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LaRel Rogers Knows the Government Market Is Not a Side Quest
From a federal marketing fellowship to the knotty business of getting commercial software into government, Rogers has built a career translating between two worlds that rarely share a dictionary.
George Parks Found a Million-Dollar Tollbooth in Government Software. So He Started Taking It Apart.
A Georgia Tech coder went to the State Department, met the bureaucracy from the inside, and came back with Archon - a bet that the dullest obstacle in software may be one of the most valuable to remove.
Irina Denisenko
Irina Denisenko is the co-founder and CEO of Knox Systems, an Austin-based cybersecurity company that delivers 'FedRAMP as a Service' to help commercial software vendors get authorized to sell to the U.S. government in roughly 90 days instead of years. She started Knox in 2023 after living through the FedRAMP bottleneck herself as COO of Class Technologies, where she scaled the company to $50M in ARR. A repeat operator who also helped build drone company PrecisionHawk, Denisenko positions Knox as a challenger to Palantir's FedStart, backed by Felicis Ventures and roughly $31.5M in total funding.
Mehran Farimani
Mehran Farimani is the co-founder and CEO of RapidFort, a Sunnyvale-based software supply chain security company that raised a $42M Series A in February 2026. A 25-year technology veteran, Mehran previously led the Fiery division at Electronics for Imaging (EFI) as SVP & GM, then founded Percipo—a computer vision AI company whose technology reached 40,000+ retail locations. At RapidFort, he is pioneering the category of Software Attack Surface Management (SASM), helping organizations automatically harden container images and eliminate up to 80% of CVEs through runtime-aware profiling, without touching a single line of application code.
Sri Ambati
Sri Satish Ambati is the CEO and Co-founder of H2O.ai, the company behind the world's most widely used open-source machine learning platform. Since founding H2O.ai in 2012 with a mission to 'democratize AI for anyone, anywhere,' he has built it into a $1.7B enterprise AI platform serving over 20,000 organizations including more than half the Fortune 500. A serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Platfora (acquired by Workday), Sri bridges academic neuroscience research - via sabbaticals at Stanford and UC Berkeley - with industrial-scale AI deployment. Under his leadership H2O.ai has advanced from AutoML pioneer to generative AI powerhouse, with h2oGPTe ranked #1 on the GAIA leaderboard and the company recognized as a Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud AI Developer Services.
Chris Hughes
Chris Hughes is a U.S. Air Force veteran, co-founder and president of Aquia Inc., VP of Security Strategy at Zenity, and the founder of Resilient Cyber - a cybersecurity newsletter and podcast with 31,000+ subscribers. A three-time Wiley/Springer author, inaugural CISA Cyber Innovation Fellow, and adjunct professor at two universities, Hughes has become one of the most influential voices on software supply chain security, vulnerability management, and agentic AI security.