digital-engineering
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LuJean Smith Has Spent 35 Years Making Complicated Things Clear
From a student newsroom in Oregon to GlobalLogic's AI-era brief, Smith's career is a study in translation: turning intricate systems, shifting markets and new technology into stories people can actually use.
Abhishek Vanamali Wants Brands to Move Before They Drift
After rebuilding one technology brand from the inside out and repositioning another for an AI-first market, FullStack's new CMO is asking a sharper question: can a company change quickly without forgetting what it means?
Arya Barirani Sells the Software You Can’t See - and the Infrastructure You Can’t Ignore
After years naming invisible categories for Silicon Valley, Hitachi’s CMO has a harder brief: make AI matter where trains move, grids hum and factories cannot afford a bad day.
Mahesh Kumar Bet on the Unfashionable Work of Making Software Useful
From business consulting to running Apptomate across Chennai and San Francisco, Mahesh Kumar has built a career around translation - turning technical possibility into software that organizations can actually use.
Samir Bagga Turns Engineering Into a Story People Can Carry
An engineer trained to think like a designer, Samir Bagga has spent three decades making invisible technical work visible - and turning recognition into a growth system.
Will Roper
Will Roper is a physicist-turned-defense-strategist who now runs Istari Digital, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup trying to build an 'engineering metaverse' where machines from satellites to medicines can be designed, tested and certified entirely in software. Before founding Istari in 2022, he was the 13th Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, steering a roughly $40-60 billion annual portfolio, and earlier the founding director of the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office, where he turned a $50 million budget into a $1.5 billion-plus prototype machine that produced drone swarms, hypervelocity guns and fighter-jet AI co-pilots. A Rhodes Scholar with an Oxford doctorate in string theory, he names his ventures after Tolkien wizards and argues America must learn to make hardware behave like software before its rivals do.
Gopalakrishna Kuppuswamy
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.
Joris Poort
Joris Poort is the co-founder and CEO of Rescale, the cloud high-performance computing platform that became the world's first unicorn in cloud HPC. Born in Nijmegen, Netherlands, and educated at the University of Michigan, University of Washington, and Harvard Business School, Poort spent years at Boeing engineering the 787 Dreamliner before co-founding Rescale in 2011 through Y Combinator. Under his leadership Rescale has raised over $284 million—including a $115M Series D in April 2025—and now serves the world's leading aerospace, automotive, energy, and life sciences enterprises with 1,250+ simulation applications across 500+ global cloud datacenters.