Ryan Janssen is the Co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic, a New York-based AI-powered business intelligence platform that lets non-technical users query data in plain English. A former McKinsey consultant and 6-year venture capital investor with advanced degrees from Harvard and Oxford, Ryan co-founded Zenlytic in 2020 alongside CTO Paul Blankley after spotting a gap: companies had modern data infrastructure but no accessible way to use it. Zenlytic has raised $15.4M including a $9M Series A in 2024 led by M13, and its AI analyst Zoe can now onboard itself autonomously to any data warehouse.
Bin 'Tony' Zhao is the founder, CEO, and Chairman of Agora (NASDAQ: API), the Real-Time Engagement Platform-as-a-Service he built after 20 years on the frontlines of internet voice and video - from being a founding engineer at WebEx to CTO of JOYY with 300 million users. Founded in 2013, Agora now powers over 80 billion minutes of real-time engagement monthly, supplied the audio backbone for Clubhouse's viral moment, and in 2025 launched a Conversational AI Engine bridging human voice and large language models.
Daily is a San Francisco developer platform for real-time voice, video, and AI. Founded in 2016 by Kwindla Hultman Kramer and Nina Kuruvilla, the company runs a global WebRTC mesh that powers video calling for products like Pitch, AppFolio, Kumospace, and HotDoc, and it created Pipecat - the open-source orchestration framework now used as the backbone for production voice agents at companies like NVIDIA, Cresta, and Epic.
Deepgram builds foundational voice AI - speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and full voice-agent APIs - used by more than 1,300 enterprises including NASA, Spotify, Twilio and Citibank to give machines the ability to listen, understand, and respond in real time.
Gorgias is a conversational AI and helpdesk platform built for ecommerce brands. It unifies email, chat, SMS, voice and social into one inbox, then layers an AI Agent that resolves a majority of tickets automatically while turning support into a revenue channel.
Anand Prajapati is Co-Founder and CTO of Leena AI, an enterprise agentic AI platform that deploys AI colleagues to automate back-office work across HR, IT, Finance, and Procurement. A graduate of IIT Delhi, Anand built Leena AI's technology from scratch after two earlier startup pivots, guiding the company through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch to a $30M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Today Leena AI's platform serves 400+ enterprise customers across 90+ countries - including Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Sony - resolving millions of employee queries autonomously across 100+ languages.
Anil Dharni is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sense, a San Francisco-based AI-powered talent engagement platform that serves over 1,000 organizations. Before reshaping how companies hire, he co-founded Funzio, the mobile gaming studio behind 'Crime City' and 'Modern War,' which sold to GREE for $210 million in 2012. At Sense, backed by SoftBank with $106 million raised and a $500M valuation, he is on a mission to humanize the contingent workforce and make candidates feel genuinely valued through AI, automation, and omnichannel communication.
Chase Kim is a startup founder who spent years deep inside Sendbird, the messaging infrastructure company powering conversations for DoorDash, Reddit, and Hinge, where he led the forward deployment team during Sendbird's critical 2024 pivot into AI agents for customer experience. In 2026, he co-founded Light Anchor (YC P26) with Sangha Park to build fully autonomous e-commerce brands run entirely by AI agents, betting that the future of consumer business is capped by compute, not headcount.
Gadi Shamia is the CEO and co-founder of Replicant, a voice AI platform that automates customer service calls at enterprise scale. A serial entrepreneur who sold his first company (TopManage) to SAP, helped EchoSign sell to Adobe for $400M, and scaled Talkdesk from seed to unicorn as COO, he brings two decades of building and scaling B2B software companies to the challenge of replacing traditional IVR systems with natural-sounding, AI-driven conversations. Under his leadership, Replicant has automated over 1 billion minutes of customer interactions and raised $113M in funding.
Masahiro 'Masa' Shimizu is the Founder & CEO of ZEALS Co., Ltd. and Omakase.ai, the Japanese pioneer of Chat Commerce. He started ZEALS as a Meiji University freshman in 2014 with robots and a mission to 'elevate Japan,' pivoted to chatbots within one month of Facebook opening its Messenger API in 2016, built Japan's #1 social chat commerce platform with 300+ employees and $69M+ raised, and is now taking that same hospitality-first philosophy — what he calls 'Omotenashi' — into voice-powered AI agents for global e-commerce through Omakase.ai.
Michael Gilson is the CEO of Conversica, the San Francisco-based conversational AI company behind over 1.5 billion automated customer conversations. Appointed in April 2025, he has repositioned Conversica as 'The Conversation Company,' expanding its AI agent platform from sales automation into automotive data intelligence, sports and entertainment ticketing, and enterprise customer lifecycle management. A Princeton graduate with a background spanning enterprise SaaS, media technology at Telestream, and data analytics at Wiser Solutions, Gilson brings operator instincts to a company that pioneered AI-to-human conversation at scale.
Mayank Goyal is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist (Head of AI) at Leena AI, an enterprise agentic AI platform that automates HR, IT, and Finance support for organizations worldwide. An IIT Delhi alumnus in Production and Industrial Engineering, Mayank co-founded ChatterOn in 2015 with Adit Jain and Anand Prajapati before pivoting to Leena AI in 2017 after noticing large enterprises like Coca-Cola and Vodafone using their chatbot platform for internal support. Leena AI joined Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch, raised $40M+ across multiple rounds including a $30M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, and now serves 500+ enterprise customers across 90+ countries, reaching 3+ million employees. Mayank leads the AI research and product intelligence that powers Leena AI's pre-built AI colleagues - Gavin (HR), Miles (IT), and Harper (Finance).
Melissa Gordon is the CEO of Rasa, the enterprise conversational AI platform powering two of the world's three largest banks and downloaded over 50 million times by developers. A two-time NCAA Division I All-American pole vaulter at Stanford and a near-decade Oracle veteran, she joined Rasa in February 2022 and has since led the company through a strategic pivot to generative AI, launching CALM (Conversational AI with Language Models) and raising a $30M Series C in February 2024 co-led by StepStone Group and PayPal Ventures.
Pieter de Villiers is the Co-Founder and CEO of Clickatell, the company that invented the world's first SMS API in 2000 with four lines of code and went on to pioneer chat banking and chat commerce globally. Based in Stellenbosch, South Africa, he led Clickatell to become the first African startup backed by Sequoia Capital, raised over $118 million in total funding, and built a platform that processes roughly 9 billion messages monthly for more than 10,000 enterprise clients across 220+ countries. He also chairs SiMODiSA, a non-profit focused on digital skills development and startup acceleration in Africa.
Raghu Ravinutala is the co-founder and CEO of Yellow.ai, an enterprise-grade conversational AI platform that automates customer and employee experiences at scale. A former IC design engineer turned AI entrepreneur, he built Yellow.ai into a $500M-valued company serving 1,300+ enterprises across 85+ countries, with $79.5M in annual revenue and over $102M raised. Under his leadership, Yellow.ai developed proprietary LLM technology and a multi-LLM architecture trained on 16 billion conversations annually, processing support in 135+ languages across 35+ channels.
PolyAI builds enterprise voice assistants that answer customer calls and handle them end-to-end. The London- and San Francisco-based company spun out of Cambridge's dialogue systems lab in 2017, and now runs AI agents in 18 languages for brands like Marriott, Caesars, PG&E, FedEx and Hopper.
Sierra is a San Francisco AI company building conversational agents that handle customer interactions for enterprises. Founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor in 2023, it serves more than 40% of the Fortune 50 and was last valued at $15.8 billion after a $950M Series E in May 2026.
Vapi is a San Francisco developer platform for building, testing, and deploying conversational voice AI agents over phone and web. It abstracts the messy plumbing of speech-to-text, LLMs, text-to-speech, and telephony so developers can ship human-sounding voice agents in minutes, with sub-500ms latency and enterprise-grade compliance.
Voximplant is a cloud communications and voice AI orchestration platform that lets developers and enterprises add programmable voice, video, messaging and AI agents to their apps without managing telecom infrastructure. Spun out of click-to-call pioneer Zingaya, it powers billions of calls a year for brands like Hyundai, Burger King, KFC, Glovo and Rappi.
Ping Wu is the CEO of Cresta, a Sunnyvale-based AI company transforming contact centers with generative AI. Before leading Cresta, Wu spent 14 years at Google where he co-founded the Contact Center AI (CCAI) Solution and Vertex AI platform. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara and a BS from Fudan University. Under his leadership, Cresta raised a $125M Series D in November 2024 and quadrupled its ARR, serving enterprise clients like United Airlines and Cox Communications.
Decagon is a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company building conversational agents that handle customer support across chat, email, voice and SMS. Its platform, anchored by Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs), lets companies define complex workflows in natural language and apply them consistently across channels. Customers include Hertz, Chime, Notion, Duolingo, Rippling, Bilt, Oura, Eventbrite and Affirm.
Speak is an AI-powered language learning app that gets users speaking out loud from day one. Backed by OpenAI's Startup Fund, Accel, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, the San Francisco company reached unicorn status in December 2024 after raising a $78M Series C at a $1B valuation. Its AI tutor offers unlimited conversational practice and instant feedback to over 10 million learners.
Toma builds AI voice agents that answer the phone for U.S. car dealerships, booking service appointments, fielding parts requests, and saving BDC teams hundreds of hours a week. Founded by Monik Pamecha and Anthony Krivonos in early 2024, the company has raised a $17M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz and is approaching eight-figure ARR with more than 100 dealership customers.
Eric Seyoung Jang is the Founder and CEO of DeepBrain AI, a Palo Alto-based company building hyper-realistic AI avatars, video synthesis technology, and conversational AI systems. Inspired by AlphaGo's 2016 defeat of Go champion Lee Sedol, he pivoted from fintech to artificial intelligence and built what became the first company to commercially deploy video synthesis at scale - from AI news anchors in Chinese broadcast studios to AI bankers in Korean bank branches. Under his leadership, DeepBrain AI raised $44M in Series B funding at a $180M valuation and set its sights on becoming the world's leading generative AI enterprise.
Fedor Pak is the CEO of Chatfuel, the no-code AI chatbot platform trusted by 7 million businesses for over a billion monthly conversations on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. A serial entrepreneur who cut his teeth in Russian oil and gas before founding coin-machine networks, ride-hailing operations in Pakistan, and e-commerce ventures, Pak joined Chatfuel in October 2022 and has since steered the company from a chatbot builder into a full AI sales and engagement engine - Meta's top automation partner and a platform that saves clinic owners 30+ hours of admin per month.
Dr. Gauri Naik is a Ph.D. biotechnologist, serial entrepreneur, and Co-Founder & CEO of OptraHEALTH, a Silicon Valley AI health-tech company building conversational AI and revenue cycle automation tools for genetics, genomics, and clinical workflows. With 11 U.S. patents, a career spanning digital pathology (BioImagene, acquired by Roche), and products deployed at leading health systems across the US, Europe, and Asia, she sits at the intersection of molecular biology, machine learning, and enterprise health IT.
Ahmed Reza is the Founder and CEO of Yobi, an AI workforce platform that deploys synthetic agents to handle calls, texts, and social DMs for small businesses 24/7. A Milken Scholar at Cornell University who wrote image-processing software for NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, Reza went from child actor in Bangladesh to homeless student to serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. His previous ventures include Call Sumo (call tracking analytics) and Dental Web Now (AI dental marketing, acquired by NPI). Yobi raised a $2.37M seed round in 2023, reached $2.4M ARR by late 2025, and in 2026 partnered with Microsoft to develop a private foundation model for predictive behavioral intelligence.
Ashish Nagar is the Founder and CEO of Level AI, a Mountain View-based enterprise AI company that has raised $73.1 million to transform how contact centers operate. Armed with a B.Tech in Applied Physics from IIT Delhi, a Stanford MS, and a Stanford GSB MBA, Nagar cut his AI teeth building the Alexa Prize at Amazon — a project to make Alexa hold a 20-minute conversation on any topic, collaborating with researchers from MIT, CMU, Stanford, and Oxford. He founded Level AI in 2019 after recognizing that the same ambient AI breakthroughs powering voice assistants could be turned toward the unglamorous but massive world of customer service. The company's vertically integrated, CX-native large language model now analyzes 100% of customer conversations for enterprises like Affirm, Penske, and Carta, detecting seven distinct emotions, cutting call handling time by 10-25%, and onboarding agents 30-50% faster.
Jesse Zhang is the 28-year-old co-founder and CEO of Decagon, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company valued at $4.5 billion that builds autonomous AI agents for customer service. A Harvard Computer Science graduate who sold his first startup Lowkey to Niantic, Zhang pivoted to enterprise AI in 2023 when GPT-4 arrived, spending months in customer discovery interviews before writing a single line of code. In under two years, he scaled Decagon from stealth to unicorn status, raised $481M total, landed clients like Duolingo, Notion, Hertz, and Deutsche Telekom, and made Forbes 30 Under 30. He is also a Grandmaster-ranked Teamfight Tactics player, a competition math problem author, and an angel investor in 20+ startups.
Monik Pamecha is the Co-Founder and CEO of Toma, an AI voice platform built for automotive dealerships. A programmer since age 11-12, he published ML research in 2016, built AI at Uber, Turing.com, and Braze, and co-founded Skindex (a skincare AI startup that was acquired) before landing in the car business - almost by accident. Toma, backed by Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz with a $17M Series A, automates inbound calls, appointment scheduling, and customer follow-ups for 100+ U.S. dealerships, handling over 1 million call minutes and approaching eight-figure ARR in under two years.