Diane Yu is the co-founder and CEO of Tidalwave, a New York-based agentic AI mortgage startup whose SOLO platform aims to modernize mortgage origination with transparency, speed, and lower costs for lenders and borrowers. A career engineer and repeat founder, she previously co-founded the adtech company FreeWheel (acquired by Comcast for roughly $375-400M in 2014), served as CTO of Comcast Advertising and of the digital lender Better, and spent nearly a decade at DoubleClick rising to VP of Engineering. In November 2025 Tidalwave raised a $22M Series A led by Permanent Capital with participation from homebuilder D.R. Horton, and the company was named to the 2026 CB Insights AI 100.
Jonathan Heller is the chairman, founder and co-CEO of Firsthand, a New York AI startup building Brand Agents - AI representatives that talk directly to consumers on behalf of publishers and brands. An adtech lifer, he co-founded the online video advertising platform FreeWheel in 2007 and sold it to Comcast for roughly $360 million in 2014. At Firsthand he is reuniting with his old DoubleClick colleague Michael Rubenstein to argue that generative AI is not a better ad-serving engine but an entirely new medium for reaching people.