Mitko Simeonov (Dimitar Simeonov) is the founder and CEO of Pioneer, a San Francisco startup that uses large language models to help climate tech companies win government grants, contracts and incentives in a fraction of the usual time. A Bulgarian math olympian turned MIT-trained AI engineer, he shipped machine learning to hundreds of millions of users at Twitter before building Pioneer, which raised $2.9M in seed funding led by Blue Bear Capital in late 2023. He describes himself as a compulsive problem solver and writes a long-running blog about thinking independently.
Petko Plachkov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bright Money, a San Francisco-based AI-powered personal finance platform that helps middle-income Americans manage debt, build credit, and access affordable financial products. A Princeton and Wharton-educated serial entrepreneur who grew up in Bulgaria and Swaziland, Petko spent over a decade building digital financial products at McKinsey and as Co-Founder of CommuterClub before launching Bright Money in 2019. The company has raised $93M in funding, serves over 1 million users, and is powered by MoneyScience - a patented system of 34 AI algorithms.
Bogomil Balkansky is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied venture capital firms, where he focuses on investments in cloud infrastructure, developer tools, DevOps, observability, and enterprise SaaS. Born in Bulgaria after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he studied mathematics at Cornell University before earning an MBA from Stanford GSB. He spent eight years at VMware growing server virtualization revenue 10x and expanding the customer base from 5,000 to 300,000, was an early employee at Bebop (acquired by Google for $397M), then led go-to-market for Google Cloud's Recruiting Solutions. He joined Sequoia in 2020 and has backed companies including Vanta, Wiz, Temporal, Chainguard, Pydantic, and Mutiny. Known for his intuition-driven investment style and deep connections across the Bulgarian and Silicon Valley tech ecosystems.