Naren Kini is the CEO and co-founder of Global Touchpoints Inc., a California-based IT services and consulting firm he built organically over 20+ years to 150+ employees and $15M+ in annual revenue — entirely without outside capital. Starting from a background in industrial engineering and early stints at Hinditron and Syntel, Kini built Touchpoints into a trusted partner for Fortune 500 companies like Meta, Intuit, and Fiserv, as well as California state government agencies, specializing in Salesforce, AWS, data analytics, AI consulting, and managed services.
Beacon Power Services (BPS) is an energy-technology company building data and grid-management software for Africa's power sector. Its AI-enabled platforms - Adora for real-time grid monitoring, CAIMS for utility asset and customer data, and the Xepp consumer app - help electricity distributors cut losses, prevent outages and digitize networks. Founded by aerospace engineer turned investment banker Bimbola Adisa, BPS now serves utilities reaching more than 50 million people across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia and beyond, processing over a billion grid data points a day.
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.
Mala Anand is Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Microsoft, leading the Customer Experience & Success division. A 25-year technology veteran who immigrated from Mumbai at 17 on a Rotary Youth Exchange Scholarship, she has shaped enterprise software at Cisco, SAP, and Microsoft, driving AI-powered transformations that measurably improve how customers get support. She is also executive sponsor of Women at Microsoft and an independent board director at Agilent Technologies.
Andy Ballard is the CEO and co-founder of Wiser Solutions, Inc., the San Mateo-based omnichannel retail intelligence platform he built through the 2017 merger of Quad Analytix and Mobee. A Harvard undergrad and Stanford MBA, Ballard spent nearly a decade at Hellman & Friedman where he sat on the boards of DoubleClick, Getty Images, Internet Brands, and Catalina Marketing before launching Quad Analytix in 2012. Today he leads a 510-person company that tracks billions of online and in-store data points for over 750 global brands and retailers, while also serving on the boards of Domino's Pizza and Etsy, and running Figtree Partners, his software-focused investment firm.
Incorta is an enterprise data and analytics platform built around its proprietary Direct Data Mapping technology, which eliminates the traditional ETL pipeline by connecting analytics directly to raw source-system data. Founded in 2013 by Oracle veterans in Foster City, California, Incorta enables Fortune 500 companies like Starbucks, Broadcom, and Comcast to query 100% of their operational data in real time - without the 18-24 month transformation projects that conventional data warehousing demands. Its Operational Lakehouse architecture supports 240+ pre-built connectors to ERP systems including SAP, Oracle, Workday, and Salesforce, and has expanded into Operational GenAI with built-in RAG and LLM integrations.
Kyligence is the company behind Apache Kylin, the open-source OLAP engine for big data. Founded in 2016 by the project's original creators, it now sells an AI-powered metrics platform and a copilot that lets non-technical employees chat with their business numbers instead of writing SQL.
Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that helps teams understand how users actually behave inside their digital products. Built around event-based tracking rather than page views, it lets companies run funnels, cohorts, retention curves, and experiments without writing SQL. Founded in 2009 by Suhail Doshi and Tim Trefren out of Y Combinator, the company now serves more than 8,000 paying customers and crossed $210M ARR.
Observe is an AI-powered observability platform that unifies logs, metrics, and traces into a single streaming data lake built on Snowflake. The company helps enterprises troubleshoot distributed applications 3x faster at one-third the cost of traditional monitoring tools. Founded in 2017 by veterans from Splunk, Wavefront, and Snowflake, Observe was acquired by Snowflake in January 2026 for approximately $1 billion after raising over $665 million in funding.
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.
Eishay Smith is the CEO and Board Member of Versatile, a construction technology company that puts AI-powered intelligence into cranes to give builders real-time visibility over production rates and project progress. A computer scientist by training, he co-founded Kifi (acquired by Google in 2016), led engineering at Netflix, LinkedIn, Wealthfront, and Carbon Health, before joining Versatile as CTO and GM in Israel - eventually taking the top job in early 2024. Based in Timrat, Israel, he runs a company that has raised $110.5M in funding and is redefining how construction sites are measured, managed, and controlled.
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.
Luke Han is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kyligence, the enterprise data analytics company built by the team that created Apache Kylin - the first Apache Software Foundation top-level project developed in China. A former eBay big data product lead, Han co-invented Apache Kylin in 2013, open-sourced it in 2014, then founded Kyligence in 2016 to commercialize the technology. Under his leadership, Kyligence raised $110M+ in funding including a $70M Series D, serves clients including UBS, McDonald's, and L'OREAL, and has evolved into an AI-powered metrics platform. Han is also a Microsoft Regional Director, Apache Kylin VP, Forbes Technology Council member, and Fortune China 40 Under 40 honoree.
Osama Elkady is the Co-Founder and CEO of Incorta, an enterprise data platform that eliminates the traditional ETL pipeline by mapping directly to systems of record for real-time analytics. After 20 years at Oracle - where he rose from junior engineer to VP of Applications Development and invented XML Publisher - he co-founded Incorta in 2014 with the conviction that businesses deserve instant access to their data. The company has since raised $192.6 million in total funding, counts Broadcom, Starbucks, and Hormel Foods among its enterprise clients, and has been recognized for delivering sub-second analytics at massive scale.
Steven Pease is the CEO of Clarify Health Solutions, a San Francisco-based healthcare analytics platform serving payers, providers, and life sciences companies with AI-powered patient journey insights. A seasoned operator with 25+ years of C-suite experience across industries ranging from toys to big data, Pease is perhaps best known for steering Hustle - a venture-backed peer-to-peer texting platform - from the brink of shutdown to a profitable $29M exit in under two years. He joined Clarify in October 2024 as CFO and COO before ascending to CEO, bringing financial discipline and operational rigor to a company that has raised over $400M and serves as healthcare's premier analytics intelligence platform.
Aristotle is a Washington, D.C.-based political technology company that has built the data, compliance, and fundraising software powering U.S. political campaigns since 1983. Founded by brothers John and Dean Phillips, it serves PACs, advocacy groups, and federal campaigns - and, famously, every U.S. president since Reagan.
Sri Manchala is Chairman and CEO of Trianz, a Silicon Valley-based digital transformation firm he founded in 2001 after an unlikely career arc: Indian Army Parachute Regiment special forces officer, Asian Paints logistics executive, KPMG consultant, and Cisco IT leader. He launched the largest-ever digital transformation study (5,000+ companies, 18 industries), authored the two-edition bestseller 'Crossing the Digital Faultline,' and in 2026 unveiled Concierto Agentic — a single-platform system that aims to compress multi-year enterprise transformation into months.
Anandan Chinnalagu is a PhD computer scientist and serial technology entrepreneur leading MindPro Technologies, an AI-focused software development firm headquartered in Karur, Tamil Nadu, India, with personal base in Sunnyvale, California. With over two decades of building enterprise software companies - from founding AC INFOTECH INC in 2003 to steering MindPro's 110-person team - he specializes in machine learning, natural language processing, and Google Cloud AI integrations. His academic research in sentiment analysis has been published in PeerJ Computer Science and IJACSA, while his products span educational platforms, IoT consulting, and notification automation under the CanString brand.
Andy MacMillan is the CEO of Alteryx, the AI-powered enterprise analytics platform that crossed $1 billion in ARR and automates over 380 million workflows annually. A Michigan State Spartan who earned his MBA in Edinburgh, he started writing Java for General Motors and made his way through Oracle, Salesforce, Act-On Software, and UserTesting before landing at Alteryx in December 2024. He also serves as a Trade and Investment Envoy for the Government of Scotland, bridging Silicon Valley and the Scottish tech ecosystem.
Anthony Lye is Chairman and CEO of Quid, the AI-powered consumer and market intelligence platform based in Santa Clara, California. A Silicon Valley veteran with over 25 years in enterprise software, he previously served as CEO of Amplience, Global Head of Apollo at Palantir Technologies, and EVP & GM of NetApp's Public Cloud Business Unit — which he grew from $500K to $550 million over five years. He is also an Operating Advisor at Bessemer Venture Partners, a Board of Trustees member at the University of Bath, and an active angel investor.
Benton Armstrong is CEO of Celerity Consulting, a San Francisco-based risk optimization firm helping electric and gas utilities convert complex data into actionable intelligence. With more than 30 years across PwC and Deloitte — where he led a 1,100-person global discovery team through 8x revenue growth — Armstrong now steers a 180-person consultancy at the intersection of wildfire mitigation, asset risk management, and utility data transformation.
Deepak Nagpal is the CEO of Audax Labs, a Bothell, Washington-based technology innovation company he has led since 2016. With a career spanning over two decades across NTT DATA, Capital One, and Interra Information Technologies, and an MBA from Oxford's Said Business School, he has built Audax Labs into a multi-practice consultancy operating across AR/VR/MR, AI, IoT, cloud migration, and data analytics - serving industries from automotive and healthcare to BFSI and government, with partnerships spanning Microsoft, Google, Amazon AWS, Hitachi Vantara, Oracle, and Rocket Software.
Eric Berridge is a 23-year Salesforce ecosystem veteran and CEO of Coastal, a premier Salesforce consultancy he joined in 2020 and took the helm of in September 2023. He previously co-founded Bluewolf in 2000 - one of the first Salesforce-focused consulting firms - and built it to a major acquisition by IBM in 2016. A TED speaker, two-time author, and MFA-holder in creative writing who never studied computer science, Berridge argues that the humanities are tech's most underrated competitive advantage. Under his leadership, Coastal was acquired by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for $700 million in January 2026, the largest professional services acquisition in Salesforce ecosystem history.
Israel Felix is the CEO and Founder of CBQA Solutions Inc., a Pleasanton, California-based technology services firm specializing in QA automation, software development, cybersecurity, and cloud migrations. With 30+ years of experience spanning Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems, and Veeva Systems, Felix built CBQA from scratch in 2015 into an 80-person operation with offices in the US, Mexico, and Colombia, serving Fortune 500 clients including Honda, Toyota, Bio-Rad, iRhythm, and United Airlines. He is also co-founder and CTO of Auditate, a fixed asset management platform, and a member of LBAN (Latino Business Action Network) Cohort 16.
Ling Xiao is the CEO of Ruvixx, Inc., a San Francisco-based SaaS platform helping enterprise brands protect intellectual property, automate license compliance, and convert market opportunities into revenue. A serial entrepreneur with deep roots in Silicon Valley, he co-founded Playdom - the social gaming company acquired by Disney in 2010 for up to $763 million - and later co-founded GGWP, an AI-powered platform tackling toxicity in online gaming. Trained in electrical engineering at UC Berkeley and computer science at Stanford, Xiao brings a rare combination of engineering rigor, product instinct, and entrepreneurial range that has taken him from Google's data teams to Disney's exec suite to the frontier of brand intelligence.
Mike Fitzgibbons is the CEO and Founder of Claritas Rx, a South San Francisco-based healthtech company that uses AI and real-world patient-level data to help biopharmaceutical companies track, understand, and support patients across the specialty drug treatment journey. Founded in 2011, Claritas Rx serves 20+ rare and specialty therapeutic areas and has appeared on Inc.'s 2025 list of America's Fastest-Growing Private Companies. Before founding Claritas Rx, Fitzgibbons spent seven years at Morgan Stanley as an equity research analyst covering pharma services and drug distribution, then joined Genentech where he worked on pricing strategy and led the Avastin marketing team - experiences that directly shaped his conviction that patient-level data, not aggregated reports, is what biopharma companies actually need.
Owen Frivold is the CEO of Cleartelligence, a modern data and AI consulting firm headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts. A Stanford-educated co-founder of Hero Digital, Frivold brings 14+ years of experience shaping customer experience and digital transformation for brands like Apple, Sephora, Airbnb, and Lucid Motors. After founding Winter Sun LLC as a boutique strategy advisory, he joined Cleartelligence as President in April 2024 - when the company acquired Winter Sun - and was elevated to CEO in April 2025. He is known for turning complex data problems into actionable intelligence and driving enterprise AI readiness across financial services, life sciences, manufacturing, and retail.
Rich Waller is President and CEO of WellStack, a Madison, Wisconsin-based healthcare data platform that helps provider and payer organizations build a unified data ecosystem for AI, analytics, and population health management. A 20-year veteran of healthcare technology, Waller co-founded VisiQuate - a healthcare revenue cycle analytics company - before joining WellStack to lead its expansion into enterprise healthcare data infrastructure. He is known for his client-centered philosophy and belief that growth strategy is a team sport.