cypherpunk
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Simanta Gautam
Simanta Gautam is the co-founder and CEO of Alpen Labs, a startup building zero-knowledge infrastructure to make Bitcoin scalable, private, and programmable. An MIT-trained engineer who earlier founded the airport-security computer-vision company Synapse Technology (acquired by Palantir, where he became AI Lead), he now leads a team turning Bitcoin's intentionally limited base layer into rails for global money. The mission traces to a personal detail: founders with roots in Nepal, where roughly a quarter of GDP arrives as remittances, saw firsthand how much money is lost to middlemen.
Vipul Ved Prakash
Vipul Ved Prakash is a serial entrepreneur and technologist who co-founded Together AI, an AI acceleration cloud platform valued at $3.3 billion after a $305M Series B in February 2025. Previously, he built Topsy (acquired by Apple for $200M+), co-founded Cloudmark (acquired by Proofpoint), and created Vipul's Razor - one of the internet's first collaborative anti-spam systems. A self-described cypherpunk with a table-tennis past, Prakash has been dismantling bottlenecks - from spam to closed AI - for over two decades.