Axion Ray (operating as Axion) builds an AI 'observability command center' that helps the world's largest manufacturers catch product quality and safety problems months before they turn into recalls. Founded in 2021 by former McKinsey AI strategist Daniel First, the company fuses fragmented, unstructured field data - service tickets, dealership notes, call-center transcripts, sensor telemetry - into early-warning intelligence for engineering teams. Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, RTX Ventures, Amplo and Inspired Capital with $25M raised, Axion works with manufacturers across aerospace, automotive, medtech and consumer goods.
Daniel First is the founder and CEO of Axion (Axion Ray), an AI-powered quality intelligence platform that helps manufacturers detect, investigate, and resolve product issues before they reach customers. After watching enterprise AI pilots stall at analysis rather than action during his years at McKinsey and QuantumBlack, he built Axion to put AI directly in the hands of field engineers across aerospace, automotive, medical devices, and consumer goods. The New York company has raised $25M total, including a $17.5M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners with RTX Ventures, and counts Boeing, Cummins, Baxter, DENSO, Newell, and Pratt & Whitney among its customers.
Legence is North America's largest pure-play building performance platform, providing integrated advisory, engineering, design, fabrication, installation, and maintenance services for high-performance and mission-critical facilities. Formerly Therma Holdings and backed by Blackstone, the company brands itself the world's first Energy Transition Accelerator, helping data centers, healthcare, education, biopharma, semiconductor, and commercial real estate clients cut carbon, lower utility costs, and run buildings more efficiently. Legence went public on Nasdaq under the ticker LGN in September 2025.
Mission College is a public community college in Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, part of the West Valley-Mission Community College District. Founded in 1975, it offers associate degrees, university-transfer pathways, career and technical certificates, ESL and noncredit courses to a diverse, largely working-adult student body. Through its Mission Promise program it offers free tuition to district residents and wraps students in support services - food, childcare, mental-health counseling and more - to remove the barriers that keep people from finishing.
Sath Sivasothy is VP of Sales and Marketing at Vyrian Inc., a Houston-based electronic components distributor and government defense contractor he co-founded in 2011. With a background in electrical engineering and over two decades in the semiconductor and electronics industry - including a stint as a Product Development Engineer at Texas Instruments and a run as VP of Sales at Silicon Valley burn-in testing firm CEIBIS Inc. where he doubled gross sales to $7M in 24 months - Sivasothy has built Vyrian into an Inc. 5000 multi-year honoree with 130+ employees across 12 global offices.
Taso Du Val is the co-founder and CEO of Toptal, the global on-demand talent network he started in 2010. A high school dropout from Western Massachusetts who tried music before code, he built one of the largest profitable bootstrapped marketplaces in the world while refusing the Silicon Valley playbook of raising round after round.
Edith Harbaugh is the CEO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly, the leading feature management platform trusted by over 5,500 organizations including 25% of Fortune 500 companies. She helped pioneer the feature flag category in 2014, scaling the company to $100M ARR, raising over $330M in venture capital, and building infrastructure that evaluates 45 trillion feature flags daily. A Harvey Mudd engineering alumna, patent holder, ultramarathoner, and co-host of the 'To Be Continuous' podcast, Harbaugh returned as CEO in 2025 to lead LaunchDarkly into the generative AI era.
Yonas Fisseha is the Co-Founder and CTO of Juniper Square, the San Francisco-based private markets platform that manages over $1 trillion in LP capital across 40,000+ funds. A Michigan State-trained computer engineer whose career spans Motorola, Shopping.com, and Huddler.com, Yonas joined Juniper Square in 2014 at the invitation of co-founder Adam Ginsburg, who called him one of the best engineers he had ever worked with. Under his technical leadership, Juniper Square has grown to 950 employees, raised $576M in funding at a $1.1B valuation, and launched JunieAI, the first enterprise-grade AI platform purpose-built for private markets GPs.
Mike Boyd is a Scottish YouTube creator behind the channel 'Learn Quick', where he documents learning new skills - from kickflips to lockpicking - in remarkably compressed timeframes. With 2.7+ million subscribers and a philosophy of learning in public, he turned a bored thesis-writer's side project into a sustainable media business, all while making the messy, fumbling process of skill acquisition oddly compelling to watch.
Eileen Tanghal is the Founder and General Partner of Black Opal Ventures, a women-led early-stage venture capital firm based in New York investing at the intersection of healthcare and frontier technology. With over 20 years of VC experience spanning corporate venture (Applied Ventures, ARM Holdings), national security investing (In-Q-Tel), and European VC (Amadeus Capital, Kennet Partners), she co-founded Black Opal in 2021 alongside Dr. Tara Bishop - a friend of 30 years from their days as MIT engineering students. The firm raised a $58M debut fund with backing from Eli Lilly, Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan, and invests in companies using AI, bioengineering, and advanced computing to reshape how healthcare is delivered and who can access it.
Natalie Vais is a General Partner at Spark Capital in San Francisco, where she backs early-stage founders building developer-first tools, platforms, and infrastructure. A former Oracle engineer, Google Cloud product lead, and Amplify Partners principal, she brings rare technical depth to VC - having personally shipped databases and distributed systems before writing checks. Her portfolio includes TigerBeetle, MotherDuck, Polar Signals, and ElectricSQL. While at Google, her team's carbon-monitoring satellite imagery project was named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Best Inventions of 2020.
Ramu Arunachalam is a General Partner at A.Capital Ventures, the San Francisco-based VC firm known for a founder-friendly approach and a portfolio spanning Notion, Anthropic, Databricks, Coinbase, and Replit. An engineer turned product manager turned investor, Ramu brings a rare depth of technical credibility to the table - he helped build VMware's first virtual switch, shaped a16z's Cloud and Big Data thesis during his time as Partner there, and now leads A.Capital's $180M Fund V with a focus on AI and crypto-native companies.
Manuel Kaver is the CEO of Ingenium LA, Latin America's first independent full-lifecycle critical infrastructure firm, overseeing 150+ data center projects across 17 countries and 250+ MW of managed capacity. With over 20 years in IT services - including a decade as CEO of GBM Corporation where he transformed the company from hardware sales to managed services - Kaver is building the engineering backbone of Latin America's digital future. He is also Chairman of ATTI Cyber, a cybersecurity company, and a sought-after speaker on edge computing, data center sustainability, and regional infrastructure strategy.
Paul Gatti is co-founder and CEO of CompareNetworks, a South San Francisco-based B2B media and technology company he built from a postdoc's side project into a 12-brand portfolio serving 8 million science and engineering professionals. Trained as a microbiologist at Tulane and UCSF, Gatti pivoted from the bench to the boardroom around 2000, assembling a media empire that connects buyers and sellers across life sciences, pharma, engineering, and industrial sectors. Under his leadership, CompareNetworks has grown via strategic acquisitions — GlobalSpec in 2020, Gulf Energy Information in 2025 — backed by Main Street Capital since 2019.
Markos Georghiades is an Engineering Partner at Andreessen Horowitz's crypto division (a16z crypto), where he focuses on cryptography and core development of Jolt - a16z's open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). An undergraduate studying Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, he has co-authored multiple research breakthroughs: helping Jolt achieve a 6x throughput speedup (over 1 million RISC-V cycles/sec), enabling true zero-knowledge proofs via the NovaBlindFold technique, and implementing 64-bit proving without performance slowdown. His GitHub bio - 'sumcheck is love sumcheck is life' - says everything you need to know about where his obsessions lie.
Sophia Luo is a Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where she backs early-stage founders building AI-native applications and enabling infrastructure. A Bay Area native who triple-majored at MIT in four years, she was a nationally ranked chess player by age eight and carried that competitive instinct into the AI startup world - first as an early engineer at Scale AI, then as a founding product engineer at Character.AI. She joined Greylock in 2024, made angel bets on Cognition and Mercor before they were household names, and landed on the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in venture capital within her first year as an investor.
Karthik Srinivasan is the CTO of Studio at Forum Ventures, the AI venture studio co-building the next generation of B2B companies from concept to company. With 20+ years of product engineering across Travelocity, Getty Images, and his own startup Pixibo, Karthik brings a rare hybrid of hands-on builder instinct and startup architect thinking to a studio that has already launched 17 companies - helping domain experts turn ideas into fundable businesses at sprint speed without the usual technical debt hangover.
Bill Coughran is a Partner and Founder's Coach at Sequoia Capital who spent two decades at Bell Labs - where C, Unix, and C++ were born - before scaling Google's engineering organization from a few hundred to over 10,000 people across four continents. A mathematician by training (Caltech BS/MS, Stanford PhD in Computer Science), he oversaw Chrome, YouTube, Maps, and Search at Google before joining Sequoia in 2011. He is one of Silicon Valley's most seasoned operator-turned-investors, known for his belief in small teams, deep technical rigor, and the kind of coaching that only someone who has actually built the thing can offer.
Michel Krieger is a Brazilian-American engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Instagram in 2010 and scaled it from zero to 1 billion users as CTO before its $1 billion acquisition by Facebook. After leaving Instagram in 2018, he co-launched Rt.live (a COVID-19 tracker) and Artifact (an AI news app acquired by Yahoo), and now co-leads Anthropic Labs, where he's building experimental AI products at the frontier of Claude's capabilities.
Wael Jabir is Chief of Staff at Hustle Fund, where he serves as right hand to co-founder Brian Nichols. With an engineering degree from University of Calgary, Wael betrayed his technical roots to build businesses instead of bridges. He broke into VC without inside connections, previously working as a Venture Partner at Altra Venture Partners and in roles at Deloitte, ICChange, and AI Education Project. As an AI Product Builder and Advisor, he posts daily insights on AI trends and developments. At Hustle Fund, Wael helped launch Angel Squad, a community of 1,500+ angel investors who've deployed over $23M across 65+ companies. He's known for running founder events across North America, his near-death sea adventure, and being the global runner-up for most confusing name pronunciation.
Jason Ding is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Salesforce, leading the engineering teams behind Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Revenue Cloud — the backbone of the world's largest CRM platform. A PhD computer scientist turned performance engineering pioneer, he set nine SPEC benchmark world records at Cisco, helped drive UCS to $1 billion in revenue in under three years, and is now steering Salesforce's engineering toward a future of AI agents and billion-transaction-per-day scale. With 14+ years at Salesforce and deep roots in academia and chip-level performance work at Intel, Ding brings a rare combination of theoretical rigor and enterprise execution.
Mike Vernal is a General Partner at Conviction Partners, an AI-native venture firm led by Sarah Guo. Before that he spent seven years as a Partner at Sequoia Capital, where he backed companies like Rippling, Clay, Notion, and Statsig. His investor instincts were forged at Facebook, where he spent eight years rising to VP of Product and Engineering - co-creating Facebook Login and the Graph API, managing the platform's pivotal mobile transition, and helping invent the modern 'growth team' playbook. A Harvard computer scientist turned operator turned investor, Vernal is known for his 'Market Curve' framework, his early-morning discipline, and a blunt skepticism about data moats.
Brian Potter is a structural engineer turned writer who publishes Construction Physics, a Substack newsletter with 72,000+ subscribers covering industrial technology, manufacturing productivity, and why buildings still cost so much to build. A Senior Infrastructure Fellow at the Institute for Progress, he spent 15 years in construction - including a front-row seat to the $2B collapse of Katerra - before channeling his frustration into some of the most rigorously researched long-form writing on industrial systems published anywhere. His first book, The Origins of Efficiency, was published by Stripe Press in October 2025.
Eugene Yan is a Principal Applied Scientist turned Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, where he bridges cutting-edge AI research with production-scale systems. Formerly at Amazon for five years building real-time recommendation and LLM-powered systems for Kindle and Search, Eugene is equally well-known for his prolific writing: 209 blog posts, 420,000+ words published, and a newsletter with over 11,800 subscribers. His open-source repository applied-ml on GitHub has become a canonical reference for teams shipping machine learning in production. He lives in Seattle, snowboards on weekends, and writes like someone who actually wants you to understand.