context-engineering
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Claire Gouze Is Teaching AI to Know What the Company Means
The nao Labs co-founder went from business school to building data systems at BCG and Sunday. Her wager now is that reliable analytics agents will be won in the quiet work of context, tests, and clean definitions.
Aman Singla Keeps Building the Missing Layer
From wireless chips to cloud-managed homes to governed AI agents, Aman Singla has spent three decades working on the infrastructure between a promising idea and the messy systems it must survive.
nao Labs
nao Labs builds an AI-native code editor for data teams - a local, VS Code-based IDE wired directly into your data warehouse, with an AI copilot that understands your schema, catches breaking changes, and runs data diffs before you ship. Founded in 2024 by Claire Gouze and Christophe Blefari and backed by Y Combinator (Spring 2025), nao is pitched as 'Cursor for data' and, more recently, an open-source analytics agent builder that lets non-technical users query data in plain English.
Trace
Trace is a workflow orchestration platform that gives AI agents shared context about how a company actually works, then routes each task to whichever worker fits best - human or AI. Founded in 2025 by Tim Cherkasov and Artur Romanov and backed by Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch, Trace connects to tools like Slack, Jira, and Notion, builds a knowledge graph of the organization, and turns plain-English process descriptions into visual workflows with AI-automated steps and human approval gates. It raised $3M in seed funding and was the most upvoted startup in the YC S25 cohort.
Contextual AI
Contextual AI is a Mountain View enterprise AI company that builds a context engineering platform for production-grade, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) agents. Founded in 2023 by RAG co-inventor Douwe Kiela and Amanpreet Singh, it packages retrieval, reranking and grounded language models into an end-to-end system that lets regulated enterprises deploy accurate, source-grounded AI on their own documents. The company has raised $100M from backers including Greycroft, Nvidia, Snowflake, HSBC and Bezos Expeditions, and counts Qualcomm and HSBC among its users.
MarcoPolo
MarcoPolo is a Santa Clara, California company building governed AI infrastructure that connects agentic AI - Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, Copilot or any MCP-enabled assistant - to a company's internal data across 50+ systems like Snowflake, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, S3, Salesforce and Jira. Instead of building fragile one-off integrations, teams route through a single secure Model Context Protocol connection with isolated execution, scoped credentials, encrypted secrets and smart context management, so AI can query, correlate and act on enterprise data without leaking it. The product pairs a governed Sandbox, a Cost Plane for token visibility and routing, and a unified Connections CLI. MarcoPolo is the pivot of Immersa, a RevOps data-intelligence startup that raised about $16M from investors including Mayfield's Navin Chaddha.
Ambient
Ambient is a San Francisco startup building an AI Chief of Staff - a shared brain for leadership teams that pulls context scattered across meetings, chat, email, and docs and organizes it around the initiatives that matter. Founded in 2023 by Lawrence Coburn, Brandon Catcho, and Taylor McLoughlin, the product delivers daily prep dossiers, secure meeting notes, and red/yellow/green tracking on make-or-break initiatives for CEOs, Chiefs of Staff, and BizOps teams.
Sergei Sorokin
Sergei Sorokin is the co-founder and CEO of Highlight, a San Francisco company building a shared intelligence layer for the agentic age of work. He spent roughly eight years at Discord as one of its earliest product hires and eventual VP of Product, helping scale the platform from a few million users to hundreds of millions and building its revenue business, including Nitro, from zero. After Discord he advised and built AI startups, then took the helm of Highlight in March 2026 alongside a $40M Series A led by Khosla Ventures. His thesis: in the workplace, AI is no longer bottlenecked by intelligence, but by coordination.
Highlight
Highlight is a San Francisco AI company building a shared intelligence layer for teams and AI agents. Its cross-platform desktop app captures on-screen context, meetings, messages, and documents, then weaves them into a unified team memory that drafts next steps across tools like Linear, Slack, Notion, and calendars. Spun out of game-clip company Medal in 2024, Highlight has grown past 500,000 users and raised a $40M Series A led by Khosla Ventures in March 2026, when former Discord product VP Sergei Sorokin became CEO.
Harrison Chase
Harrison Chase is the co-founder and CEO of LangChain, the open-source framework that became the default scaffolding for developers building LLM-powered applications. Starting as an 800-line Python package he wrote as a side project in October 2022, LangChain has grown to serve 1 million+ developers, 80 million monthly downloads, and blue-chip enterprise customers from Uber to JPMorgan - reaching a $1.25 billion valuation after a $125 million Series B in October 2025. A Harvard-trained statistician who got into machine learning through sports analytics, Chase built LangChain to solve the problem he kept running into at work: there was no good way to chain LLM calls together into reliable, production-ready applications.
Aurimas Griciūnas
Aurimas Griciūnas is a Lithuanian ML/AI engineer, founder of SwirlAI, and author of the SwirlAI Newsletter with 58,000+ Substack followers. A former CPO at neptune.ai (acquired by OpenAI), he now runs SwirlAI — an AI engineering education and consulting firm — and is a LinkedIn Top Voice in AI with 120,000+ followers. His newsletter covers AI engineering, LLMOps, RAG architectures, and agentic systems from a production-first, no-hype perspective.
Zep AI
Zep AI builds the context engineering infrastructure that makes AI agents actually useful. Their platform - powered by a temporal knowledge graph called Graphiti - gives agents persistent memory across sessions, letting them track what users said, what changed, and when. Founded in 2023 and backed by Y Combinator (W24), the San Francisco team hit $1M ARR within months of launch and now serves 240+ customers including Fortune 500 companies. With 25,000+ GitHub stars on Graphiti and a published arXiv paper, Zep is quietly becoming foundational infrastructure for the AI agent era.
Elvis Saravia
Elvis Saravia is the co-founder and lead AI researcher at DAIR.AI, a mission-driven organization democratizing AI research and education worldwide. Based in Belize, he is the author of the Prompt Engineering Guide - one of the most widely read AI resources on the internet with 73,000+ GitHub stars and over 3 million learners - and publishes the AI Agents Weekly newsletter. A PhD graduate from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, he has contributed to landmark AI projects including the Galactica large language model at Meta AI, and is known for bridging rigorous research with accessible, production-minded education for the next generation of AI builders.