Spencer Kimball is the co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, the company behind CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database built to survive almost anything you throw at it. Long before databases, he co-wrote GIMP as a Berkeley class project in 1995, spent roughly a decade as an engineer at Google working on its file-system guts, and built a photo startup that Square acquired. He named his database after the one creature famous for being nearly impossible to kill - which turned out to be the perfect pitch.
Dmitry Fonarev is the co-founder and CEO of Testkube, the Kubernetes-native test orchestration platform that has powered over 100 million automated tests for customers including Cloudflare, Siemens, Adobe, and Volvo. A Boston University computer science graduate with more than two decades building engineering teams at Dell, SmartBear, and vKernel, he co-founded Kubeshop in 2021 with SoapUI creator Ole Lensmar, then spun Testkube out as a standalone company that raised an $8M Series A in 2025.
JFrog is the company behind the universal software supply chain platform anchored by Artifactory, the binary repository that lets engineering teams store, secure, and ship every artifact - packages, containers, and now AI models - from a single source of truth. Founded in Israel in 2008 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, JFrog (NASDAQ: FROG) serves thousands of enterprises and crossed $531.8 million in revenue in 2025 while pushing its 'Liquid Software' vision of continuous, secure software flow.
Alec Miloslavsky is the Founder and CEO of EIS Ltd (EIS Group), a San Francisco-based cloud-native digital insurance platform serving major insurers including Aflac, Allstate, Liberty Mutual, and Nationwide. Born in Ukraine and relocating to the US at age 17, he co-founded Genesys Telecommunications in 1990 - a contact center technology company he helped grow to a $1.9 billion acquisition by Alcatel-Lucent. He then co-founded Exigen Services, growing it past $70M in revenue, before pivoting to insurance tech by founding EIS Group in 2008. Under his leadership, EIS has raised over $224M in funding and built a modular, API-first core platform used across five insurance segments globally.
Automation Anywhere is a San Jose-based enterprise software company building agentic process automation - software bots and AI agents that handle the repetitive office work humans do not want to do. Its Automation 360 platform combines RPA, document AI, and generative-AI co-pilots to run end-to-end workflows for global enterprises across finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and the public sector.
ClickHouse is the open-source columnar database engineered for real-time analytics on petabyte-scale data. Born inside Yandex in 2009 and spun out as ClickHouse, Inc. in 2021, it now powers analytics for Anthropic, Tesla, Sony, Meta, Lyft, and roughly 3,000 other paying customers as a managed cloud service.
Docker, Inc. builds the toolchain that put containers into the daily vocabulary of software development. From Docker Desktop to Docker Hub to Docker Scout, the company helps roughly 20 million developers package, share, and run applications anywhere - and is now extending that same packaging logic to AI models and agents.
MinIO is a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage company building the data layer for AI. Its software-defined storage runs on commodity hardware in private clouds, on-prem, and at the edge, and is used by more than half of the Fortune 500 to power analytics, ML training, and exascale AI workloads.
Observe is an AI-powered observability platform that unifies logs, metrics, and traces into a single streaming data lake built on Snowflake. The company helps enterprises troubleshoot distributed applications 3x faster at one-third the cost of traditional monitoring tools. Founded in 2017 by veterans from Splunk, Wavefront, and Snowflake, Observe was acquired by Snowflake in January 2026 for approximately $1 billion after raising over $665 million in funding.
Dylan Cui is a co-founder of PingCAP, the company behind TiDB - one of the world's most widely adopted open-source distributed SQL databases. A software engineer by trade, Dylan co-built TiDB from scratch starting in 2015 after experiencing firsthand the pain of database scaling at scale while working at Wandoujia. PingCAP has raised over $341 million and TiDB has more than 33,000 GitHub stars, serving thousands of enterprises globally across fintech, gaming, and e-commerce.
Amiram Shachar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Upwind Security, a cloud-native security unicorn valued at $1.5 billion after its $250M Series B in January 2026. A serial entrepreneur with deep IDF Mamram roots, he previously founded Spot.io - sold to NetApp for $450M - before returning to build a runtime-first CNAPP platform that cuts security alert noise by 98%. He leads a team of ~350 people from San Francisco and Tel Aviv.
Anand Babu 'AB' Periasamy is the Co-Founder and CEO of MinIO, the world's most widely deployed open-source object storage platform with over 2 million Docker pulls per day. A serial entrepreneur from Tamil Nadu, India, he previously co-founded Gluster Inc. — the distributed file system company acquired by Red Hat for $136 million in 2011. With MinIO, he built a Kubernetes-native, Amazon S3-compatible storage engine that became foundational infrastructure for AI, machine learning, and data-lake workloads. In January 2022, MinIO closed a $103M Series B at a $1 billion valuation, cementing its unicorn status with backing from Intel Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, and Nexus Venture Partners.
Dan Woods is the Founder and CEO of Socotra, the AI-native cloud-native insurance core platform he built from scratch starting in 2014. A Stanford AI researcher and former Palantir engineer (employee #20), he left the data-intelligence world to fix insurance technology - an industry he describes as 'a decade behind banking.' Under his leadership, Socotra has raised $87M+ in total funding including a $50M Series C led by Insight Partners, and powers carriers and insurtech MGAs who can now launch insurance products in weeks instead of years.
Don Johnson is the CEO of Docker, Inc., the company behind the world's most widely used container platform. Appointed in February 2025, he brings decades of hyperscale cloud infrastructure experience from founding Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and serving as a founding technical leader at Amazon Web Services. A builder at heart who spent years constructing the plumbing of the modern cloud, Johnson now leads Docker's mission to make software development frictionless, secure, and AI-ready for the world's 20 million developers.
Dustin Yoder is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sureify, a San Jose-based insurtech SaaS company that builds a low-code, cloud-native platform helping life insurance and annuity carriers digitize their sales, service, and engagement operations. With roots in the insurance industry through his family's Silicon Valley brokerage, Yoder entered insurtech in 2012, making him one of the earliest pioneers in the space. Under his leadership, Sureify has grown to serve marquee carriers including State Farm, Allstate, Nationwide, and Principal, reaching $38.9M in annual revenue by 2024 after raising $25M+ in total funding including a $15M Series C from Aspen Capital Group in 2021.
Ev Kontsevoy is the co-founder and CEO of Teleport, a cybersecurity company building the identity-native infrastructure access platform trusted by organizations like Samsung, NASDAQ, and IBM. A serial entrepreneur who grew up in Siberia and studied applied mathematics, he previously co-founded Mailgun (acquired by Rackspace in 2012) before starting Teleport in 2015 to eliminate the fragmented, secrets-based approach to infrastructure security. Under his leadership, Teleport reached a $1.1B valuation with its $110M Series C, and he authored an O'Reilly book on identity-native infrastructure access management. He is now focused on defining agentic identity frameworks for the era of AI-driven enterprise infrastructure.
Haseeb Budhani is the Co-founder and CEO of Rafay Systems, a Sunnyvale-based infrastructure orchestration platform that simplifies Kubernetes and AI infrastructure lifecycle operations across public clouds, private data centers, and the edge. A serial entrepreneur with a track record of building and selling enterprise technology companies, Budhani previously co-founded Soha Systems - a secure remote access startup acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2016 - and has held senior product and engineering roles at Citrix, Infineta Systems, and others. Under his leadership, Rafay has raised $37.1M in total funding, built partnerships with Verizon, NVIDIA, and Cisco, and grown to serve major enterprise customers at the intersection of Kubernetes operations and AI infrastructure.
Jeyappragash 'JJ' Jeyakeerthi is the co-founder and CTO of Tetrate, the company that made Istio enterprise-ready and brought FIPS-verified service mesh to regulated industries including the US federal government. An IIT Madras graduate who once ran Twitter's Cloud Infrastructure, JJ co-founded Tetrate in 2018 with Varun Talwar to secure the cloud-native stack from edge to datacenter - building one of the most technically credible teams in the service mesh ecosystem, trusted by the US Air Force and some of the world's largest enterprises.
Ken Kaufman is the CEO of Sirona Medical, a San Francisco-based cloud-native radiology platform backed by $118M in funding. A radiology IT veteran with decades of experience at IDX Systems, McKesson, and Allscripts, he co-founded PureWellness — a population health platform that grew to 15 million users and was acquired by Cerner in 2013. Now at Sirona, he is driving the company's mission to rearchitect radiology software with AI at its core, helping radiologists read faster, practice everywhere, and generate reports with unprecedented efficiency.
Luke Han is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kyligence, the enterprise data analytics company built by the team that created Apache Kylin - the first Apache Software Foundation top-level project developed in China. A former eBay big data product lead, Han co-invented Apache Kylin in 2013, open-sourced it in 2014, then founded Kyligence in 2016 to commercialize the technology. Under his leadership, Kyligence raised $110M+ in funding including a $70M Series D, serves clients including UBS, McDonald's, and L'OREAL, and has evolved into an AI-powered metrics platform. Han is also a Microsoft Regional Director, Apache Kylin VP, Forbes Technology Council member, and Fortune China 40 Under 40 honoree.
Max Liu (刘奇) is co-founder and CEO of PingCAP, the company behind TiDB - an open-source distributed SQL database designed for hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP). He co-founded PingCAP in 2015 after stints at JD.com and Wandou Labs, solving the database scaling crisis at hyperscale. Under his leadership, PingCAP raised $341.6M in total funding including a $270M Series D, and TiDB now serves customers including Pinterest, Plaid, Bolt, and Atlassian. In 2025, Liu was named one of The Top 50 Software CEOs of 2024 by The Software Report.
Mwalimu Karisa is an executive at Kong Inc., the San Francisco-based API connectivity company behind the Kong Gateway and Konnect platform. Originally from Kilifi County on Kenya's coast, Karisa's path ran through an exchange program in Iowa and onto the front lines of global API and AI infrastructure. Kong serves enterprises managing critical API traffic across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments, with over $424 million raised and a $2 billion valuation. Before entering the technology sector, Karisa was publicly recognized for community development work in his home village, raising funds for clean water access and healthcare infrastructure in coastal Kenya.
Nick Talken is the Co-Founder and CEO of Albert Invent, an Oakland-based AI platform that is transforming how chemists and materials scientists do research and development. A chemical engineer by training who learned to code, Talken spent years inside Henkel's global R&D organization before spinning out Albert Invent in 2022 with a team of co-founders who built the product from within. The company's platform - used by over 3,000 scientists across 142+ labs in 30+ countries at companies like Kenvue, Henkel, and Chemours - has raised over $52 million from top-tier investors including Coatue, Index Ventures, TCV, and J.P. Morgan Private Capital.
Ratan Tipirneni is President and CEO of Tigera, the company behind Project Calico - the open-source container networking and security project powering over 100 million containers across 8 million nodes in 166 countries. A serial entrepreneur with stints at Cisco, Actifio, Sun Microsystems, and SupportSoft, he joined Tigera in 2017 and has since grown it into the definitive platform for Kubernetes security, observability, and now AI workload protection.
Rafay Systems is a Sunnyvale-based platform-engineering company that builds infrastructure orchestration and workflow automation software for Kubernetes, GPU workloads and AI/ML pipelines. Its cloud-based platform lets enterprises offer self-service compute to developers and data scientists while keeping platform teams in control of cost, security and compliance across AWS, Azure, GCP and on-prem environments.
Sirona Medical is a San Francisco cloud-native radiology software company building Unify, a single platform that fuses PACS, viewer, worklist, reporting and AI into one browser-based workflow for radiologists.
Socotra is a cloud-native insurance core platform that gives carriers, MGAs, and InsurTechs a fully configurable system for policy administration, billing, claims, and analytics - so they can launch new products in weeks instead of years, and run them on infrastructure that updates 48 times a year without breaking.
Spectro Cloud is a San Jose-based enterprise software company that builds Palette, a Kubernetes management platform used to run, secure and scale containerized workloads, AI infrastructure and GPU clusters across cloud, data center, bare metal and edge environments. Founded in 2019 by Cisco/Cliqr veterans, it counts GE HealthCare, T-Mobile, Nokia and the U.S. Air Force and Navy among its customers and closed a $75M Series C in November 2024 led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs.
Teleport is the infrastructure identity company. Its open-source Access Platform replaces shared secrets, VPNs, and long-lived credentials with short-lived cryptographic identities for humans, machines, and AI agents accessing servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases, applications, and Windows desktops.