Formation is a San Francisco–based, A16Z-backed virtual fellowship that trains experienced software engineers to land senior roles at top tech companies. It pairs adaptive AI assessments with one-on-one mentorship from engineers at Meta, Google, Stripe and Airbnb to drill candidates on algorithms, system design and modern AI fluency.
Sophie Novati is the CEO and co-founder of Formation, an A16Z-backed engineering fellowship that helps underrepresented software engineers break into top-tier tech companies. A Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate who rose to staff engineer at Facebook and Nextdoor, she founded Formation in 2019 after recognizing that talented engineers from non-traditional backgrounds were being systematically excluded from elite tech roles. Formation pairs adaptive AI-driven learning with mentorship from senior engineers, and its graduates have landed roles at Meta, Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Dropbox, with an average first-year compensation increase of over $100,000. The company has raised $9 million in funding and Novati credits a 2am chess game with Mark Zuckerberg as one early spark for thinking about business models.
Manara is a Silicon Valley-backed edtech company training and placing software engineers, AI and cloud talent across the Middle East and North Africa. Through cohort-based learning, mentorship from senior engineers at companies like Google and Meta, and partnerships with AWS, Manara has trained over 300,000 learners and helped hundreds land jobs at global tech firms.
Belsasar 'Bel' Lepe is co-founder and CEO of Cerby, the identity automation platform built to secure the applications that traditional identity tools ignore - the sprawling layer of disconnected, nonstandard, and unmanageable apps that enterprises actually run on. A first-generation Mexican-American and Stanford Computer Science graduate, Lepe started at Google at 18, then co-founded Ooyala - a video technology company that achieved two exits totaling over $440M - before turning his attention to the gaping hole in enterprise identity security. Cerby raised $54M in Series B funding in 2025, counts L'Oréal, Fox, and Allstate among its customers, and has grown ARR 10x in under two years.
Iliana Montauk is the Co-Founder and CEO of Manara, a social-impact edtech platform that connects software engineers from the Middle East and North Africa with global tech jobs at companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon. A Harvard grad and Fulbright Fellow who speaks five languages, she built Gaza's first startup accelerator before co-founding Manara with Laila Abudahi in 2020. Backed by Y Combinator, Stripe, Reid Hoffman, and Paul Graham, Manara has trained engineers who achieve 86% job placement within five months, and in 2025 inked a $3.6M AWS partnership to upskill 2,500 engineers in cloud and AI — on a mission to reach 1 million learners by 2027.
Chike Agbai is the CEO and Founder of Azumo, a San Francisco-based nearshore software development company he launched in 2016 after nearly two decades on Wall Street advising over $100 billion in enterprise software transactions for clients like Oracle, Salesforce, and Dell. A Stanford Economics graduate, he pivoted from investment banking to entrepreneurship on the conviction that exceptional technical talent exists everywhere - not just in traditional tech hubs. Under his leadership, Azumo has grown to 110+ employees across 20+ countries in Latin America, earned a 4.9-star rating on Clutch, served 100+ clients including Facebook, Twitter, and Discovery Channel, and been recognized among the '10 Smartest Companies of the Year 2025.' He credits his grandfather's migration from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the 1930s as the spark behind his own entrepreneurial ambition.
Anarghya Vardhana is a venture partner at Maveron, the consumer-only VC firm co-founded by Howard Schultz, where she has spent nearly a decade backing iconic consumer brands in health, wellness, and social tech. A Stanford grad who published a math theorem at 17, she moved from Sandia National Labs nuclear research to Google international ops to the boardrooms of startups like Co-Star, Bend Health, and Alife. Forbes named her a 30 Under 30 in VC and their First Diversity Champion across the entire class. Simultaneously serving as Investor in Residence at Vanta, she is one of the few investors who credibly bridges deep technical rigor with consumer intuition - and who also runs trail marathons and dances Bharatanatyam.
Kat Manalac spent over 11 years at Y Combinator, where she built the Female Founders Conference, ran Startup School, and opened YC's doors to founders worldwide who had never heard of Paul Graham. She left YC in 2024 to join Convective Capital as Partner, where she now builds communities and tells stories at the intersection of technology and wildfire/disaster resilience.
Pooja Nath Sankar is an Indian-American tech entrepreneur best known as the founder and former CEO of Piazza, an online Q&A and collaborative learning platform used by millions of students across 1,500+ universities. Born in a rural village in northern India with no electricity, she became the first girl from her hometown to attend an IIT, went on to work at Facebook, and left pre-IPO stock options on the table to attend Stanford GSB and build Piazza. She stepped down as CEO in 2022 to focus on family and teaching.
Kelsey Hightower is one of the most recognized figures in cloud-native computing - a self-taught engineer who rose from sleeping in his car to becoming a Distinguished Engineer (L9) at Google. Co-author of 'Kubernetes: Up and Running' and creator of the legendary 'Kubernetes The Hard Way' tutorial, he spent nearly a decade evangelizing Kubernetes and cloud-native practices before retiring from Google in 2023. Known for his disarming candor, human-first philosophy, and gift for making complex infrastructure accessible, Kelsey now serves as Board Director at Civo and continues to shape the future of platform engineering, AI, and open source sustainability.