human-in-the-loop
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Tim Cherkasov
Tim Cherkasov is the co-founder and CEO of Trace (YC S25), an AI-native workflow orchestration platform that routes tasks between human teams and AI agents. A serial founder since age 17 with a fintech and data science background, he built and shut down the crypto-portfolio startup Clustr before pivoting into Trace, which topped the YC Launchpad leaderboard for the Summer 2025 cohort and raised a $3M seed round in early 2026.
Zakariea Sharfeddine
Zakariea Sharfeddine is the co-founder and CEO of InLoop Robotics (YC P26), a startup building AI-native warehouse fulfillment powered by robotic arms you hire by the month. A KIT-trained informatics engineer who did machine learning work at Bosch and BMW and reinforcement learning research at RoboTUM, he now leads a team deploying bimanual robots that pack, kit, and fulfill orders, with remote human operators stepping in on edge cases so the line never stops.
Phoebe Yao
Phoebe Yao is the founder and CEO of Pareto.AI, a talent-first human data platform that recruits and trains the top sliver of expert labelers to produce high-quality training data for the world's leading AI labs. A Chinese-American immigrant, classical violist, 2020 Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, she dropped out of Stanford during the pandemic to build what began as a bootcamp training women as remote virtual assistants and pivoted in 2023 into the human-data backbone for AI research. Her companies have worked with the likes of Character.AI and Imbue and researchers at Stanford and UPenn, all anchored by a single conviction: the humans behind AI deserve to be treated as experts, not anonymous clickworkers.
Yiorgos Nikoletakis
Yiorgos Nikoletakis is the co-founder and CEO of 100mentors, an Athens- and San Francisco-based edtech company that started as a platform connecting young people with mentors worldwide and has since pivoted into generative-AI skilling for organizations. A Fulbright scholar with degrees from AUEB, Ohio State, and Columbia, he describes his job as teaching people to ask better questions, use GenAI well, and keep humans in the loop. His personal motto: arguing like he's right, listening like he's wrong.
Meghan Joyce
Meghan Verena Joyce is the co-founder and CEO of Duckbill, a Boston startup that pairs AI with human experts to act as an executive assistant for your personal life - booking appointments, filing claims, and clearing the to-do list. Before founding Duckbill in 2022, she ran Uber's biggest East Coast markets, served as COO and EVP of Platform at Oscar Health, and advised the U.S. Treasury during the recession. She has raised $33 million for Duckbill, led by Forerunner Ventures, and sits on the boards of The Boston Beer Company and Guardant Health.
Summer Weisberg
Summer Weisberg is the CEO of Testlio, an AI-powered managed crowdsourced testing platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Appointed to the role in February 2026 after serving as COO and Interim CEO, she brings over 15 years of experience spanning software engineering, enterprise testing, professional services, and customer success. Before Testlio, she held senior roles at CloudBees, CA Technologies, FedEx, and Silicon Graphics. An advocate for diversity in tech and a sharp critic of AI-for-AI's-sake, she champions human judgment in quality engineering - insisting that AI without a solid quality foundation just makes mistakes faster.
Wendy Gonzalez
Wendy Gonzalez is the CEO of Sama, a mission-driven AI data annotation and model evaluation company that employs thousands of workers in East Africa. She joined Sama in 2015, rose through the ranks as COO and President, and assumed the CEO role in 2020 following the passing of founder Leila Janah. Under her leadership, Sama closed a $70M Series B - at the time the largest funding round for a woman-led AI infrastructure company - achieved Forbes AI 50 recognition, and scaled to over 3,000 employees while maintaining its B Corp certification and social mission of lifting people out of poverty through dignified work in the AI economy.
Eric Zhang
Eric Zhang is the Chief Executive Officer of Thoth AI, a Singapore-headquartered global AI data solutions company with R&D operations in Silicon Valley. Under his leadership, Thoth AI powers frontier AI models for some of the world's leading AI labs by providing high-quality training data, RLHF workflows, model evaluation, and multilingual customer experience services across 170+ countries in 200+ languages. Zhang operates at the intersection of AI safety, responsible deployment, and global scale - building the human infrastructure that makes AI smarter, safer, and culturally aware.
Mark Godley
Mark Godley is the CEO of LeadGenius, a Berkeley-based B2B data intelligence platform that combines AI with human computation to deliver precision contact data for enterprise go-to-market teams. A self-described C-suite startup junkie with 30 years of SaaS expertise, Godley joined LeadGenius in 2017 — first as President, then stepping into the CEO role — and has driven the company's pivot from a service-heavy model to a scalable SaaS platform serving 400+ enterprise customers across 42 countries including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and Autodesk. Under his leadership, LeadGenius has distinguished itself as the first crowdsourcing company to set a minimum wage tied to the cost of living in each country of operation, building a global decentralized workforce of data researchers while remaining GDPR and CCPA compliant.