Arkestro is a San Francisco-based predictive procurement platform that uses machine learning, game theory and behavioral science to help enterprise buyers run faster, smarter sourcing events. Born as BidOps in 2016, it now serves Fortune 500 manufacturers, energy and logistics firms and claims roughly 18.8% savings per dollar of spend.
Edmund Zagorin is the founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Arkestro, the AI-powered Predictive Procurement Orchestration platform he co-founded in San Francisco in 2017. Drawing on a philosophy degree, championship-level policy debate experience, and years as a procurement consultant to Fortune 500 companies, Zagorin built Arkestro around a radical premise: that AI, game theory, and behavioral science could predict procurement outcomes before a sourcing cycle begins - cutting sourcing time by 60-90% and delivering average cost savings of 18.8% per million spent. The company has raised $104M in total funding, including a $36M Series B in 2025 led by Altira Group and Aramco Ventures. Away from procurement, he publishes fiction and poetry under the pen name Elizeya Quate.
Thanh Tran is Co-CEO of A5 Labs, a Foster City-based AI company building game integrity infrastructure for competitive online gaming. With a PhD in Computer Science from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and a background scaling Upwork's data science team through its IPO, he now leads a 180-person team applying deep reinforcement learning, blockchain reputation systems, and real-time behavioral analytics to eliminate bots, collusion, and cheating from online poker and beyond.
Zuzanna Stamirowska is the co-founder and CEO of Pathway, a Palo Alto-based AI infrastructure company building real-time data pipelines and post-transformer AI architectures. With a PhD in Complexity Science from Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and a background in maritime trade forecasting recognized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, she leads a team that counts NATO, Formula 1, and La Poste among its customers. Pathway's $10M seed round in November 2024 brought total funding to $14.5M, and the company's October 2025 launch of the Dragon Hatchling (BDH) - a brain-inspired, continual-learning architecture - positions it at the frontier of post-transformer AI.