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.
Natasha Alexeeva is the Founder and CEO of Friendly, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company that automates insurance underwriting, claims processing, and reinsurance treaty analysis using deep learning. Originally from Moscow, she holds a CS degree from Lomonosov Moscow State University and an MBA from Stanford. Before Friendly, she pioneered EMR-integrated asynchronous telemedicine as founder of GoGoHealth and led new service incubation at Amazon Web Services. Her platform processes 7,000 pages per hour at 95% accuracy, delivering the 85% efficiency gains she's made her personal mission.
Sid Manchkanti is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pulse, a production-grade document intelligence platform that converts complex unstructured documents into LLM-ready structured data. A Berkeley CS graduate with experience at NVIDIA and D.E. Shaw, he co-founded Pulse in 2024 after going through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch. The company raised a $3.9M seed round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and has processed over one billion pages for Fortune 100 enterprises across finance, healthcare, insurance, legal, and supply chain sectors.
Vik Paruchuri is the founder and CEO of Datalab, an AI startup building small, efficient foundation models for document intelligence. A self-taught ML engineer who majored in American History, he previously founded Dataquest - an online learning platform that taught data skills to over 1 million students. His open-source projects (Marker, Surya, Chandra OCR) have earned thousands of GitHub stars and benchmark-topping accuracy scores. He publishes 'The Vik Letter' newsletter covering semiconductors and tech.