. Over two decades he built flagship platforms at Microsoft, Google, and Expedia - helping launch Bing and the early core of Microsoft Messenger and Azure, co-founding Google's Ads AI personalization team, leading YouTube Ads through hypergrowth, and serving as SVP of Consumer Product at Expedia. His thesis: with AI accelerating engineering, the real bottleneck is no longer code but turning strategy into execution.
Trianz is a Silicon Valley digital-transformation firm that has reinvented itself from a traditional IT consultancy into an IP-led, 'Transformation Services as Software' company. Founded in 2001 by former special-forces officer Sri Manchala, it builds hyper-automated platforms - Concierto for multi-cloud migration and operations, Extrica for turning data into AI, and Pulse for the digital workplace - to accelerate transformations for Fortune 1000 and emerging enterprises across data, analytics, cloud, and security.
Archera is a Bellevue, Washington FinOps company that turns long-term cloud commitments into short, insured ones. Its free multi-cloud platform gives teams cost visibility, forecasting, and purchasing recommendations across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, then layers on its signature Insured Commitments - reserved instances and savings plans wrapped with a money-back guarantee and terms as short as 30 days. The result is commitment-level discounts of roughly 30-40% without the multi-year lock-in. Founded in 2019 by brothers Aran and Nikhil Khanna, Archera manages over $3.4B in annual cloud spend for more than 1,000 customers.
Coiled is a lightweight cloud compute platform that lets Python users scale data science, machine learning, and AI workloads from a laptop to thousands of cloud machines without Docker or Kubernetes. Founded in 2020 by Matthew Rocklin, the creator of the open-source Dask library, Coiled runs inside a customer's own AWS, GCP, or Azure account, handling provisioning, autoscaling, environment replication, and cost visibility so data teams can run Dask clusters, serverless functions, and batch jobs with minimal friction.
WAi Technologies is a Santa Clara-based digital engineering and AI services company that helps enterprises modernize legacy .NET applications and ship software faster. As a long-standing Microsoft partner, it pairs Azure, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform expertise with its own product line: the open-source Raaghu Design System and AI Pundit, an AI toolchain that converts Figma designs into production-ready front-end code. Its current bet is 'spec-driven' AI delivery - keeping humans in control of strategy while AI does the building.
Zelar (ZelarSoft) is a cloud-native engineering and consulting firm that helps banks, telcos, oil & gas, and government teams adopt Kubernetes, DevOps, and AI without the usual pain. Founded in 2018 and led by CEO Vasu Maganti, the company pairs hands-on services - cloud migration, SRE, security, and data engineering - with its own platforms: Klusternetes for self-service Kubernetes multi-tenancy, OpenOps for production-ready GKE stacks, and Cokpit for agentic AI DevOps. A Google Cloud Premier Partner with offices across the US, Canada, India, and the UAE, Zelar bets that most teams want cloud-native outcomes, not cloud-native homework.
Muhammad Asad Tanwir is a Netherlands-based technical project manager and software architect with more than a decade building and shipping enterprise software. He moves fluently between the whiteboard and the codebase: ecosystem architecture, cloud transformation, DevOps and pre-sales on one side, hands-on Angular, .NET, C#, Azure and SQL on the other. After roughly six years at Wiseman Innovations he has been working on AI-driven projects, including a recent stretch in Riyadh tied to Saudi technology firm Azm Development, where a colleague publicly called him the company's biggest gem.
Anuj Jalan is the Vice President of Sales Marketing at Microsoft, based in Chandigarh, India. He has built his career across major technology and services firms, moving from process development at Genpact and customer support at Dell to senior sales and marketing leadership at one of the world's largest technology companies. With an MBA from Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies and a background spanning recruitment, operations, and client engagement, Jalan represents the archetype of a career professional who climbed the ranks through diverse industry exposure in India's booming tech sector.
Jeremy Nelson is a Vice President at Microsoft, leading Marketing Services, Marketing Engines & Experiences. Based in Redmond, Washington, he has spent over two decades at Microsoft - joining in December 2002 - building his career from early-stage roles all the way to VP. His focus spans demand generation infrastructure, marketing technology platforms, and the systems that power Microsoft's global marketing engine. With a background from Seattle University (class of 2000), Nelson represents a generation of Microsoft lifers who grew up alongside the cloud era and now shape how one of the world's largest technology companies reaches its customers.
Jonathan Manalo is VP of Growth at Microsoft, operating from Central Luzon, Philippines. In this role he drives commercial expansion across one of the world's most influential technology companies - a company whose annual revenue exceeds $281 billion and whose technologies power enterprises from startups to sovereign governments. Based in the Philippines, Manalo sits at the intersection of Microsoft's deep enterprise portfolio - Azure, Microsoft 365, Copilot, and Dynamics 365 - and the rapidly digitizing Southeast Asian market.
Michael Schechter is Corporate Vice President of Search Growth and Experiences at Microsoft, where he has spent over two decades shaping how people discover information on the web. A computer science graduate of the University of Maryland, he has been at the center of Bing's evolution - from leading the captions feature in its early days to orchestrating the AI-powered transformation of Bing with Copilot Search. Known for his candid voice on search industry trends and his willingness to engage publicly on topics like citation transparency and AI reliability, Schechter represents the rare executive who can speak both engineer and user fluently.
Nancy Lesueur is a seasoned technology leader with over 20 years of experience, currently serving as Chief of Staff for the Corporate Vice President of Customer Experience Engineering at Microsoft Security. Based in Sammamish, Washington, she bridges strategic leadership with operational execution at one of the world's most critical security organizations. Her career spans roles in risk intelligence, fraud and abuse prevention, and enterprise program management, with previous positions at FiveBy Solutions and Murphy & Associates. Known for her collaborative leadership style and exceptional listening skills, Nancy is also an advocate for inclusive workplace cultures, having championed Microsoft's Indigenous Employee Resource Group partnerships during a visit to Aotearoa New Zealand.
Natalie Gibralter is a New York-based product executive currently serving as VP of Product, AI Innovation for Microsoft Experience and Devices. She built her reputation as the first Product Manager at Squarespace, scaling the company's commerce platform through a decade of 10x growth to IPO. Before tech, she founded TrailTalks, a nonprofit bridging young Israeli backpackers with international peers, and helped launch KIND's social mission. An Oxford-trained philosopher turned product leader, she was named to Crain's New York Business 40 Under 40 in 2022 and is known for building empowered, outcome-focused teams at the intersection of people and technology.
Rahul Sharma is Vice President of Marketing at Microsoft, based in New Delhi, India. He leads marketing strategy and execution for one of the world's most valuable technology companies in one of its fastest-growing markets. Operating at the intersection of enterprise software, AI, and cloud computing, Sharma drives Microsoft's brand and commercial marketing efforts across India - a country Microsoft has identified as central to its global AI and cloud expansion strategy.
Ross Ortega is VP of Product Management at Microsoft, currently leading Discovery and Communications initiatives. He previously built a $1 billion portfolio of Azure networking services - including ExpressRoute, Virtual WAN, Application Gateway, and Web Application Firewall - and then led Azure for Operators, Microsoft's 5G and edge computing platform for telecommunications providers. Before Microsoft, he co-founded Consystant Design Technologies and served as President and CTO of GraniteEdge Networks. A career technologist with roots in embedded systems and networking, Ortega has spent over two decades at Microsoft shaping how enterprises and telecoms connect to the cloud.
Song Zou is Vice President of the Edge Growth Team at Microsoft, where he leads the growth strategy for one of the world's most widely-used browsers. A 25-year Microsoft veteran, he has shaped the user experience of nearly every major Windows release - from MSN Money to Vista's desktop to Windows 7's taskbar and Start menu - before steering the pivotal migration of Microsoft Edge to the Chromium engine and building the microservices infrastructure behind it. Trained as an electrical engineer at Georgia Tech and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, he is a rare operator who bridges deep systems-level engineering with executive-scale product growth.
Armada is a San Francisco-based edge computing company that builds ruggedized, containerized data centers - the Galleon family and the megawatt-scale Leviathan - paired with Starlink connectivity and an AI orchestration platform. Its mission is to put AI and compute everywhere the cloud can't reach: oil rigs, mines, ships, forward operating bases, and remote industrial sites.
DuploCloud is a San Jose-based DevOps automation platform that turns plain-English application requirements into production-ready, compliance-aware cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure and GCP. Founded by ex-Microsoft Azure engineer Venkat Thiruvengadam, it aims to give Main Street IT the hyperscale automation patterns once locked inside Big Tech.
Takeshi Numoto is the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft, appointed in October 2023 after his predecessor Chris Capossela's 32-year tenure. A University of Tokyo law graduate and Stanford MBA, Numoto joined Microsoft in 1997 after serving as a trade negotiator for Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Over nearly three decades at Microsoft, he has been the architect behind the marketing strategies that powered the explosive growth of Azure, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365, and now leads all worldwide marketing for the company's AI-driven Copilot era — overseeing brand, advertising, product marketing, events, and communications globally.
Toby Bowers is Vice President of Commercial Cloud & AI Marketing at Microsoft, based in the Seattle area. With over 20 years at the company, he leads market strategy across Microsoft's Cloud and AI product portfolios, including business and technical audience marketing, global events, and partner ecosystem engagement. He is the architect of Microsoft's 'Frontier Firms' initiative - a framework identifying and showcasing organizations reimagining their operations through AI - and was a driving force behind the ISV Connect program that grew to 700+ independent software vendors. A prolific blogger on the Microsoft Cloud Blog, Dynamics 365 Blog, and Power Platform Blog, Bowers is one of Microsoft's most visible voices on AI-driven enterprise transformation.
Amitabh Sinha is the Co-Founder of Workspot, Inc., a cloud PC and virtual desktop infrastructure company based in Campbell, California. After earning a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he built a career across Oracle, Informix, and Citrix - where he ran the XenDesktop product line as VP of Product Management - before co-founding Workspot in 2012 with Puneet Chawla and Ty Wang. He served as CEO for over a decade, steering the company through five funding rounds to $86.75M in total capital raised, and pioneering innovations like the industry's first cloud PC with 99.99% SLA availability. In April 2024, he transitioned to Chief Strategy Officer.
Workspot is a cloud-native platform that delivers Windows and Linux desktops, apps, and GPU workstations as a service across Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. Built for enterprises moving away from legacy VDI, it lets IT teams provision a global cloud PC fleet in days rather than months.
Venkat Thiruvengadam is the founder and CEO of DuploCloud, a no-code/low-code DevSecOps platform headquartered in San Jose, California. A founding member of Microsoft Azure's networking team, he wrote core parts of Azure's compute and network controller stack before building DuploCloud to bring hyperscale cloud automation - previously available only to giants like AWS and Microsoft - to mainstream enterprises. Under his leadership, DuploCloud has raised $52M in total funding (including a $32M Series B in 2023), grown ARR by 700% since 2021, and serves 100+ customers across healthcare, fintech, and enterprise software.
Vishal Joshi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Joy, a modern wedding and celebration platform that has helped millions of couples plan their weddings with beautifully designed websites, all-in-one registries, and guest management tools. A former Microsoft Azure product manager who spent nearly a decade helping build cloud infrastructure, Joshi left to co-found Joy in 2014 through Y Combinator's S16 cohort. Joy has raised over $44M in funding from investors including General Catalyst, Sierra Ventures, and celebrity angels Joe Montana and Marc Pincus, and has grown to nearly 500 employees.
Pump.co is a San Francisco-based AI cloud platform that pools AWS commitments across hundreds of startups to deliver enterprise-grade discounts - up to 60% off - with no engineering work or long contracts. Founded in 2022 and backed by Y Combinator, it has grown into a multi-product 'intelligent cloud' covering cost optimization, visibility, and security.
Connie Tang is the CEO and founder of CCT Technologies Inc., operating as ComputerLand of Silicon Valley - a San Jose-based IT solutions firm she built from a storefront computer shop in 1991 into a 55-person enterprise serving government agencies, K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and commercial businesses across Northern California. After more than three decades at the helm, she led the company through a strategic acquisition by ISSQUARED Inc. in May 2024, positioning the combined entity to expand in cybersecurity, AI, and edge computing.
Rakesh Vartak is the CEO of WAI Technologies, a Santa Clara-based AI-powered software and Microsoft solutions company with 250+ employees and offices in the US and India. With over 30 years in IT and ITES, he leads a company building next-generation developer platforms - including AI Pundit (spec-driven AI development) and Raaghu (open-source React design system) - that promise to deliver digital transformation 3x faster for enterprises across healthcare, finance, and logistics.
Rohan Marfatia is the CEO of DataCRaiM, Inc. (formerly Beround), a technology consulting firm specializing in Data, AI, and CRM solutions for equipment leasing, finance, and MedTech/healthcare sectors. With over 20 years of experience across India, the UK, the Netherlands, and the United States, he has built a career at the intersection of enterprise technology and human-centered leadership. A TEDx and keynote speaker, President of IAMCP Northern California, and a 2024 Fremont mayoral candidate, Marfatia is also running for Alameda County Supervisor in 2026. He holds an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis and an engineering degree from Sardar Patel University.