data-annotation
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Ha Dao Is Building the Less Glamorous Half of AI
Models get the applause. Ha Dao has spent six years working on the data, people and privacy architecture that determine whether those models are useful at all.
Mohammad Musa
Mohammad Musa is the founder and CEO of Deepen AI, a San Jose company building the data engine for Physical AI - tools and managed services that handle collection, calibration, annotation, validation, and synthetic data for autonomous vehicles and robotics. A Santa Clara University-trained computer engineer who once ran launch readiness for Google Apps, Musa co-founded Deepen in 2017 and has spent nearly a decade arguing that machines, like people, need many senses working together to move safely through the world. He also teaches product management at his alma mater.
Phoebe Yao
Phoebe Yao is the founder and CEO of Pareto.AI, a talent-first human data platform that recruits and trains the top sliver of expert labelers to produce high-quality training data for the world's leading AI labs. A Chinese-American immigrant, classical violist, 2020 Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, she dropped out of Stanford during the pandemic to build what began as a bootcamp training women as remote virtual assistants and pivoted in 2023 into the human-data backbone for AI research. Her companies have worked with the likes of Character.AI and Imbue and researchers at Stanford and UPenn, all anchored by a single conviction: the humans behind AI deserve to be treated as experts, not anonymous clickworkers.
Erik Duhaime
Erik Duhaime is the cofounder and CEO of Centaur.ai (formerly Centaur Labs), a Boston startup that turns the wisdom of crowds into medical-grade training data for AI. His PhD research at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence showed that ordinary medical students, when their opinions are measured and pooled the right way, can out-diagnose individual experts. He built a company on that insight, raising $35M total to label the world's health and science data.
Rukesh Reddy
Rukesh Reddy is the Founder and CEO of Deccan AI, a Mountain View-based AI data and post-training company that raised a $25M Series A in March 2026 led by A91 Partners with participation from Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures. Built as a 'born GenAI' company in October 2024, Deccan AI serves frontier AI labs and major tech companies - including Google DeepMind and Snowflake - with high-precision training datasets, reinforcement learning environments, and enterprise evaluation suites. Reddy brings over 15 years of experience spanning finance, strategy consulting, and digital transformation at firms including J.P. Morgan, Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte), and Citi, where he led CX and digital transformation for the global retail bank.
Wendy Gonzalez
Wendy Gonzalez is the CEO of Sama, a mission-driven AI data annotation and model evaluation company that employs thousands of workers in East Africa. She joined Sama in 2015, rose through the ranks as COO and President, and assumed the CEO role in 2020 following the passing of founder Leila Janah. Under her leadership, Sama closed a $70M Series B - at the time the largest funding round for a woman-led AI infrastructure company - achieved Forbes AI 50 recognition, and scaled to over 3,000 employees while maintaining its B Corp certification and social mission of lifting people out of poverty through dignified work in the AI economy.
Eric Zhang
Eric Zhang is the Chief Executive Officer of Thoth AI, a Singapore-headquartered global AI data solutions company with R&D operations in Silicon Valley. Under his leadership, Thoth AI powers frontier AI models for some of the world's leading AI labs by providing high-quality training data, RLHF workflows, model evaluation, and multilingual customer experience services across 170+ countries in 200+ languages. Zhang operates at the intersection of AI safety, responsible deployment, and global scale - building the human infrastructure that makes AI smarter, safer, and culturally aware.
Edwin Chen
Edwin Chen is the Founder & CEO of Surge AI, the AI data infrastructure company that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon for model training and evaluation. A former ML scientist at Google, Twitter, Dropbox, and Facebook, Chen bootstrapped Surge AI from his San Francisco apartment in 2020 to over $1.2 billion in annual revenue with fewer than 110 employees - no venture capital, no sales team. TIME named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2025, and Forbes put him on the 400 list as one of the youngest billionaires. Surge's platform powers RLHF, supervised fine-tuning, and custom evaluations for the world's leading AI labs.
Ivan Lee
Ivan Lee is the Founder and CEO of Datasaur, an NLP data labeling and private LLM development platform based in Silicon Valley. A Stanford-trained engineer and serial entrepreneur, Ivan previously co-founded Loki Studios (acquired by Yahoo in 2013) and worked as a product manager at both Yahoo and Apple before launching Datasaur in 2019. Under his leadership, Datasaur has raised $9.2M across multiple seed rounds backed by Initialized Capital, Y Combinator, and Greg Brockman of OpenAI, serving enterprise clients including Google, Netflix, Spotify, the FBI, and Zoom with tools that improve labeling efficiency by up to 9.6x and enable companies to build their own private AI models.