infrastructure-automation
(3)
Gregory Penza Built a Robot for the Streets Nobody Wants Dug Up
A failed sewer robot gave the Long Island contractor a useful grievance. He answered with machines that work inside live utility pipes - and a company built around fewer holes, shorter closures and better Tuesdays above ground.
Venkat Thiruvengadam
Venkat Thiruvengadam is the founder and CEO of DuploCloud, a no-code/low-code DevSecOps platform headquartered in San Jose, California. A founding member of Microsoft Azure's networking team, he wrote core parts of Azure's compute and network controller stack before building DuploCloud to bring hyperscale cloud automation - previously available only to giants like AWS and Microsoft - to mainstream enterprises. Under his leadership, DuploCloud has raised $52M in total funding (including a $32M Series B in 2023), grown ARR by 700% since 2021, and serves 100+ customers across healthcare, fintech, and enterprise software.
Jesse Robbins
Jesse Robbins is General Partner at Heavybit, the San Francisco-based venture firm focused exclusively on developer-first companies. He co-founded Chef (sold to Progress Software for $200M+), invented GameDay chaos engineering at Amazon where he held the title 'Master of Disaster', and co-created the O'Reilly Velocity Conference that seeded the global DevOps movement. A former volunteer firefighter and EMT, he brings a crisis-responder's instincts to early-stage investing, backing companies like Snyk, PagerDuty, Fastly, LaunchDarkly, and Tailscale. His portfolio spans 60+ companies with five IPOs.