Mirador Therapeutics is a San Diego precision-medicine company building first- and best-in-class therapies for immune-mediated inflammatory and fibrotic diseases. Its Mirador360 engine fuses human genetics, multi-modal patient data, AI and advanced analytics to find novel targets, design combination therapies and identify the patients most likely to respond. Founded in 2024 by the former Prometheus Biosciences leadership team, Mirador launched with more than $400 million and has since raised over $650 million total.
Axion Ray (operating as Axion) builds an AI 'observability command center' that helps the world's largest manufacturers catch product quality and safety problems months before they turn into recalls. Founded in 2021 by former McKinsey AI strategist Daniel First, the company fuses fragmented, unstructured field data - service tickets, dealership notes, call-center transcripts, sensor telemetry - into early-warning intelligence for engineering teams. Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, RTX Ventures, Amplo and Inspired Capital with $25M raised, Axion works with manufacturers across aerospace, automotive, medtech and consumer goods.
Patrick Brown is SVP of Global Marketing at Adobe, leading growth, analytics, media, and marketing engineering across the company's global B2B and B2C operations. He oversees Adobe's Digital Economy Index — a research engine that tracks a trillion e-commerce transactions across 100 million SKUs — and has emerged as one of the most data-forward voices in enterprise marketing. Based in San Jose, California, Brown combines an MBA from Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business with deep experience in technology, finance, and consumer goods sectors.
Alex Reibman is the Co-Founder and CEO of AgentOps (Agency), a San Francisco-based developer platform for building, testing, and monitoring AI agents. A 17-time hackathon champion with 10+ years of machine learning experience, he previously led ML engineering at Ernst & Young on $40M+ engagements for clients like Goldman Sachs and American Express, co-founded Menubites.ai (acquired by Snappr in 2023), and worked as a cybersecurity data scientist. AgentOps raised a $2.6M pre-seed in August 2024 and serves enterprise clients including Microsoft, Google, Samsung, and Meta. He studied Economics and Philosophy at Emory University and won the 2024 Emory Entrepreneur Award.
Alfonso Villanueva is the EVP, Chief Transformation Officer and Interim CEO of Verizon Consumer Group - the largest consumer wireless carrier in the United States. A former McKinsey Senior Partner and PayPal EVP, he joined Verizon in November 2025 at the invitation of new CEO Dan Schulman, his former PayPal colleague, to lead a sweeping $5B+ operational transformation. With roots in strategy consulting across Asia-Pacific and two decades of experience in telecom, media, and technology, Villanueva brings a rare blend of corporate venture expertise, AI-driven data strategy, and global transformation leadership to one of America's biggest companies.
Fligoo is a forward-deployed AI engineering firm that embeds senior engineers inside large enterprises to ship production AI - models, agents, and data pipelines - across banking, wealth, insurance, retail, and telecom. Founded by Argentine engineers and headquartered in San Francisco, it built its name partnering with Broadridge on predictive analytics for wealth advisors.
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.
Krishna Gade is the co-founder and CEO of Fiddler AI, a Palo Alto-based enterprise AI observability and control platform that has raised over $112 million in funding. Before founding Fiddler in 2018, he built data infrastructure at scale at Microsoft/Bing, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook - where he led the team that created the industry's first large-scale AI explainability feature, 'Why am I seeing this?' in News Feed. Fiddler AI sits at the intersection of AI transparency, model monitoring, and governance, serving Fortune 500 companies, the US Navy, and organizations that need to trust the decisions their AI systems make.
Maxwell Blumenfeld is the Co-Founder, COO, and Head of R&D at SentiLink, a San Francisco-based identity verification and fraud prevention company he co-founded in 2017 with Naftali Harris after both worked as risk leaders at Affirm. Discovering that synthetic identities with real 750+ credit scores were slipping through the financial system, they built SentiLink into a platform now serving 300+ financial institutions - including three of the top 10 US banks - having verified several hundred million applications. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2020, Blumenfeld holds a mathematics and economics degree from the University of Chicago and operates from Austin, Texas.
Soups Ranjan is the co-founder and CEO of Sardine, an agentic AI platform for financial crime prevention and AML compliance headquartered in San Francisco. With a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University and career stints at Coinbase (as Head of Risk) and Revolut (Head of Financial Crime), he channeled over 15 years of fraud-fighting expertise into Sardine, which has raised $145.6M and grown to 300+ enterprise customers. Sardine's behavioral biometrics and device intelligence platform now profiles 2.2+ billion devices, making it one of the most comprehensive financial crime databases in existence.
Sri Satish Ambati is the CEO and Co-founder of H2O.ai, the company behind the world's most widely used open-source machine learning platform. Since founding H2O.ai in 2012 with a mission to 'democratize AI for anyone, anywhere,' he has built it into a $1.7B enterprise AI platform serving over 20,000 organizations including more than half the Fortune 500. A serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Platfora (acquired by Workday), Sri bridges academic neuroscience research - via sabbaticals at Stanford and UC Berkeley - with industrial-scale AI deployment. Under his leadership H2O.ai has advanced from AutoML pioneer to generative AI powerhouse, with h2oGPTe ranked #1 on the GAIA leaderboard and the company recognized as a Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud AI Developer Services.
Domino Data Lab makes an enterprise AI and MLOps platform that helps large, regulated companies build, deploy, monitor, and govern data science and machine learning models across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Founded in 2013 by three former Bridgewater Associates technologists, Domino is used by more than 20% of the Fortune 100, including Allstate, Bristol Myers Squibb, Bayer, Lockheed Martin, and Dell.
Numerai is a San Francisco hedge fund that trades the global stock market using a single AI meta-model built from predictions submitted by thousands of anonymous data scientists worldwide. Participants stake the company's Ethereum-based NMR token on their models - good predictions earn more NMR, bad ones get burned. The result is what founder Richard Craib calls 'the last hedge fund.'
Bassel Ojjeh is the CEO and co-founder of LigaData, a Menlo Park-based data platform company specializing in AI-powered telecom analytics and big data infrastructure. A Syrian-American serial entrepreneur, Ojjeh previously co-founded digiMine (behavioral targeting pioneer, later Audience Science), DMX Group (acquired by Yahoo, where he served as SVP), and nPario (big data platform). He also co-founded Syria's first English-language private university and SYNC, the first international tech conference held in Syria in 50 years, working to bridge Silicon Valley with Damascus.
Jorge Torres is the Co-Founder and CEO of MindsDB, an open-source AI data platform headquartered in Berkeley, California. He is a Visiting Research Scholar at UC Berkeley focused on machine learning automation and explainability. Torres built MindsDB to democratize AI—letting any developer query AI models directly from databases using plain SQL or natural language. Under his leadership, MindsDB has raised over $77 million in funding from investors including Benchmark, NVIDIA, Mayfield, and Y Combinator, garnering recognition from Forbes as one of America's most promising AI companies and from Gartner as a Cool Vendor for Data and AI.
Maxx Lobo is the Chief Executive Officer of Ask Media Group, the IAC-owned digital media and performance marketing company behind Ask.com and other properties reaching 245 million people monthly. A two-decade veteran of ad-tech, cloud infrastructure, and digital media, Lobo rose through the ranks as CTO and COO/President before taking the top role in 2025. Under his operational leadership, Ask Media Group tripled its EBITDA from $50 million to over $100 million in four years, cementing his reputation as one of the more quietly effective operators in the digital media landscape.
Neschae Fernando is the CEO of Zone24x7, a 22-year-old technology engineering company headquartered in San Jose, California, with a major hub in Sri Lanka. With a dual background in electrical engineering (MS and BS from UCLA) and enterprise IT delivery at Cisco, Fernando leads a 270-person team that sits at a rare intersection: companies capable of integrating hardware and software end-to-end. Under his leadership since June 2022, Zone24x7 has won seven industry awards in 2025 alone, including Gold at NBQSA and the IoT Technology of the Year Award, while expanding its AI, RFID, and cognitive vision platforms across 50+ enterprise clients globally.
Thanh Tran is Co-CEO of A5 Labs, a Foster City-based AI company building game integrity infrastructure for competitive online gaming. With a PhD in Computer Science from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and a background scaling Upwork's data science team through its IPO, he now leads a 180-person team applying deep reinforcement learning, blockchain reputation systems, and real-time behavioral analytics to eliminate bots, collusion, and cheating from online poker and beyond.
Tim Paris is the co-founder and CEO of Dataro, an AI-native fundraising intelligence platform helping nonprofits predict donor behavior and optimize campaigns. A former cognitive neuroscientist with a PhD from Western Sydney University, Tim pivoted from brain research to social impact by applying statistical machine learning to charitable fundraising. He co-founded Dataro in 2017 alongside high school friend David Lyndon (CTO) and later Chris Paver (COO). The company has grown to serve 300+ organizations worldwide - including World Central Kitchen, Amnesty International, and Stand Up To Cancer - and raised a $14.28M Series A led by Blueprint Equity in February 2026, bringing total funding to $16.78M.
Tristan Zajonc is the cofounder and CEO of Continual, a San Francisco-based AI agent platform enabling enterprises to automate complex workflows. A Harvard-trained public policy PhD turned serial AI entrepreneur, he previously founded Sense.io (acquired by Cloudera in 2016) and served as Cloudera's CTO for Machine Learning before pivoting back to founding. With over 15 years building machine learning infrastructure across academia and industry, Zajonc has been quietly shaping how enterprises operationalize AI - from SQL-driven ML pipelines to LLM-powered agents - long before it became fashionable.
Ari Tuchman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Quantifind, a Palo Alto-based AI risk intelligence company that uses machine learning, entity resolution, and natural language processing to automate financial crime detection and compliance workflows for Tier 1 banks and government agencies. A Harvard-trained physicist with a Yale Ph.D. in atomic physics, Tuchman left a Stanford research career working on DARPA-funded quantum sensors to co-found Quantifind in 2009. His company's Graphyte platform now analyzes millions of entities, reduces false positives by up to 75%, and auto-resolves 90% of risk cases for global financial institutions. He is also a co-founder of Entanglement Technologies, a quantum chemical sensor company.
Jeremy Fraenkel is the CEO and co-founder of Fundamental, the AI lab that emerged from stealth in February 2026 as a $1.4 billion unicorn with $255 million in funding. A DeepMind alumnus with a graduate degree in Machine Learning from UC Berkeley, Fraenkel previously cut his teeth at JPMorgan and Bridgewater Associates before founding and exiting two startups. At Fundamental, he and co-founders Marta Garnelo (Chief Science Officer, ex-DeepMind/Isomorphic Labs) and Gabriel Suissa are building NEXUS, a Large Tabular Model that does for structured enterprise data what LLMs did for language - delivering accurate predictions from raw tables with a single line of code, no preprocessing required.
Kurt Zenz House is the Co-Founder and CEO of KoBold Metals, an AI-driven mineral exploration company backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Andreessen Horowitz. A Harvard-trained earth scientist and serial energy entrepreneur, he built KoBold from the ground up to solve one of the most consequential problems of the energy transition: finding enough copper, cobalt, lithium, and nickel to power a decarbonized world. Under his leadership, the company discovered the Mingomba deposit in Zambia - potentially the most significant copper find in a century - and raised over $1 billion to develop it. Before KoBold, he founded C12 Energy (CO2-based enhanced oil recovery) and Phase Change Resources (natural gas asset acquisition), and held research and teaching roles at MIT and Stanford.
David Winer is the Co-Founder and CTO of Ciro (YC S22), an AI-powered go-to-market platform that automates sales prospecting from target identification to booked meetings. With roots in applied mathematics, a Berkeley EECS master's, and a Stanford MBA, he spent time at Bain, Pure Storage, and Google (where he served as PM for the Kotlin programming language and sat on the Kotlin Foundation board) before co-founding Ciro in 2022 with Brown University friends Richard Lee and Ross Geiger. Ciro raised $3.8M in seed funding from CRV, Y Combinator, and SV Angel, and runs on a stack anchored by Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, and Elasticsearch. Outside the office, David self-identifies as an 'exceedingly obscure internet personality' and writes a personal blog mixing statistical deep-dives with essays on bike theft and vegetarianism.
Shyam Maddali is the Co-Founder and CTO of Coris, an AI-powered merchant risk platform backed by Y Combinator, Lux Capital, and Exponent Capital. After spending seven years at WePay (a JPMorgan Chase company) as Senior Director of Data Science & Risk Engineering, and earlier years at eBay leading Trust & Safety machine learning, Shyam co-founded Coris in 2022 to solve the unsolved problem he saw up close: that financial institutions managing small business risk were still drowning in spreadsheets, legacy systems, and false positives. Coris now automates merchant onboarding, underwriting, fraud detection, and continuous monitoring for clients including GoFundMe, Kajabi, Clio, and Cherry - processing intelligence on 330 million merchants across 50+ countries.
Ziad Obermeyer is a physician-scientist and professor at UC Berkeley whose 2019 Science paper exposing racial bias in a healthcare algorithm used by millions changed how the world thinks about AI fairness. An emergency medicine doctor who moonlights as a machine learning researcher, McKinsey alum, and serial founder, Obermeyer co-founded Dandelion Health and Nightingale Open Science while testifying before Congress and earning a spot on TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI.
Benjamin Rogojan, known online as SeattleDataGuy, is a data engineer turned full-time independent consultant and content creator based in Denver, CO. After leaving Facebook/Meta in December 2021, he built a media and consulting empire: 100k+ YouTube subscribers, 100k+ Substack newsletter readers, and a thriving consulting firm serving healthcare, fintech, SaaS, and private equity clients. He also runs the Technical Freelancer Academy, helping engineers launch 6-7 figure consulting businesses.
Ben Lorica is a machine learning researcher, media entrepreneur, and conference architect who spent over a decade as Chief Data Scientist at O'Reilly Media before launching Gradient Flow, his independent newsletter and research platform that Coursera ranked among the top 10 sites for data scientists. Known for the @bigdata Twitter handle he registered before 'big data' was a thing, he chairs The AI Conference, the AI Agent Conference, Ray Summit, NLP Summit, and Data+AI Summit while hosting The Data Exchange - a 342-episode podcast in the top 0.5% globally. He coined the PARK Stack (PyTorch, AI Frontier Models, Ray, Kubernetes) as the production AI infrastructure standard for the current era.
Jess Ramos is a data analytics educator, LinkedIn Top Voice, and founder of Big Data Energy - a media and education brand with 500,000+ followers across platforms. With an MSBA from the University of Georgia, she turned a corporate analytics career (peaking at $153K at Crunchbase) into a thriving solo business after being laid off in 2023. She runs a Substack newsletter with 45,000+ subscribers, teaches SQL to 50,000+ students via LinkedIn Learning, and has brand partnerships with IBM, AWS, Snowflake, NFL, and Claude (Anthropic). Her origin story - doubling her salary 110% in 11 months - became a viral moment that built her community of data professionals seeking real, human-centric career guidance.
Justin Gage is the founder and writer of Technically, a newsletter that makes software and AI concepts accessible to non-engineers. With 72,000+ subscribers on Substack, he built one of the most respected tech-explainer newsletters from scratch - conceived during a 7-hour Tokyo airport layover - growing it without paid ads through authentic writing and word-of-mouth. By day, he serves as VP of Developer Marketing at Amplify Partners, an early-stage VC firm focused on technical founders.