Directus is an open-source data platform that wraps any SQL database with an instant REST and GraphQL API plus a no-code admin app, letting developers and non-technical users manage content and data without building a backend from scratch. Founded on a project Ben Haynes started in 2004 and incorporated as a company in 2020, Directus has surpassed 30 million downloads and is used by organizations including Adobe, Bose, Tripadvisor, AT&T and the U.S. Navy.
Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform that lets developers quickly build internal tools - admin panels, dashboards, CRUD apps, and workflow automations - by dragging pre-built UI widgets onto a canvas and wiring them to databases and APIs with JavaScript. Founded in 2019 by Abhishek Nayak, Arpit Mohan, and Nikhil Nandagopal, the company positions itself as the developer-first, self-hostable alternative to closed platforms like Retool, and has expanded into AI-powered agents that give business teams context-aware automation on top of their own data.
Dhaivat Pandya is the founder and CEO of Verse Medical, a New York healthtech company building software to modernize the $50B-plus world of in-home medical supplies, an industry still run largely on fax machines. A Harvard computer science and statistics graduate and a longtime open-source builder and technical writer, he came up through quantitative research at Two Sigma and Kensho and core engineering at Apollo GraphQL before starting the company in 2018 through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch. Verse Medical pivoted from an earlier consumer venture (JetLenses) into a software-driven medical supplier and has grown to roughly 160-200 employees, backed by investors including Y Combinator, Abstract Ventures, Josh Buckley, and Paul Graham.
Contentful is an API-first, cloud-native content platform - the company that popularized the 'headless CMS.' Founded in Berlin in 2013, it separates content from presentation so teams can store structured content once and deliver it anywhere: websites, mobile apps, kiosks, smart watches, or AI agents. It serves more than 4,800 brands, including roughly 30% of the Fortune 500, and in June 2026 entered an agreement to be acquired by Salesforce to power the content layer behind Agentforce.
Postman is the world's leading API platform, used by more than 35 million developers and 500,000+ organizations to design, build, test, document and monitor APIs. What began in 2012 as a side-project Chrome extension to debug HTTP requests is now an AI-native, end-to-end API workspace - the connective tissue behind a huge chunk of the modern internet.
Hashnode is a blogging platform built for developers, engineers, and tech leaders to write, publish, and grow their technical audience. Founded in 2016 by Sandeep Panda and Syed Fazle Rahman, the platform hosts over 60,000 active blogs and attracts more than 4 million developers monthly. Hashnode offers a free-tier blogging experience with custom domain mapping, AI-assisted writing, and a headless CMS powered by GraphQL APIs - letting teams run enterprise-grade developer blogs and documentation without building infrastructure from scratch. Backed by Salesforce Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and angel investors including Naval Ravikant and Guillermo Rauch, Hashnode has raised $9.37 million and employs roughly 260 people across four continents.
Advith Chelikani is the co-founder and CTO of Pylon, an AI-powered B2B customer support platform based in San Francisco. A Caltech computer science graduate and former Samsara engineer, Advith co-founded Pylon in November 2022 alongside Marty Kausas and Robert Eng. In under three years, the company raised $51.2M in total funding - including a $17M Series A from a16z in 2024 and a $31M Series B in 2025 - scaled to 750+ customers, and grew revenue 5x year-over-year for two consecutive years. Pylon replaces legacy platforms like Zendesk by meeting enterprise support teams where their customers already are: Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord.
Sandeep Panda is the Co-Founder and CTO of Hashnode, a developer-first blogging and community platform that lets software engineers own their content and publish on custom domains. Founded in 2016 alongside Syed Fazle Rahman, Hashnode has grown to serve 3M+ monthly readers and 10M+ monthly views, backed by Sequoia Capital India's Surge, Salesforce Ventures, and angel investors including Naval Ravikant and Guillermo Rauch (Vercel). A graduate of IIIT Bhubaneswar with a background in web development and technical writing, Sandeep has authored books on AngularJS and HTML5, and is now building Bug0, an AI-native end-to-end testing platform.

Nader Dabit is a developer relations leader, educator, and engineer who built a career from scratch after starting to code at 30. From React Native expert to AWS advocate to Web3 bridge-builder, he has spent the last decade making complex technology accessible to developers everywhere. A founder of DeveloperDAO, author of two O'Reilly-family books, and now working at Cognition on AI software agents, Nader is the rare person who connects technical depth with community instinct - and has the self-taught story to prove it.

Predrag Gruevski is an independent software engineer, open-source creator, and Rust ecosystem luminary best known for building Trustfall - a universal query engine that lets you query anything from APIs to LLMs - and cargo-semver-checks, a semantic versioning linter that's becoming a cornerstone of the Rust publish workflow. A former MIT competitive mathematician turned principal engineer at Kensho Technologies, Predrag brings Olympic-level rigor to API design and compiler technology, writing and speaking extensively on correctness-first software development.