google-brain
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Akshay Agrawal
Akshay Agrawal is the co-founder and CEO of marimo, an open-source reactive Python notebook stored as plain Python files so it is reproducible, git-friendly, runnable as a script, and deployable as an app. A Stanford PhD advised by Stephen Boyd, he co-built version 1.0 of CVXPY, created the embedding library PyMDE, and worked on TensorFlow 2.0 at Google Brain. marimo has grown past 20,000 GitHub stars and raised a $5M seed round led by AIX Ventures, backed by figures including Jeff Dean, Wes McKinney, and Clement Delangue.
Alex Wiltschko
Alex Wiltschko is the founder and CEO of Osmo, a company teaching computers to read and write smell. An olfactory neuroscientist who spent roughly 18 years studying scent, he led the team at Google Brain that built an AI model predicting how a molecule smells from its chemical structure - work published in Science in 2023 as the Principal Odor Map. Osmo spun out of Google in 2022, and in 2024 it pulled off 'scent teleportation,' digitally capturing a fresh-cut summer plum and reprinting its smell in another room. In February 2026 the company raised a $70 million Series B led by Two Sigma Ventures.
Anna Goldie
Anna Goldie is the co-founder and CEO of Ricursive Intelligence, a frontier AI lab building the AI stack that designs, verifies, and closes silicon. With Azalia Mirhoseini she co-created AlphaChip, the reinforcement-learning system that laid out multiple generations of Google's TPUs in hours instead of months. A Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind and an early contributor to work at Anthropic, she holds dual bachelor's degrees in computer science and linguistics plus a master's from MIT and a PhD from Stanford. Launched in 2025, Ricursive raised $335M across seed and Series A within four months, reaching a $4B valuation backed by Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Nvidia.
Reiner Pope
Reiner Pope is the co-founder and CEO of MatX, an AI chip startup based in Mountain View, California, designing purpose-built silicon for large language models. A former Google Senior Staff Software Engineer who led AI software development for Google's TPUs and served as Efficiency Lead for PaLM, Pope left Google one week before ChatGPT launched to build what he calls 'the best chips for LLMs that physics allows.' MatX has raised approximately $604M to date, including a $500M Series B led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness LP, and is building a hybrid SRAM-HBM chip architecture targeting the world's leading AI labs.
Uma Roy
Uma Roy is the co-founder and CEO of Succinct, the company building SP1 - the world's fastest open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). A former Google Brain AI researcher and MIT double major in mathematics and computer science, she pivoted from machine learning to cryptography to make zero-knowledge proofs accessible to every developer. Under her leadership, Succinct raised $55M led by Paradigm, launched a decentralized prover network, and positioned SP1 as critical infrastructure securing billions in TVL across major Layer 2 networks.
Ali Yahya
Ali Yahya is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) where he leads the firm's crypto investing practice. A Stanford computer scientist and former Google Brain TensorFlow developer, he discovered Bitcoin in 2010 during security research and joined a16z in 2017 as its first full-time crypto investor. He has backed landmark bets including Solana and LayerZero, and is known for his deep technical thesis on privacy, zero-knowledge proofs, and the intersection of AI and crypto infrastructure. Off the charts, he runs a personal life operating system called walrOS built on 16 daily tracked habits and a spaced-repetition learning system.
Aravind Srinivas
Aravind Srinivas is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, the citation-backed AI answer engine that reached a $21B+ valuation in under three years. Born in Chennai in 1994, he earned a dual degree from IIT Madras before completing a PhD at UC Berkeley, then worked as a researcher at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain before founding Perplexity in 2022. India's youngest billionaire at 31, he has positioned Perplexity as a direct challenger to Google Search by insisting that every AI-generated answer carry verifiable citations - a principle he lifted straight from academic paper standards.
Illia Polosukhin
Illia Polosukhin is a Ukrainian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-authored 'Attention Is All You Need' (2017), the paper that introduced the Transformer architecture powering virtually every modern AI system, and co-founded NEAR Protocol, a layer-1 blockchain that raised $500M+ and peaked at a $20B+ market cap. Now CEO of the NEAR Foundation, he is building 'User-Owned AI' - privacy-preserving, decentralized AI infrastructure that puts users in control of their data and models rather than corporations.