Michael Ulin is a three-time AI founder and engineer who builds machine-learning companies in heavily regulated industries. He was the founding AI engineer and VP of AI at ZestyAI, whose property-risk models help underwrite trillions in U.S. insured assets, then co-founded and served as CTO of Paxton AI, a generative-AI legal research tool used by thousands of attorneys that raised a $6M seed round in 2023. He now builds from Bend, Oregon, where his current work centers on Trarian, applying AI to patent underwriting, alongside ventures spanning AI forecasting and probabilistic reasoning. He also writes the Substack 'And Yet It Moves' on entrepreneurship and the case for building startups outside Silicon Valley.
Steve Hoover is the CEO of Impossible Objects, the Northbrook, Illinois company commercializing CBAM (composite-based additive manufacturing), a from-the-ground-up 3D printing process that bonds carbon fiber and other composites into parts that are stronger, lighter and more heat-tolerant than conventional prints. A mechanical engineer with a Carnegie Mellon doctorate, he spent roughly two decades at Xerox, rising to corporate CTO and running PARC as CEO, before a stint leading RIT's Global Cybersecurity Institute and co-founding the art-recognition startup Artify.ai. He took the Impossible Objects helm in March 2023 to push composite 3D printing from prototypes into high-volume manufacturing.
Abhishek Choudhary is the Co-Founder and CTO of TrueFoundry, a Series A-backed AI infrastructure platform that helps enterprises deploy, manage, and govern machine learning models at scale. A former Senior Staff Engineer at Meta — where he worked on infrastructure serving over a billion users — he left to build the platform he wished had existed at Facebook: one that brings Meta-level AI automation to every enterprise. An IIT Kharagpur alumnus, he co-founded TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside batchmates Nikunj Bajaj and Anuraag Gupta, and has since grown it to serve clients like NVIDIA, Siemens Healthineers, and ResMed, raising $21.3M in total funding.
Abhishek Kumar is the co-founder and CTO of Xoxoday, a Bengaluru-based SaaS platform that powers rewards, incentives, and employee engagement for 5,000+ enterprises worldwide. An IIT Bombay alumnus who previously co-founded EveningFlavours (an early food-discovery startup), Abhishek has helped grow Xoxoday from a 2012 experiences marketplace into a $100M+ funded global platform processing 250,000 transactions daily, with products spanning employee engagement, sales gamification, consumer loyalty, and API-based transactional rewards.
Adarsh Hiremath is the Co-Founder and CTO of Mercor, the AI-powered talent marketplace connecting domain experts with AI labs for model training, evaluation, and data creation. At 22, he dropped out of Harvard, received a Thiel Fellowship, and co-built Mercor from a São Paulo hackathon idea into a $10 billion company generating over $500 million in annual revenue - making him one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires alongside co-founders Brendan Foody and Surya Midha.
Advith Chelikani is the co-founder and CTO of Pylon, an AI-powered B2B customer support platform based in San Francisco. A Caltech computer science graduate and former Samsara engineer, Advith co-founded Pylon in November 2022 alongside Marty Kausas and Robert Eng. In under three years, the company raised $51.2M in total funding - including a $17M Series A from a16z in 2024 and a $31M Series B in 2025 - scaled to 750+ customers, and grew revenue 5x year-over-year for two consecutive years. Pylon replaces legacy platforms like Zendesk by meeting enterprise support teams where their customers already are: Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord.
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.
Brendan O'Connor co-founded AppOmni in 2018 after a decade as Salesforce's Chief Security Officer and a stint as Security CTO at ServiceNow. Frustrated by the lack of proper tooling to secure enterprise SaaS environments, he built the solution he wished he'd had. AppOmni pioneered the SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) category, raised over $202 million in funding, protects more than 100 million SaaS user accounts, and counts 25% of the Fortune 100 among its customers. O'Connor now serves as Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder.
Bryson Koehler is the CEO of Revinate, a hospitality SaaS company specializing in guest data platforms, CRM, and marketing automation for hotels. A career technology executive with deep roots in enterprise data and cloud infrastructure, Koehler previously served as CTO at IBM Watson & Cloud Platform and as EVP/Chief Technology, Product, Data & Analytics Officer at Equifax. He built the legendary Weather Company data platform - processing 4GB of data per second from 40 million mobile devices - before IBM acquired it in 2016 partly due to his work. His return to hospitality with Revinate merges two career obsessions: data engineering at scale and the guest experience.
Chaithanya Yambari is the Co-Founder and CTO of Zluri, a next-generation Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) platform that helps enterprise IT teams discover, manage, secure, and automate their SaaS applications. An engineer from BITS Pilani, he spent nearly a decade rising from software developer to Director of Engineering at gamification startup KNOLSKAPE before co-founding Zluri in 2020 alongside Ritish Reddy and Sethu Meenakshisundaram. Under his technical leadership, Zluri has raised $32M in total funding - including a $20M Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in July 2023 - and now serves 270+ employees and hundreds of enterprise customers worldwide.
Chandra Singh is the CTO and Co-Founder of Rescale Technologies, a Thane-based technology firm helping global enterprises navigate digital transformation through cybersecurity, IT staffing, M&A support, and product development. An IIT Bombay graduate, Singh co-founded Rescale Technologies in 2022 alongside Pawan Kumar and Gaurav Meena, positioning the company at the intersection of creative strategy and technical execution.
Chris Merrick is the Co-Founder and CTO of Omni, a $1.5B-valued AI analytics platform that raised $120M in Series C funding in April 2026. A Princeton physics graduate and longtime Philadelphia resident, Merrick shaped the modern data stack long before Omni existed - he wrote the first lines of code for dbt, co-created the Singer open-source ETL standard at RJMetrics, and led engineering through Stitch's acquisition by Talend. At Omni, he reunited with college friends Colin Zima and Jamie Davidson to build a BI platform that combines governed semantic modeling with the flexibility of ad-hoc SQL analysis, serving customers like BambooHR, Perplexity, and BuzzFeed.
Gian Merlino is the co-founder and CTO of Imply, the company commercializing Apache Druid - the open-source real-time analytics database he co-created while at Metamarkets. A Caltech computer science graduate with roots at Yahoo, Merlino has over 1,000 commits to Apache Druid and served as the project's inaugural PMC chair. Imply reached unicorn status in May 2022 with a $100M Series D, bringing total funding to $215M. Based in San Francisco, Merlino is a recognized expert in operational analytics, real-time data infrastructure, and the convergence of batch and streaming architectures.
Gil Feig is the Co-Founder and CTO of Merge, the unified API platform that lets B2B software companies add hundreds of integrations to their products in days instead of months. He started coding at 12, got a cease-and-desist from Facebook at 16, and launched Merge in the middle of COVID after interviewing 100 companies before writing a single line of code. The company has raised $74.5M, serves 4,000+ customers, and named Feig and co-founder Shensi Ding to the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Hitoshi Harada is the Co-Founder, CTO, and CPO of Alpaca Markets - the fintech unicorn building what he calls the 'Global Financial OS.' A Keio University-trained computer scientist who rewrote parts of PostgreSQL (Window Functions, PL/v8), Harada spent years building distributed databases at Greenplum before co-founding Alpaca in 2015 with Yoshi Yokokawa. The company, named after an alpaca they spotted on a Silicon Valley billionaire's estate, has grown to command 94% of the global tokenized US equities market, serve 300+ financial institutions across 40+ countries, and reach unicorn status at $1.15B valuation with a $150M Series D in January 2026.
Gopalakrishna Kuppuswamy is Co-Founder and CTO of Cognida.ai, an enterprise AI company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, that raised a $15M Series A from Nexus Venture Partners in February 2025. With 30+ years in technology - starting at CMC Limited in 1994 and spending a decade as VP at Hitachi Vantara - he now leads the engineering behind Zunō, Cognida's agentic AI platform that cuts enterprise AI deployment timelines from 6-8 months down to 10-12 weeks. Based in Hyderabad, he holds master's degrees from both the University of Hyderabad and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and has helped grow Cognida.ai to 250+ employees and $37.7M ARR.
Ian Christopher is the Co-Founder and Chief Engineer of Qventus, the AI-powered hospital operations platform backed by KKR and Bessemer Venture Partners. A Stanford-trained computational engineer, he co-built Qventus from a 2012 YC startup into a $400M+ company that automates how hospitals manage patient flow, surgical scheduling, and care coordination - reducing staff burnout and cutting length of stay for major health systems across the US.
Jason Warner is the co-founder and CEO of Poolside, a San Francisco-based frontier AI lab building proprietary foundation models for software development with $626M raised and a $3B+ valuation. Before Poolside, he was CTO of GitHub - where he launched Actions, Packages, Codespaces, and incubated what became GitHub Copilot - and then a Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures. A self-described 'average developer but excellent architect,' Warner is betting that reinforcement learning from code execution will make software the first domain where AI surpasses human-level intelligence.
Jeremy Baker is the Co-Founder and CTO of Zipline, the enterprise SaaS platform that connects corporate retail strategy to the frontline store employees executing it. A self-taught developer who skipped university to build a web design company at 16, he previously co-founded MightyHive (acquired by S4 Capital for $150M) and spent five years as a Senior Prototyper at Yahoo. Based in West Vancouver, BC, he built Zipline alongside CEO Melissa Wong to serve over 170,000 retail employees across brands like Gap, LUSH, Sephora, and LEGO.
Jessica McKellar is the CEO of Pilot.com, the largest accounting firm for startups in the US, which she co-founded in 2017 alongside longtime collaborators Waseem Daher and Jeff Arnold. A MIT computer science alumna, she previously co-founded Zulip (acquired by Dropbox) and served as Director of Engineering at Dropbox. Beyond building companies, she has been a transformative force in the Python open source community, growing Boston's Python user group to the world's largest, and teaching Python inside San Quentin State Prison. Pilot reached unicorn status in 2021 with a $1.2B valuation and over $222M raised from Sequoia, Index Ventures, and Bezos Expeditions.
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.
Jonathan Perichon is the Co-founder and CTO of Checkr, Inc., a San Francisco-based AI-powered background screening platform he co-founded in 2014 with Daniel Yanisse. A French-born software engineer who discovered the gig economy's broken background check infrastructure while working at an LA startup, Perichon turned that frustration into a $4.6 billion company serving over 100,000 clients including DoorDash, Lyft, Coinbase, and Uber. A Y Combinator S14 alumnus who applied three times before getting in, he embodies the principle that persistence and execution beat credentials every time.
Kaushik Arakalgud is a technology entrepreneur and builder based in Bengaluru, India, currently working in AI at Domestika - the global creative learning platform that reached unicorn status with a $1.3B valuation in 2022. As Co-Founder and CTO of Aimwiser, an AI and neuroscience-powered people and wellness intelligence SaaS platform, he brings together his passion for education technology, artificial intelligence, and human development. Trained as a computer science engineer at PES College of Engineering, Kaushik has spent his career at the intersection of technology and meaningful societal impact.
Kurt Ruppel is the Co-Founder and CTO of Middesk, the business identity platform that helps financial institutions, fintechs, and marketplaces verify and onboard businesses in seconds rather than weeks. A UC Berkeley cognitive science alumnus turned engineer, he built his technical chops at Zendesk and Checkr before co-founding Middesk with Kyle Mack in 2018. The company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch, secured a $4M seed led by Accel and Sequoia before Demo Day ended, and raised a $57M Series B in 2022—bringing total funding to over $77M. Ruppel leads Middesk's technical vision, focusing on primitives and forward concepts that transform raw business data into actionable intelligence for the financial ecosystem.
Luis Paarup is the Co-Founder and CTO of HappyRobot, the AI voice agent platform transforming how logistics enterprises automate operations. A robotics engineer by training with a Masters from the Technical University of Munich, Luis met his co-founder Pablo Palafox on a competitive underwater robotics team and went on to build one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the supply chain space. HappyRobot, a Y Combinator S23 company backed by a16z and Base10 Partners, has raised over $100M and deployed AI workers at 70+ enterprise customers including DHL, Ryder, and U.S. Xpress.
Marcos Martinez is the CTO and Co-Founder of Fligoo, a San Francisco-based AI company building intelligent recommendation and predictive analytics solutions for financial institutions. Born in Córdoba, Argentina, he co-founded Fligoo in 2012 after earlier stints in software development. Under his technical leadership, Fligoo evolved from a social-graph gift recommendation engine into a WealthTech platform serving major institutions including Mastercard, Broadridge Financial Solutions, and Wells Fargo. Fligoo was named to the WealthTech100 in 2024 and has raised over $17M in funding, including a Series A round in 2020.
Marshall Jones is the CTO and Co-Founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based fintech company that has become the world's leader in payment tokenization with over 5 billion tokens stored. He co-founded VGS in 2015 alongside Mahmoud Abdelkader after building PCI-compliant payment vaults at Balanced Payments (later acquired by Stripe). Under his technical leadership, VGS has raised over $104 million in funding from top investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Vertex Ventures, serving Fortune 500 companies, merchants, fintechs, and banks globally.
Max Wang is the Co-Founder and CTO of Workstream, a San Francisco-based HR and payroll platform built specifically for America's hourly workforce. He co-founded China's AngelList equivalent (VC.CN) in 2011, built it to a 50-person team, then crossed the Pacific to co-build Workstream with Desmond Lim and Lei Xu after a 100-interview discovery sprint revealed that hiring hourly workers was a massive unsolved problem. Today, Workstream serves 4,000+ businesses across 24,000 locations, has raised $118 million, and is deploying AI tools - including VoiceAI - to compress hiring cycles from weeks to hours for restaurants, franchises, and deskless-workforce employers.
Ofer Feldman is the Co-Founder and CTO of Stampli, a Mountain View-based AI-powered accounts payable automation company he co-founded with his brother Eyal Feldman in 2015. A computer engineer by training from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Ofer spent over a decade building software across defense, enterprise, and healthcare sectors before channeling that depth into Stampli. Under his technical leadership, Stampli has grown to process over $100 billion in invoices annually for 1,600+ businesses, raised $145.7 million in total funding including a $61M Series D led by Blackstone in 2023, and pioneered Cognitive AI that brings human-level PO matching to finance teams worldwide.
Rahul Raina is the Co-Founder and CTO of TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company that helps governments, financial institutions, and crypto businesses detect and investigate financial crime on the blockchain. Born out of a failed game startup, TRM Labs now serves 600+ government agencies across 75+ countries, achieved unicorn status in February 2026 with a $70M Series C at a $1B valuation, and is recognized as a leading force in making the crypto ecosystem safer. Rahul was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2022.