TurbineOne builds Mission-AI for the frontlines. Its flagship Frontline Perception System (FPS) puts machine learning directly on the sensor at the tactical edge - no cloud, no coding, no connectivity required - so warfighters can detect, identify, and act on threats in real time. Founded in 2021 by Navy veteran Ian Kalin and former Amazon engineer Matt Amacker, the company is deployed across all branches of the U.S. military and reached a roughly $300M valuation with its 2025 Series B.
Josh Gruenstein is the co-founder and CEO of Tutor Intelligence, an MIT CSAIL spinout building AI-powered robots that work alongside people in American factories and warehouses. He leases robots by the hour instead of selling them, betting that fleet-scale learning, not bigger algorithms, is what finally puts a robot in every factory. In December 2025 the company raised a $34M Series A led by Union Square Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $42M.
Gilad Shainer is Senior Vice President of Networking at NVIDIA, where he leads the strategy, marketing, and ecosystem development for the company's networking portfolio — including InfiniBand, Ethernet, DPUs, and interconnect technologies that power more than half the world's top 500 supercomputers. A Technion-trained electrical engineer who graduated Cum Laude at both B.Sc. and M.Sc. levels, Shainer spent nearly two decades at Mellanox Technologies before joining NVIDIA via the $6.9 billion acquisition in 2020. He founded the HPC-AI Advisory Council in 2008, which now spans 400+ organizations globally, co-founded the ISC Student Cluster Competition, holds two R&D 100 Awards (2015 and 2019), and has authored or co-authored dozens of papers across IEEE, ACM, and Springer venues. At a moment when AI factories are rewriting the rules of data center design, Shainer is the person making sure the wires — and the protocols running through them — are ready.
Sampson Han is Vice President of AI and Data Center Marketing at NVIDIA, the Santa Clara-based technology powerhouse behind the GPU revolution driving modern artificial intelligence. Operating at the intersection of cutting-edge silicon and the enterprise market, Han oversees marketing strategy for NVIDIA's data center and AI product portfolio - the very infrastructure powering the global AI buildout. He works within one of the most influential technology companies in history, helping define how hyperscalers, enterprises, and sovereign AI initiatives understand and adopt NVIDIA's data center solutions.
Nanonets is a San Francisco-based AI company that turns messy, unstructured documents - invoices, receipts, contracts, claims - into clean, structured data that flows directly into systems like SAP and Salesforce. Founded in 2017 by Sarthak Jain and Prathamesh Juvatkar, the company builds OCR and deep-learning agents that automate the dull back-office work nobody wants to do.
Deepgram builds foundational voice AI - speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and full voice-agent APIs - used by more than 1,300 enterprises including NASA, Spotify, Twilio and Citibank to give machines the ability to listen, understand, and respond in real time.
FLYR is an AI-first travel and transportation technology company building a cloud-native Revenue Operating System for airlines and hospitality brands. Its deep-learning platform powers forecasting, dynamic pricing, offer and order management, and revenue optimization for customers like JetBlue, Air New Zealand, Avianca, Virgin Atlantic, and Wyndham.
Focal Systems is a Burlingame, California computer-vision company building what it calls the Self-Driving Store. Its battery-powered shelf cameras digitize aisles every hour and feed FocalOS, a retail operating system that automates ordering, restocking, planogram compliance and labor scheduling for some of the world's largest grocers, including Walmart and Morrisons.
Krisp is a voice AI company that strips background noise, voices, and echo from live calls using deep learning, then layers transcription, meeting notes, accent conversion, and real-time translation on top. Founded in 2017 by ex-Twilio engineers, it now processes 75+ billion minutes of audio a month for contact centers, BPOs, Discord, and millions of remote workers.
Akash Agarwal is the Founder and CEO of Pibit.AI, a Y Combinator-backed insurtech company revolutionizing commercial insurance underwriting through AI. Building on a childhood watching his father toil as an insurance agent buried in paperwork, Akash set out to automate the most labor-intensive parts of underwriting. Pibit.AI's CURE platform - Centralized Underwriting Risk Environment - processes loss runs, submission documents, and risk data at machine speed, helping insurers cut underwriting cycle times by up to 85% and improve loss ratios by up to 700 basis points. After raising a $7M Series A led by Stellaris Venture Partners in November 2025, with participation from Y Combinator and Arali Ventures, the company is scaling its AI models and data partnerships to reshape how the $1T+ P&C insurance industry makes risk decisions.
Dan Calpin is a senior technology executive and founder who has spent his career at the intersection of AI, media, and enterprise strategy. As Founding Partner and General Manager of Bain Media Lab, he co-created Mensio, an AI-powered analytics platform measuring TV advertising and sponsorships. He went on to serve as President of Hive, the enterprise AI company specializing in content understanding, and later as EVP North America at Incode Technologies. He is currently launching a new stealth AI venture.
Karim Karti is the CEO of RapidAI, a deep clinical AI company whose platform is used in 2,500+ hospitals across 100+ countries for stroke, vascular, and radiology workflows. He brings 22+ years from GE Healthcare — including running its $9B imaging division — and a stint as COO of iRhythm, where he doubled revenues to $210M in 18 months. Trained as an engineer in France and a former P&G brand manager, he now leads one of the most clinically validated AI platforms in medicine, backed by 700+ published studies and 10+ million scans processed.
Nikhil Buduma is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ambience Healthcare, an ambient AI platform that automates clinical documentation, coding, and revenue integrity for health systems. A two-time International Biology Olympiad gold medalist, MIT-educated computer scientist, and author of O'Reilly's 'Fundamentals of Deep Learning,' Buduma built Ambience from the ground up - first by running a medical practice, then by creating the AI platform his clinicians needed. The company has raised $343M total, reached a $1.25B valuation after a $243M Series C in 2025, and built a platform that supports 100+ medical specialties across outpatient, emergency, and inpatient settings.
Pablo Palafox is the Co-Founder and CEO of HappyRobot, a San Francisco-based AI workforce platform that deploys autonomous voice agents for logistics and freight operations. A Spanish-born roboticist who left a PhD program at the Technical University of Munich in 2022, he has built HappyRobot from a YC S23 startup into a company serving 70+ enterprise clients including DHL, Ryder, Schneider, and Werner - raising $103M across three funding rounds, most recently a $44M Series B led by Base10 Partners with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.
Robert Nishihara is a co-founder of Anyscale, the company commercializing Ray - the open-source distributed computing framework powering AI workloads at OpenAI, Apple, Uber, and thousands of other organizations. A Harvard math grad and UC Berkeley PhD, he built Ray during his doctoral research to solve the tooling bottlenecks he personally experienced doing AI research. Anyscale has raised $259.6M and reached a $1B+ valuation under his leadership before he transitioned from CEO to a product-focused role in mid-2024.
Sarthak Jain is the CEO and co-founder of Nanonets, a San Francisco-based AI company that automates document-heavy business workflows for enterprises. A two-time founder and IIT Gandhinagar gold medalist, he previously built and sold Cubeit to Myntra before launching Nanonets through Y Combinator's Winter 2017 batch. Under his leadership, Nanonets grew from an OCR tool to a $100M ARR autonomous AI agents platform serving over a third of the Global Fortune 500 - with just 130 employees.
RapidAI builds FDA-cleared clinical AI software that reads CT, CTA, CT perfusion and MRI scans to flag stroke, aneurysms and pulmonary embolisms in minutes - giving hospital teams a faster path to treatment. The platform began life as the Stanford spin-out iSchemaView and now runs in more than 2,000 hospitals across 100+ countries.
STRADVISION is a Korean automotive AI company building SVNet, a deep-learning vision perception software that lets cars see and understand the road in real time. Its lightweight networks run on low-power automotive chips and ship in production vehicles from more than a dozen global automakers.
Zippin builds the AI brain that lets shoppers walk into a store, grab what they want, and walk out — no lines, no scanners, no cashiers. Its computer-vision and sensor-fusion platform powers checkout-free stores in stadiums, airports, hotels, hospitals and workplaces around the world.
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.
Sung Kim (김성훈), known professionally as Hun Kim, is the Co-Founder and CEO of Upstage AI, South Korea's first generative AI unicorn. A former HKUST professor and founding head of Naver Clova AI, he co-founded Upstage in October 2020 to solve the gap between enterprise data and practical AI deployment. Under his leadership, Upstage developed Solar - a compact 10.7B parameter language model - and Solar Pro 2, which outperforms GPT-4.1 at half the compute cost. With $326M in total funding and a Series C close in early 2026, Upstage is positioning itself as a global AI frontier company focused on enterprise document intelligence and AI agents.
Tim Shi is the co-founder and former CTO of Cresta, the AI platform for contact centers that grew to over $100M ARR and raised $401M from Sequoia, a16z, and Greylock. A Tsinghua CS graduate who did early AI research at OpenAI alongside Andrej Karpathy — including the 'World of Bits' paper on web-based reinforcement learning agents — he co-founded Cresta in 2017 with Zayd Enam after both dropped out of Stanford's AI PhD program. In 2025, he co-founded Recursive Superintelligence, which emerged from stealth with $650M at a $4.65B valuation to build self-improving AI systems.
D2S, Inc. is a San Jose-based semiconductor software company that builds GPU-accelerated computational design platforms for photomask manufacturing. Its TrueMask product family turns inverse-lithography and curvilinear designs into mask-writer-ready data, and the company runs the eBeam Initiative, a cross-industry consortium pushing electron-beam lithography forward.
Lex Fridman is a Russian-American computer scientist, AI researcher at MIT, and host of the Lex Fridman Podcast — one of the most-watched long-form interview shows in the world. With a PhD from Drexel University and research spanning autonomous vehicles, deep learning, and human-robot interaction, he interviews everyone from Elon Musk to world leaders to Nobel laureates. A black belt in both jiu-jitsu and judo, he blends intellectual curiosity with martial discipline, and has built a YouTube channel with over 4.8 million subscribers and hundreds of millions of views.
TwelveLabs is a San Francisco-based AI company building video-native multimodal foundation models that give machines the ability to see, hear, and understand video the way humans do. Its flagship models - Marengo for embedding and retrieval and Pegasus for video-to-text generation - power enterprise applications in media, government, sports, and security, enabling precise semantic search, summarization, and insight extraction from video at scale. With 30,000+ developers on its platform and backing from NVIDIA, Databricks, Snowflake, and In-Q-Tel, TwelveLabs is becoming the standard infrastructure layer for video intelligence.
UnitX builds AI-powered visual inspection systems for manufacturers who can't afford to ship defective products. Their flagship platform - combining OptiX (software-defined imaging), CorteX (AI edge computing), GenX (synthetic defect generation), and FleX (the full integrated system) - cuts defect escape rates by 9x and deploys in about a week. With 820+ systems running across 170+ factories globally, UnitX has inspected over $6.1 billion worth of goods and counts five of the world's top ten automotive tier-1 suppliers among its customers.
VELMENI is a Sunnyvale-based dental AI platform that uses computer vision and deep learning to analyze 2D and 3D dental radiographs in real time. Its FDA-cleared flagship product, VELMENI for DENTISTS, is the first dental AI approved to detect pathologies in panoramic X-rays — catching caries, bone loss, and other findings that experienced clinicians miss roughly one-third of the time. Beyond diagnostics, the platform automates insurance claims, enables voice-assisted periodontal charting, interprets CBCT scans, and delivers VR-based patient education, all from a single integrated workflow. Founded in 2020 by CEO Mini Suri and Chief Dental Officer Dr. Arvin Oberai, the company has been beta-tested by over 1,300 dentists across 500+ practices in 50+ countries.
Viz.ai is an AI-powered care coordination platform trusted by over 2,000 hospitals across the United States. The company's suite of 50+ FDA-cleared algorithms analyzes medical imaging data in real time - detecting strokes, brain hemorrhages, aneurysms, pulmonary embolisms, and cardiac conditions - then instantly alerts the right clinical team so treatment can begin minutes faster. Founded in 2016 by neurosurgeon Dr. Chris Mansi and machine learning researcher Dr. David Golan, Viz.ai has grown into a platform covering 230 million lives, supporting 70,000+ healthcare providers, and partnering with 14+ leading pharmaceutical companies to accelerate drug development and patient access.
Eric Seyoung Jang is the Founder and CEO of DeepBrain AI, a Palo Alto-based company building hyper-realistic AI avatars, video synthesis technology, and conversational AI systems. Inspired by AlphaGo's 2016 defeat of Go champion Lee Sedol, he pivoted from fintech to artificial intelligence and built what became the first company to commercially deploy video synthesis at scale - from AI news anchors in Chinese broadcast studios to AI bankers in Korean bank branches. Under his leadership, DeepBrain AI raised $44M in Series B funding at a $180M valuation and set its sights on becoming the world's leading generative AI enterprise.
João Diogo 'JD' Falcão is the CEO and co-founder of AiFi Inc., the San Francisco-based company building the world's largest autonomous retail network. A PhD from Carnegie Mellon and Master's from Cornell in Robotics, JD spent years shaping AiFi's core technology as CTO before stepping up as Chief Executive in September 2025. Under his and the team's leadership, AiFi has deployed 300+ camera-only autonomous stores globally, processes over 90 petabytes of spatial data annually, and counts Microsoft, ALDI, and 7-Eleven among its partners. His central thesis: the physical world deserves to be as queryable as the internet.