LanceDB builds the data backbone for multimodal AI. Its open-source Lance columnar format and lakehouse let teams store, search, and train on text, images, video and embeddings in one system - replacing the brittle stack of Parquet files, vector stores and feature pipelines that AI teams usually stitch together. Used by Midjourney, Runway, Character.AI, WeRide and others, LanceDB raised a $30M Series A in 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $41M.
Philippe Noël is the co-founder and CEO of ParadeDB, an open-source Postgres extension that brings Elasticsearch-grade full-text search and analytics directly into the database, eliminating the brittle ETL pipelines companies build to sync Postgres with a separate search engine. A Harvard computer science and economics graduate raised in rural Quebec, he previously co-founded the cloud-browser startup Whist before pivoting into ParadeDB during a contracting stint. In 2025 ParadeDB raised a $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures, with customers including Alibaba, Modern Treasury, and Bilt Rewards.
Argyle is a consumer-permissioned verification platform that pulls real-time income, employment, and asset data straight from the source - payroll systems and bank accounts - through an API and no-code console. Instead of faxed pay stubs and HR phone calls, lenders, background screeners, and tenant screeners get instant, direct-source verifications covering roughly 90% of the U.S. workforce. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in New York, the company has raised over $100M from Bain Capital Ventures, Rockefeller Asset Management, Mastercard, Checkr, and SignalFire.
OpenRouter is a unified API gateway for large language models. Through a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint, developers can reach 400+ models from 60+ providers, with automatic routing, price comparison, and failover across vendors. It removes the need to maintain separate integrations for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral and dozens of others, and now processes around 100 trillion tokens per month for more than 8 million users.
Bo Jiang is the co-founder and CEO of Lithic, the New York card-issuing platform that started life as the consumer privacy tool Privacy.com. He and two childhood friends built the burn-after-use virtual card people loved, then discovered the real prize was the issuer-processor plumbing underneath it. When developers started reverse-engineering Privacy.com's API to issue their own cards, Jiang turned the back end into the product, rebranded to Lithic, and now sells programmable money movement to high-growth companies.
Dmitry Fonarev is the co-founder and CEO of Testkube, the Kubernetes-native test orchestration platform that has powered over 100 million automated tests for customers including Cloudflare, Siemens, Adobe, and Volvo. A Boston University computer science graduate with more than two decades building engineering teams at Dell, SmartBear, and vKernel, he co-founded Kubeshop in 2021 with SoapUI creator Ole Lensmar, then spun Testkube out as a standalone company that raised an $8M Series A in 2025.
Zach Lloyd is the founder and CEO of Warp, the Rust-based terminal that grew up into an agentic development environment. A former Google principal engineer who led the Docs and Sheets teams, he looked at the one tool every programmer touches and noticed it had barely changed in 40 years. Warp's answer: a command line that reads natural language, runs AI agents, and as of 2025 codes by prompt. The company has raised roughly $73-75M from Sequoia, GV, Dylan Field and Elad Gil, and went from its first $1M of ARR in 300-plus days to adding $1M every few days.
John Sundell is a Swift and Rust developer, writer and podcaster who runs Swift by Sundell, a weekly publication of articles, tips, podcasts and videos read in well over a hundred countries. A former lead iOS developer at Spotify, he went indie to build apps, games and a stack of widely used open-source developer tools - including the static site generator Publish, the type-safe HTML DSL Plot, the Markdown parser Ink and the syntax highlighter Splash. He is based in Gdansk, Poland.
GitLab is an AI-powered DevSecOps platform that brings the entire software development lifecycle - planning, source code management, CI/CD, security, and deployment - into a single application. Born as an open-source alternative to GitHub in 2011 and run as one of the world's largest all-remote companies, GitLab now serves enterprises and millions of developers, trades on Nasdaq under GTLB, and is pushing into agentic AI development with GitLab Duo.
New Relic is a San Francisco-based, AI-powered observability platform that gives engineering teams a single place to see everything running in their software - from application code and infrastructure to logs, user experience, and AI models. Founded in 2008 by Lew Cirne, it helped popularize application performance monitoring (APM) and later coined much of the modern 'observability' category. After going public in 2014 and being taken private in a $6.5 billion deal in 2023, New Relic now serves thousands of companies with usage-based, consumption pricing and a strong bet on AI and agentic observability.
Twilio is a cloud communications platform that turns telephone networks, SMS, email, and messaging apps into a few lines of code. Through programmable APIs for voice, messaging, email, and identity verification, plus a customer data platform built on its Segment acquisition, Twilio lets developers and enterprises embed communication and customer engagement directly into their software. More than 400,000 active customer accounts, including roughly 90% of the Fortune 500, build on it.
Xendit is a Southeast Asian payments infrastructure company that lets businesses accept, process, and disburse money across Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and the wider region through a single API. Founded in 2015 and the first Indonesian company backed by Y Combinator, it handles virtual accounts, e-wallets, cards, QR codes, payouts, and fraud prevention for startups, marketplaces, and global enterprises expanding into the region.
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.
Bin 'Tony' Zhao is the founder, CEO, and Chairman of Agora (NASDAQ: API), the Real-Time Engagement Platform-as-a-Service he built after 20 years on the frontlines of internet voice and video - from being a founding engineer at WebEx to CTO of JOYY with 300 million users. Founded in 2013, Agora now powers over 80 billion minutes of real-time engagement monthly, supplied the audio backbone for Clubhouse's viral moment, and in 2025 launched a Conversational AI Engine bridging human voice and large language models.
Docker, Inc. builds the toolchain that put containers into the daily vocabulary of software development. From Docker Desktop to Docker Hub to Docker Scout, the company helps roughly 20 million developers package, share, and run applications anywhere - and is now extending that same packaging logic to AI models and agents.
Evinced is an AI-powered digital accessibility platform that helps engineering teams find, fix, and prevent accessibility defects across web and mobile apps. Founded by ex-Oracle execs in 2018, it sells to enterprise developers and counts six of the ten largest US and UK banks among its customers.
Finix is a San Francisco-based payments infrastructure company that gives software platforms, marketplaces, and retailers the tools to own their payments end-to-end. Built around a no-code/low-code PayFac-as-a-Service model and a developer-friendly API, Finix lets SaaS companies monetize payments, manage merchants, and route money across cards, ACH, and wallets without becoming a registered payment facilitator themselves.
Vanessa Thompson is the Vice President of Revenue and Growth Marketing at Twilio, where she leads a global team driving top-of-funnel growth across demand generation, lifecycle marketing, product marketing, competitive intelligence, and the developer network. A New Zealander who built her career through government tech, analyst research at IDC, and SaaS consulting at Bluewolf before joining Twilio in 2018, she has ascended from IoT marketing director to interim CMO and now oversees the full revenue marketing engine at one of the world's leading cloud communications platforms.
Merge builds the connective infrastructure for modern SaaS and AI: one unified API that lets a product offer hundreds of HRIS, ATS, CRM, ticketing, and accounting integrations - and a newer Agent Handler that gives AI agents secure, observable access to thousands of third-party tools.
Mux is the video API for developers. The San Francisco company gives engineers a simple set of endpoints for live streaming, on-demand video, encoding, playback, and quality-of-experience analytics, so they can ship video features without rebuilding the streaming stack from scratch.
Abel Mengistu is the cofounder and CEO of FlutterFlow, the low-code visual app builder that has enabled over 2 million users to create production-ready Flutter applications without deep coding expertise. A former Google senior software engineer who worked on Google Maps and ATAP hardware, he co-founded FlutterFlow in 2020 with Alex Greaves after a failed restaurant-recommendation startup taught them the real bottleneck was app development complexity. Accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch after applying past the deadline, they famously survived 'No-sleep November' to build FlutterFlow 1.0 in a single month. The company raised a $25.5M Series A from GV (Google Ventures) in January 2024, has grown to 173 employees, and in 2025 launched Dreamflow - an AI-powered builder that generates production-ready app screens in roughly 10 seconds.
Abhijit Kane is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Postman, the world's leading API platform used by 20+ million developers and 98% of Fortune 500 companies. A BITS Pilani alumnus, he joined Abhinav Asthana and Ankit Sobti in 2014 to turn a viral Stack Overflow side project into a $5.6 billion company that defines how developers build, test, and collaborate on APIs.
Abhinav Asthana is the co-founder and CEO of Postman, the world's leading API platform used by over 35 million developers and 500,000 organizations. Growing up in small-town Uttar Pradesh, India, he taught himself programming as a child, built virtual tour software before finishing college, and turned a side project Chrome extension into a company valued at $5.6 billion. He moved Postman from Bangalore to San Francisco in 2017 and has raised $433 million in total funding, including a $225M Series D in 2021.
Alexander Gallego is the founder and CEO of Redpanda Data, a San Francisco-based streaming data platform that reached unicorn status in April 2025 after raising $100M in Series D funding led by GV. A Colombian immigrant who moved to the US at 14, Gallego built a storage engine at Akamai that outperformed Kafka by 34x, then left to found Redpanda in 2019 with a singular mission: make real-time data infrastructure simple enough to deploy in 60 seconds. Today Redpanda powers mission-critical systems for Fortune 1000 companies, government contractors, and telecom firms, processing up to 14GB/second sustained throughput, and is pivoting toward enterprise agentic AI infrastructure as autonomous agents reshape how applications are built.
Alexey Aylarov is the CEO and co-founder of Voximplant, a Voice AI orchestration and cloud communications platform (CPaaS) powering 30,000+ customers and 2+ billion calls annually. A VoIP engineer turned serial entrepreneur, he spent 20+ years in telecommunications before building Voximplant into an enterprise-grade platform combining serverless infrastructure with AI-driven voice and video communications. Based in Sunnyvale, California, he co-founded the company in 2013 alongside Sergey Poroshin and Andrey Kovalenko, guiding it to profitability in under two years and through a $30M Series C raise in 2021.
Amet Alvirde is a founder and software engineer based in Mexico City, associated with Render - the cloud deployment platform that hit a $1.5 billion valuation after its $100 million Series C extension in February 2026. A long-time Linux advocate, TypeScript developer, and Fullscreen content creator since 2012, he maintains a public digital garden of philosophical writing in Spanish, shoots street photography on a Sony a7iv, and plays guitar. His GitHub projects span fitness data tooling, trading system analysis, and personal infrastructure - a practitioner who builds for himself as readily as for the platform serving 4.5 million developers.
Anish Dhar is the Cofounder and CEO of Cortex, a San Francisco-based internal developer portal company he co-founded in 2019 after spending nearly five years as an engineer at Uber. Watching Uber's microservices sprawl into chaos—thousands of undocumented services named after video games, ownership lost every time someone quit—he rented an Airbnb for a weekend hackathon with two friends and built the first version of what would become a $470M company backed by Sequoia, Scale Venture Partners, IVP, and the Collison brothers. Cortex raised $60M in Series C funding in September 2024 and is used by engineering teams at Adobe, Grammarly, Xero, TripAdvisor, and Canva to catalog, score, and continuously improve their software services.
Ankur Goyal is the Founder & CEO of Braintrust, a San Francisco-based AI evaluation and observability platform that helps engineering teams ship reliable AI products. Previously VP of Engineering at SingleStore (MemSQL) and founder of Impira (acquired by Figma in 2022), Goyal brings over a decade of distributed systems and ML infrastructure experience to the challenge of making AI applications production-ready. Braintrust has raised $121M in total funding, including an $80M Series B at an $800M valuation in February 2026, backed by ICONIQ Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and a roster of elite angels including Greg Brockman and Elad Gil.
Augusto 'Aghi' Marietti is the CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc., the company behind the world's most widely deployed API gateway. Born in Rome in 1988, he co-founded Mashape at age 19 in a Milan garage, arrived in San Francisco with $600 and a 90-day visa, crashed on Travis Kalanick's couch, and built what became Kong - a $2 billion enterprise processing over 20 trillion API requests monthly. Known as the 'API Godfather,' Marietti has raised $424 million in total funding, surpassed $146M in annual recurring revenue with 800+ employees, and is now positioning Kong as the essential AI connectivity layer for the enterprise.
Babak Nivi is the co-founder of AngelList, the platform that rewired how startups raise money and find talent. Alongside Naval Ravikant, he turned a casual email list of angel investors into a $3.5B+ funding infrastructure that backed over 7,000 startups and produced 200+ unicorns. Before AngelList, Nivi co-created Venture Hacks, the blog that demystified term sheets and negotiation for a generation of founders. An MIT-trained engineer who once co-invented the first printed inorganic transistor, he brings both scientific rigor and street-level startup pragmatism to everything he builds.