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ScaleOps and the expensive art of playing it safe
Cloud engineers have excellent reasons to reserve too much computing power. ScaleOps sells a way to change that habit without making production the experiment.
Simplismart and the Expensive Second After the Model Thinks
The glamour in artificial intelligence belongs to the model. The bill belongs to inference. Simplismart built a business in that awkward second between a clever answer and one that arrives fast enough, cheaply enough, and inside the right security perimeter.
The Robot They Let Into Production
Cloud engineers are paid to fear surprises. Sedai built a business by asking them to let software change production anyway - one reversible, measurable step at a time.
Kubex Spent 27 Years Learning Why Cloud Savings Die in a Spreadsheet - Then It Built the Autopilot
Most cloud tools can point at waste. Kubex is betting that the valuable part is changing production safely - and that a 27-year-old analytics company can teach Kubernetes to tune itself.
DevZero Was Selling Developer Speed. Then Its Kubernetes Bill Exposed the Bigger Business.
The Seattle startup raised $26 million to move development off laptops. Then its own cloud margins revealed a better product: software that cuts Kubernetes and AI waste without making reliability the price of admission.
Dean Leitersdorf
Dean Leitersdorf is the 27-year-old Co-Founder and CEO of Decart, an AI research lab building real-time world models and ultra-fast inference infrastructure. A Technion PhD graduate at 23 and veteran of Israel's elite Unit 8200, he co-founded Decart in late 2023 with Moshe Shalev. The company went from stealth to unicorn status in under a year, raising over $453M total including a $300M Series C in May 2026 backed by NVIDIA, Radical Ventures, Adobe, Toyota, and angel investors including Andrej Karpathy. Decart's products - DOS (inference stack), Lucy (real-time video transformation), and Oasis (the viral AI-generated Minecraft-like game) - position it as a vertically integrated AI company targeting a billion-user consumer app.
TrueFoundry
TrueFoundry is a San Francisco-based enterprise agentic AI platform that helps Fortune 1000 companies deploy, govern, and scale AI and machine learning applications. Founded in 2021 by former Meta engineers from IIT Kharagpur, it provides an end-to-end MLOps/LLMOps platform covering model deployment, AI gateway, model registry, prompt lifecycle management, and observability - all on the customer's own infrastructure with SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance. With $21.3M in total funding led by Intel Capital and Peak XV, TrueFoundry's platform manages 1,000+ clusters, processes 10+ billion monthly API requests, and delivers 40-50% infrastructure cost reductions for customers including Siemens Healthineers, ResMed, NVIDIA, and Automation Anywhere.
Brian Yoo
Brian Yoo is Chief Business Officer at FriendliAI, an AI inference platform that helps enterprises deploy and scale large language models faster and cheaper. Before joining FriendliAI in April 2026, he spent nearly a decade as COO at Moloco, where he scaled the AI-driven advertising company from 10 employees to 600+ and grew revenue over 500x to $250M+, helping it reach a ~$4 billion valuation. A Cornell-trained operations research engineer turned business operator, Yoo brings deep expertise in scaling AI-native companies through go-to-market strategy, financial operations, and global team building.