human-centered-ai
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Katy Bunn Is Making the Customer the Meeting’s Most Important Voice
After a decade helping Paycor grow from a regional HR company into a public business acquired by Paychex, Katy Bunn has a new brief: turn marketing from an order-taking function into a source of customer truth.
Inflection AI
Inflection AI is a Palo Alto-based artificial intelligence company, structured as a public benefit corporation, founded in 2022 by Mustafa Suleyman, Reid Hoffman, and Karen Simonyan. Originally known for the empathetic consumer chatbot Pi and its Inflection large language models, the company was reshaped in March 2024 after Microsoft licensed its technology for roughly $650 million and hired most of its team. Under CEO Sean White, Inflection re-founded itself as an enterprise-focused AI provider, selling data-secure, customizable models (Inflection 3.0) that let organizations own their intelligence, data, and infrastructure - including an on-premises appliance developed with Intel.
EdConnective
EdConnective is a Richmond, Virginia edtech company that delivers virtual-first, one-to-one instructional coaching for teachers, coaches, and school leaders. Founded by Will Morris, it records classroom instruction, has expert coaches analyze the footage, and returns bite-sized, actionable video feedback within about 48 hours - turning district priorities into everyday classroom practice. The company reports roughly 35-40% gains in student engagement, rigor, and content mastery, and pairs its coaching with interactive workshops and PLC facilitation for educator teams.
IPMD, Inc.
IPMD, Inc. is a San Mateo-based emotional AI company building software that reads human feelings from faces, voice, and language. Its flagship platform, Project M - now evolving into EchoAI - uses custom CNN-based deep learning to classify eight core emotions across roughly 400,000 intensity variations, reporting up to 96% ROC/AUC accuracy. Founded in 2016 out of UC Berkeley after the loss of a student to depression, IPMD applies its 'human-centered' emotional AI to telemedicine, mental-health support, and hiring, and is pursuing an FDA-regulated medical-device pathway.
Kanjun Qiu
Kanjun Qiu is the co-founder and CEO of Imbue, a San Francisco AI research lab building agents that reason and code while keeping humans at the helm. A CS grad from MIT who once funded her studies writing high-frequency trading algorithms, she was Dropbox's first chief of staff, co-founded the ML recruiting startup Sourceress, and now runs a lab that raised over $200M (Series B, backers including Nvidia) at a valuation north of $1 billion. She's also a general partner at Outset Capital, a Sequoia Scout, and co-author of Sew Electric, a book that teaches kids computer science through sewing.
Abhay Agarwal
Abhay Agarwal is the founder and CEO of Poly, the intelligent cloud file browser built to replace Finder and File Explorer for the AI era. A former Microsoft Research AI fellow and Stanford d.school lecturer, he came up through engineering at UC Berkeley and design at Stanford, then founded the human-centered AI consultancy Polytopal before pivoting it into a Y Combinator-backed startup. In November 2025, Poly emerged from stealth with $8M in seed funding led by Felicis, powered by its own Polyembed-v1 embedding model. Agarwal describes the product as 'an LLM with infinite context from your life,' and frames his life's work around a theory he calls Post-Cognitive Design.
Min Lee
Min Lee is the founder, CEO and president of IPMD, Inc., a San Mateo emotional-AI company born at UC Berkeley in 2016. He led the build of EchoAI (also known as Project M), a human-centered emotional-AI platform that reads facial micro-expressions, tone, and language to classify human emotion with a reported 96% comprehension rate - trained over 130,000 hours by a team of roughly 500 collaborators. In 2025 he was named a Visionary CEO in Emotional AI by Business Worldwide Magazine.
Nilou Salehi
Niloufar (Nilou) Salehi is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-founded Across AI, a San Francisco startup building 'agentic memory' systems for enterprise sales teams. An associate professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information known for human-centered AI and social computing research, she put her professorship on pause to serve as Across AI's Chief Product Officer. Across came out of stealth in December 2024 with a $5.7M seed round co-led by Cota Capital and Village Global. Her academic work spans crowd-worker organizing (Dynamo), reliable machine translation for high-stakes settings, and equity in algorithmic systems.
Imbue
Imbue is a San Francisco AI research lab building agents that can reason and code. Founded in 2021 as Generally Intelligent and renamed in 2023, the company is led by CEO Kanjun Qiu and CTO Josh Albrecht. After a $200M Series B that valued it above $1B, Imbue is focused on practical agent tools - most visibly Sculptor, a UI for running parallel coding agents safely in containers - guided by a mission to keep humans in control of powerful AI.
Leigh-Margaret Stull
Leigh-Margaret Stull is the CEO of Mural, the visual work platform trusted by 95% of Fortune 100 companies. Appointed in July 2024, she brought over 25 years of operational and product leadership to the role, having previously served as COO and CPO at CareerBuilder. A Kentucky native now based in San Francisco, she is driving Mural's AI-first strategy around the conviction that empathy, creativity, and trust are the capabilities AI can amplify but never replace.
Vianai Systems, Inc.
Vianai Systems is a Palo Alto-based enterprise AI company founded by Dr. Vishal Sikka - former CEO of Infosys and CTO of SAP - that builds human-centered AI platforms designed to make generative AI genuinely useful at scale. Its flagship product, hila, is a conversational AI analytics platform that lets C-suite executives query enterprise data in plain language, while its broader MLOps platform handles model explainability, drift detection, bias monitoring, and automatic retraining across industries including financial services, manufacturing, aerospace, and defense. Backed by $440 million in funding including investment from SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Vianai partners with TCS, Google Cloud, Cognizant, and Boomi to deploy trusted, responsible AI for the world's largest enterprises.
Sean White
Sean White is the CEO of Inflection AI, the Palo Alto public benefit corporation behind the empathetic chatbot Pi. He took over in March 2024 after co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and most of the team left for Microsoft, and has since rebuilt the company around emotionally intelligent enterprise AI that runs on-premises. A Stanford- and Columbia-trained computer scientist with a deep background in augmented reality and wearable computing, White was previously Chief R&D Officer at Mozilla and head of the Interaction Ecologies Group at Nokia.
Vishal Sikka
Vishal Sikka is the founder and CEO of Vianai Systems, an enterprise AI company he started in 2019. A Stanford-trained computer scientist, he previously created SAP HANA as SAP's first-ever CTO and led Infosys as its first non-founder CEO. He sits on the boards of Oracle and BMW Group, advises Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, and has championed the idea that AI should amplify - not replace - human creativity.