competitive-intelligence
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Karthik Bettadapura
Karthik Bettadapura is the co-founder and CEO of DataWeave, an AI-powered SaaS platform that delivers competitive intelligence to retailers and consumer brands. Founded in 2011 in Bengaluru with co-founder Vikranth Ramanolla, DataWeave aggregates and analyzes billions of unstructured data points across the web - tracking prices, assortment, and digital-shelf performance for enterprise clients. Karthik leads product vision and business development, and drove the company's pivot from India to the US market. An IIIT-Bangalore engineer who earlier helped build CNBC's Web18, he now runs DataWeave from the Austin, Texas area.
Mark Chrystal
Dr. Mark Chrystal is the CEO and co-founder of Profitmind, a Pittsburgh-based agentic AI startup that gives retailers a team of AI analysts for pricing, inventory, assortment, forecasting and competitive intelligence. A 25-year retail operator who ran analytics, supply chain and e-commerce at rue21, David's Bridal, American Eagle, Disney Store and Victoria's Secret, he was recruited by AI pioneer Andrew Ng to build software 'for retailers by retailers.' The company, formerly known as Netail, has raised roughly $14 million to date, including a $9 million Series A backed by Accenture Ventures, with partnerships spanning Accenture and Microsoft.
Jonathan Sherry
Jonathan Sherry is the CEO and co-founder of Alium, a New York-based buyer intelligence platform that replaces pay-to-play analyst ratings with structured, AI-analyzed interviews from real enterprise practitioners. A Columbia MBA and Penn engineering grad, Sherry previously co-founded CB Insights alongside Anand Sanwal - building it from a near-shuttered startup in 2009 into the venture industry's premier market intelligence platform with 250+ employees and eight-figure revenue. Alium, which operated in stealth for four years before publicly launching in January 2025 with $7M in seed funding from Greycroft and Primary Venture Partners, has already conducted 1,000+ in-depth vendor performance interviews with decision-makers at companies including Walmart, Nike, Marriott, and Spotify.
Jonah Lopin
Jonah Lopin is the co-founder and CEO of Crayon, a Boston-based market and competitive intelligence software company he started in 2015 with John Osborne. Before Crayon, he was HubSpot's sixth employee, running Customer Success from zero through the company's 2014 IPO. A Cornell physics grad with an MIT Sloan MBA, Lopin built Crayon on a simple frustration: companies obsess over their internal metrics while staying blind to what's happening in the market around them. His pitch is that competitive intelligence can be programmatic, continuous, and software-driven rather than a slide deck someone updates twice a year.
Felix Herranz
Felix González Herranz is the Co-Founder and CEO of FounderNest, an AI-powered market intelligence platform serving Fortune 500 companies with tools for innovation scouting, competitive analysis, and M&A research. A Fulbright Scholar and Stanford GSB Arjay Miller Scholar, Felix built FounderNest from a problem he lived firsthand - helping companies find signal in a sea of 54 million company profiles. Before FounderNest, he worked at the Inter-American Development Bank across 20+ countries, consulted at The World Bank, and co-founded JuntoSalimos during Spain's 2009 economic crisis to support Spanish-speaking entrepreneurs. His clients include L'Oréal, Roche, Telefónica, AstraZeneca, and Novo Nordisk.