Mohamed Elgendy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kolena, a San Francisco-based AI testing and validation platform that raised $21M to help enterprises build reliable, trustworthy AI systems. An Egyptian-American technologist and author of the widely-read 'Deep Learning for Vision Systems' (Manning Publications, 20,000+ copies sold), Elgendy cut his teeth building AI/ML organizations at Amazon, Twilio, Rakuten, and Synapse (acquired by Palantir) before founding Kolena in 2021. His mission: bring software engineering rigor - unit testing, regression analysis, scenario-level validation - to a field that has long relied on aggregate accuracy scores that mask real-world failures.
Yasser Elsaid is an Egyptian-born software engineer and entrepreneur who bootstrapped Chatbase - an AI agent platform - from zero to $9M ARR with 18 people, all without raising a dollar of VC funding. He launched to 16 Twitter followers in February 2023, the tweet went viral, he failed two university classes, turned down a $1M acquisition offer for his source code three months in, and kept building. Now based in San Francisco on an O-1 'Alien of Extraordinary Ability' visa, he's declared 2026 the year Chatbase forgets it's bootstrapped.